Las Vegas

The James Bond Project #8: Diamonds are Forever (1971)

~ Randy Blazak ~ 20 Comments

January 21, 2025

This series is intended to evaluate each product of the James Bond film franchise through a feminist lens, and the relevance of the Bond archetype to shifting ideas of masculinity in the 2020s.

Diamonds are Forever (1971, directed by Guy Hamilton)

Sean Connery is back! This is probably the Bond film I saw the most on the 4 O’clock Movie in the seventies. Watching it five decades later, it pretty much sucks. Eon Productions was Bond-less after George Lazenby agreed to only make one film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Numerous actors were considered, including Americans Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Robert Wagner, and Batman’s Adam West. Ultimately, Connery was lured back with a promised $1.5 million payday. To recapture the glory, Goldfinger director Guy Hamilton was brought back, as was theme song singer Shirley Bassey. Early 70s 007 looked a lot like early 60s 007.

Diamonds are Forever begins with Bond hunting down Blofeld, presumably because he killed his wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. However, his wife is never mentioned and James shows zero signs of grief or even vengeance. He’s been trying to kill Blofeld since 1963 in From Russia With Love. One could assume that Lazenby’s Bond may have been married but Connery’s never was. Diamonds are Forever is much more of an American film than any previous Bond movie, with most of the action taking place in Las Vegas. (One of the reasons American Tom Mankiewicz was hired to work on the script.) I loved the scenes in Circus, Circus and Bond racing cops on Freemont. That Vegas is long gone (although you can still shoot water into balloons at Circus, Circus). Diamonds also gives us our first American Bond girl, Tiffany Case (played by 70s-80s TV fixture Jill St. James).

The attempt to recreate the magic gives us Bond staples, including Blofeld (and his darn cat), CIA agent Felix Leiter, James gambling in a casino (craps, this time) and, of course, an underground lair. Also space lasers and an elephant that plays slot machines. Added to Blofeld’s bad guy team are Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, a pair of sociopathic gay assassins. This might have fit a “homosexuals are deviants” narrative in 1971, but now it’s just horribly offensive. (I thought it was creepy when I was a kid, but now it just seems really, really dumb.) We do get a bit of globe trotting with a stop in South African diamond mine (no mention of racial apartheid, just black miners smuggling diamonds) and Amsterdam, where James meets a scantily clad Tiffany and says he likes her change of hair color, “provided the collars and cuffs match.”

Diamonds are Forever premiered in Munich, West Germany on December 14, 1971, three days before East and West Germany signed a historic agreement allowing for more open travel across the Berlin Wall. The film was a box office blockbuster but reviewers saw it as more silly than sexy. Maybe that was due to the fact the the special effects budget was sacrificed to pay Connery’s salary. The scene of Bond driving a moon buggy through the Nevada desert, being chased by henchmen on dirt trikes, is particularly goofy. But you do get Bond in his white dinner jacket scaling the Las Vegas Hilton (the “Whyte House” in the film) and Jimmy Dean (the sausage guy) playing a character based on billionaire Howard Hughes, who was friends with Bond producer Cubby Broccoli.

Seventies Bond may fair better. Let’s drop Diamonds into our matrix.

Driver of Action – Diamonds are Forever is classic Bond. We get brief cameos from M, Q, and Miss Moneypenny. Felix and his CIA team play a minor support role, especially when 007 encounters Bambi and Thumper, Blofeld’s bathing suit-clad guardians of Willard Whyte. Part of the story drifts into heist film with James and Tiffany as a team, but, rarely fully clothed, she seems to be just brought along for added sex appeal. Producers had Connery back and were going to make sure he was in nearly every frame.

