Answer me this
bigbychoice
United StatesPosts: 27MI6 Agent
Is there anyone out there who absolutely hated the Mr. Wytte and Mr. Kidd characters as much as i did?
bigbychoice
United StatesPosts: 27MI6 Agent
Comments
or to the character of Mr. Whyte, played by Jimmy Dean and the killer played by Putter Smith?
I'll assume you're referencing the Wint and Kidd characters from the movie played by Bruce Glover and Putter Smith.
No. I don't hate them. I'm disappointed by the movie as a whole. "Diamonds are Forever" wasn't, in my opinion, one of Ian Fleming's stronger novels to begin with but the characters of Wint and Kidd were certainly menacing enough. Sadistic would be the best way to describe them. The casually brutal way they disciplined the jockey who double crossed their boss,
the "Brooklyn Stomping" they gave Bond, and the general delight they took in murder and torture made them very memorable characters.
The Wint and Kidd of the film were ineffective, comically mean, hitmen. Although they eliminate a number of people throughout the film, when it comes to doing Bond in, they are grossly incompetent. Instead of shooting him in the head while he unconscious, they attempt to bury him alive at a construction site. Instead of shooting Bond and Tiffany on shipboard or cutting their throats while they slept, they try to deliver a bomb in a cake to their stateroom, a bomb which would severely damage the ship and put themselves in danger as well as everyone else. This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "dumb waiter". The film itself is handled clumsily and as the first Bond film of the seventies it can be said to
presage the Roger Moore era. The overall silliness of the film would become the hallmark of the Roger Moore Bonds. RM would not have looked out of place riding through the Nevada desert in that moon buggy. Tiffany Case is the first of the dumb leading ladies for 007. Like Britt Ekland's Mary Goodnight, Tanya Roberts' Stacy Sutton, like Rosie Carver, Jill St. John's Tiffany and Lana Wood's Plenty O'Toole are idiots. Tiffany running around Blofeld's HQ in a DONFELD bikini and top,accidentally putting the wrong tape into the computer, tripping over herself and her guards, looks remarkably like Britt Ekland, hitting the wrong button with her bikini clad bum. Both women are nothing more really than pretty, dangerous distractions. Tiffany's idiocy makes her far more of a threat to Bond than Wint or Kidd or even Blofeld for that matter.
As a film "Diamonds are Forever" is disappointing on many levels. That said, it can also be amusing. Good for a rainy Saturday afternoon when you can't decide between Bond and a nap. Wint and Kidd and the rest of DAF isn't really hate worthy, just not Bond worthy. As someone once said, this isn't Bond. It's Bond lite.
I think of DAF as a Roger Moore film that Sean Connery stumbled into.
They were among the highlights of a movie that disappoints on several levels.