So here is the return of my Sunday NIght Movie  postings. Last night I booted up the PS3, logged into Netflix and started the next of my Bond Movie series, Diamonds Are Forever. This is a Bond film that I have never seen in its entirety. I can recall seeing bits and pieces of this movie on cable as I flipped through the channels, But I had never sat down and watched the film from front to finish. Now, it turns our that I had seen very little of this film and most of it was a total unknown to me, a very pleasant unknown I might add.

This movies picks up shortly after the end of On Her Majesty’s  Secret Service, where the perennial Bond villain Ernst Blofeld had murdered Traci, Bond’s wife right at the end of the movie. Now Bond is working his way through Blofeld’s henchmen questing for revenge. In the pre-title sequence He finds Blofeld and murders hims by dumping him  in a vat of mud. (Along with a Blofeld double.)

Secure in his revenge, Bond returns to work trying to untangle a diamond smuggling operation that is lifting large quantities of the precious stones, but none are arriving at the market. Complicating affairs are the murderous gay duo, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, who have been assassinating all the links in the smuggling network. (They are truly reprehensible depictions of homosexuals, but given the times that is hardly unexpected.)

The trail leads to Las Vegas and the enigmatic and perpetually unseen industrialist Willard White. (Clearly a Howard Hughes stand-in.) Soon it’s clear that something much more than just diamond smuggling is going on the fate of the world, naturally, is at stake.

I really enjoyed this outing with 007. There were few gadgets and accepting the general level of unreality in a Bond film, it worked and flowed rather well. There was a tendency to play a scenes for laughs a little too much, but not as badly or as often as what happened during the Roger Moore cycle.