Role of Violence  – The film starts with Bond on a killing spree as he tries to find Blofeld. That includes finding a woman on a beach, ripping off her bikini top, and strangling her with it. Ultimately, after killing someone in Blofeld’s lab (with mud), Bond kills Blofeld. Or a Blofeld.(“Welcome to hell, Blofeld.”)  There’s a scene where Bond kills a diamond smuggler after a pretty intense fight in a Dutch elevator and the now routine scene where Bond slaps his Bond girl. Most “fun” is when Bond realizes that Blofeld is alive (THE GUY THAT KILLED HIS WIFE – BUT NOT MENTIONED). In fact, there are apparently multiple “cloned” Blofelds and cats. He’s faced with two Blofelds (this time played by Brit Charles Gray, who played an MI-6 agent in You Only Live Twice). With a 50-50 chance, Bond shoots and kills the wrong Blofeld. “Right idea, Mr. Bond,” says Blofeld. “But wrong pussy,” says Bond. Oh yeah, there’s a climatic shoot out on an oil rig between the CIA and the Henchmen that kills a grip of dudes.

Vulnerability – Nope. Zero mention of Bond’s dead wife. Not even a hint that that’s why he’s after Blofeld. Older Bond is all business.

Sexual Potency – James might be losing his touch. He hooks up with a casino trollop named (ready?) Plenty O’Toole (played by Natalie Wood’s little sister, Lana). He gets her dress off but before he can get his pants off, some mobsters throw her out of a hotel window, into a pool. He tells the gun-toting goons, “Well, I’m afraid you’ve caught me with more than my hands up,” which, I assume, is a reference to the Bond Boner. Of course, Bond does bed Tiffany Case. (Her smoking in his bed the next morning is the clue.) At one point, while his body on hers, she asks, “What’s going to happen to me?” “I’m on top of the situation,” James says. Snort. But the required three sexual conquests is not achieved in Diamonds are Forever. Gee, maybe he was thinking about Tracy.

Connection – Maybe Connery was just tired of playing Bond, but 007 doesn’t really seem to care about anybody in this film, including M, Felix, Moneypenny, or Plenty (who gets tossed out of a tenth story window). There is some connection with Tiffany, who seems to want to be a spy as much as a diamond smuggler. The film ends with James and Tiffany, wait for it it, in a boat! This time it’s an ocean liner. But we’re not quite done. Here come Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, the homicidal homosexuals, posing as waiters with bomb souffle to kill Bond. They end up on fire and blown up, over the side as James and Tiffany sail away to short-term happiness.

Toxic Masculinity Scale: 4

Summary Seventies Bond still has a problem with race. The primary cast is lily white and we’re still stuck with “the sun never sets on the British Empire” ethos. (Did Richard Nixon have anything to say about British agents running amok in Vegas?) There’s a scene in Circus, Circus where a black woman is transformed into a gorilla for the amusement of children. And the mobsters of Slumber, Inc are caricatures of Italian mafiosos. Some of this will be both fixed and made worse in the next installment, Live and Let Die.

Aside from slapping Bond “girls” or throwing them out of windows, you get the sense that the most misogynist elements of the franchise were running on fumes by 1971. Diamonds are Forever is a cartoon version of a 007 film that tries to balance sexy or sexist Bond quips with more over the top diabolical plans. (There’s a comment from Blofeld that if his space laser destroys Kansas, nobody will know about it for four years.) It’s all just dumb. They should have made Gloria Steinem a Bond girl and had her repurpose MI-6 and the CIA to raid the underground lair of patriarchy. Ms. Bond, we need you.

Next: Live and Let Die (1973)

The James Bond Project #7: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

The James Bond Project #6: You Only Live Twice (1967)

The James Bond Project #5: Casino Royale (1967)

The James Bond Project #4: Thunderball (1965)

The James Bond Project #3: Goldfinger (1964)

The James Bond Project #2: From Russia With Love (1963)

The James Bond Project: #1: Dr. No (1962)

Laissez les mauvaise temps rouler?: The Terror of 2025 and How to Stop It

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

January 3, 2025

Well, 2025 is off with a bang. My New’s Eve hangover didn’t have time to kick in before the news from New Orleans rolled in. And then Las Vegas. Welcome to the worst year of our lives.

Forty years ago, my study of fascism was the focus of my second undergrad major of political science. That then moved headlong into the field of criminology. As a graduate student, my research on teenage skinheads evolved into a study of right-wing extremists groups. Once I had my PhD in my pocket, that work became a scholarship on domestic terrorism. When I was asked to contribute to the 2003 edition of the Encyclopedia of Terrorism, I knew had achieved the title of “terrorism expert.” And that meant I would spend a chunk of New Year’s Day talking to reporters.

The study terrorism is not exactly an exact science. And those coming from academia and those coming from law enforcement are going to have different focuses (root causes vs. threat assessments, for example). But where we come together is in vague intention to create terrorist profiles (which I jokingly refer to as terrorist stereotypes). The good news is that we have a massive amount of data from previous bombings, mass shootings, car rammings, and the like to have a pretty good picture of who commits these crimes, with a handful of relevant variables. The bad news is that we have all this data because of the success of these people in carrying out their deadly plots.

So with minimal facts available, I had a pretty clear picture of who Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans attacker who killed 15, was and wasn’t. For example, despite the unhelpful grandstanding at Wednesday’s press conference, I was pretty certain Jabbar worked alone. The blather that Jabbar was a part of an “ISIS cell” fit conservative fear-mongering (since the “immigrant” narrative crashed), but did’t fit the typical profile. This was not the Oklahoma City Bombing. It was the Big Easy’s version of the 2016 truck attack in Nice, France. While Donald Trump decried “open borders,” I talked to local media about how we have seen this movie before.

You’ve got a guy with a military background who served in Afghanistan who probably saw the heavy hand of Uncle Sam in a Muslim land. That was enough for Army psychiatrist Nidal Hassan who went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood in 2009, killing 13 and injuring dozens. Jabbar also had a host of economic crises, including massive debt, and a dramatic divorce involving conflict over children. Most men who go on workplace mass shootings are in the same situation. Exactly. The insanity of ISIS gave him a place to put his anger. Their binary world of believers vs. non-believers is like a warm blanket to someone whose life in a complete spiral. Like the workplace shooter, Jabbar was ready to check-out (AKA die) but he was going to go out in a blaze of glory, spreading his pain to others as he barreled down Bourbon Street.

The case of Matthew Alan Livelsberger is a little less obvious. Livelsberger was the Army Special Forces operations master sergeant who drove a rented Tesla Cybertruck up to the front door of the Las Vegas Trump Hotel, shot himself in the head and set off a bomb in the truck. Again, the nattering nabobs of disinformation over at Fox News claimed this was an attack on the incoming president and his boss, Elon Musk. But, there were facts that didn’t add up to that claim, including the fact that Livelsberger was a green beret (not known for their liberal anything) and that the bomb was so poorly constructed it didn’t injure anybody. (He could have driven straight into the hotel lobby if he was after casualties.) There are clues to motive that have nothing to do with Trump or Musk.

We’ve seen a steady increase in the suicide rate of active military (523 cases in 2023, up 9% from 2022). We still know so little about the PTSD-suicide link, but we know it exists. Livelsberger was a new father, so that should have been a mediating factor. (When Cozy was born, I didn’t want to miss a single second, staring at her while she slept.) But we don’t know much about the sergeant’s internal and external life yet. We do know that soldiers who suffer trauma from combat who also experienced trauma as young children are significantly more likely to spin off the rails. Musk and Trump have been a constant presence in the news. It’s likely that he chose the car and hotel as part of a strategy to make his suicide more newsworthy. After all, how many of the over 500 military suicides last year hit the news cycle? (And the suicide rate for veterans is almost twice the non-veteran rate, so maybe both Livelsbergerm and Jabbar were demanding attention on the matter.)

If there’s any good news in all this carnage it’s that we know these profiles inside and out. Which means we know the antecedents to the terror, the proverbial red flags. And the red flags provide intervention points to head off calamity. As we dissect these two New Year’s Day attacks, we’ll find points where “somebody could have done something.” The Cure-PNW project I work on, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, has been finding angles to de-escalate political violence by strengthening communities and empowering people to intervene when they see a Livelsberger or Jabbar moving toward criminal action. (We refer to these interveners as “credible messengers.”) This is the work that needs to be upscaled on a national level as 2025 promises many more January firsts. (Unfortunately, our grant runs out with the new administration.)

After Election Day there was a lot of “the sky is falling” hysterics on my side of the aisle. Yeah, decency and democratic guardrails took a major hit. But the 2026 midterm election is only 96 weeks away and there is already dissent in the Trump-Musk-GOP ranks. Maybe the sky won’t fall, but what we can count on remaining constant are the factors that drive (almost exclusively) men into choices to commit acts of terror. Better understanding how to utilize that knowledge gives that “something” that we can do.

How to talk rationally about gun control

~ Randy Blazak ~ 7 Comments

October 5, 2017

The slaughter in Las Vegas on Sunday was the largest since the 300 slaughtered at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890 or the 250 slaughtered in the 1921 attacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma (or any of the other slaughters in which non-white Americans were the victims). The carnage has America in a brief moment of refection. Why does this keep happening and what are we going to do about it? The answer to the second question is probably nothing. If we couldn’t find the will to amend our gun laws after Sandy Hook in 2012 when Adam Lanza shot 20 small children to death, we never will. There will be many more shootings, some will be bigger Stephen Paddock’s death toll of 58 (so far), and we still won’t do anything.

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The sad reality is that our congress is owned by the National Rifle Association. They pimp out mostly Republicans but a lot of Democrats as well. (Here in Oregon, both Republican Rep. Greg Walden and Democrat Rep. Kurt Schrader have taken NRA donations.) The NRA is fiscally invested in widening the sale of all types of guns, as well as silencers and “bump stocks” that Paddock used to modify his assault rifles into automatic machine guns, greatly increasing his casualty rate. In 2015, the NRA supported the unbanning of armor-piercing bullets that have been used to kill police officers. And old white guys get angry at rap music.

We will see plenty of NRA puppets say it’s “too soon” to “politicize” the murder in Vegas. But there is another mass shooting just around the corner so it will always be too soon. So stop using that excuse. Stop using excuses period and do something.

I’ve written about the connection between men and gun violence. (It’s always men doing this. Always.) I want to talk about how to talk about gun control with two simple points.

The Second Amendment, like all rights, is negotiated.

The First Amendment is not absolute. Go into a crowded movie theater and shout “Fire!” or onto an airplane and say, “I have a bomb!” and then claim “free speech.” I dare you. Or try writing something libelous or post on your Facebook page that you are going to kill the President and try and hide behind the First Amendment. I dare you. Your goose will be cooked.

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The Supreme Court is in charge of determining what is constitutionally protected and what is not. In Virginia v. Black, the high court, in 2003, ruled that burning a cross was protected speech, unless it could be proven that it was intended to intimidate others. Our rights are constantly negotiated. They aren’t absolute and they aren’t “sacred.” The U.S. Constitution is a living document, written by humans, that the humans of the judicial branch are constantly interpreting and defining.

Case in point; the Second Amendment. It states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” There is certainly a difference between “a well regulated militia,” and an angry 64-year-old real estate investor with 47 firearms in his possession, but let’s focus on the second part; the right to keep and bear arms. The Bill of Rights was written in way back in 1789. I used to tell my criminology students at Portland State that there were only two ways to interpret its second amendment.

  1. The Historical Interpretation: When the founding fathers wrote the amendment, they were thinking of the arms that were available to people in 1789. This would be pistols, flint lock rifles, muskets, canons, and maybe those bombs where you light the fuse and chuck them at people. And the founding fathers wrote the Constitution for white male property owners. (Jeez, women weren’t allowed to even vote until 1920.) So the the Second Amendment says white men can own muskets and that’s it.
  2. The Libertarian Interpretation: The Constitution applies to ALL Americans, including children, the mentally ill, convicted felons in prison, and, yes, even women. And the Second Amendment applies to ALL arms, including machine guns, flame throwers, nuclear missiles, and weaponized anthrax. So the Second Amendment says psychotic American serial killers have the right to own intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Obviously, the reality has been negotiated to be somewhere in between those two interpretations. Automatic assault weapons were banned in 1994 under the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act. In February, President Trump signed a law to make is easier for mentally ill people to purchase guns. SCOTUS didn’t even recognize an individual right to possess a weapon until 2008 (District of Columbia v. Heller). It’s a constantly evolving landscape of what the Second Amendment actually protects and prohibits. It’s never been static. So why think it’s set in stone now? It’s set in pudding.

It’s all about reducing harm

I love it when the the gun control debate pops up, the trolls say, “Well, if you outlaw guns, people will still kill each other. With guns! And knives!” Look, you can kill a person by pushing them off a cliff. Nobody wants a law banning cliffs. This about reducing harm. After a horrible 1996 mass murder in Australia, the country passed real gun control and both murders and suicides dropped dramatically. Obviously, there are still murders and suicides in Australia, but there are significantly fewer victims. So don’t give me this, “if you outlaw guns there will still be murder” crap.

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Conservatives are stuck in this binary thinking. Either a gun law eliminates all gun crime or it’s pointless. Look, we just want to reduce the body count. We’ll never eliminate it. Gun-related homicides dropped 59% in Australia after they changed the gun regulations.  If your loved one was one of the people who would have been killed in the 41% of murders that didn’t happen, you’d think that the gun law was the best fucking thing to happen since sliced kiwi. Here, the NRA-check cashers in congress don’t care about the 93 Americans that are killed by guns every single day. Sure, they’ll send their “thoughts and prayers,” which is the polite way of saying they’re sending smoke up your ass.

Laws save lives. The seatbelt law has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Not everybody wears one, but the tally of 33,000 people killed in crashes each year would be vastly greater without the law. A gun law that clamps down on internet gun sales, or limits ammunition sales, or makes it harder for wife-beaters to buy handguns won’t stop crime, but there will be fewer casualties. If that means someone you love won’t get shot, I bet you’d think that law was worth pissing off the NRA and their deep pockets.

We don’t want to take your guns away

The hysterical right love to play this old song that somehow liberals want to take their guns away. “Out of my cold dead hands,” they bleat. Plenty of liberals and/Democrats have guns. They want to protect their families and go hunting, and shoot trap (whatever that is). I’ve shot plenty of guns. I used to keep a shot-up gun range target in my office, hoping to intimidate any grade-grubbing undergrads. Some of my shooting has been pretty high-powered. I did a weapons training course with the FBI in 2005 and scored this hot pic of me squeezing off a few rounds from an MP5. I don’t own a gun (as far as you know) but I have fired two Glocks from each hand, Matrix-style. Definitely not like the movies. I respect guns. I want to keep these things away from lunatics.

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The majority of Americans want stricter gun control laws. According to the most recent Gallup poll on the topic taken last October (you know a new one is coming any minute), 55% of Americans want stricter gun laws and only 10% want less strict laws. You’d never know that this week as congress is expected to loosen access to gun silencers. What Americans want is some reasonable legislation that keeps the Second Amendment somewhere between white property owners with muskets and convicted felons with nukes. Something that might drop the body count by any meaningful percentage.

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Gun nuts often say that gun laws only serve to punish law abiding gun owners because of the actions of a few criminals. It’s worth pointing out that most murderers aren’t actually criminals until they choose to commit murder. Stephen Paddock, 64, had no criminal record until he smashed out the windows in his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel and unloaded hundreds of rounds into a crowd of concert-goers, in the greatest act of single shooter mass violence in our lifetime.

How do we stop the next mass murder? The answer is complex, but a slack legal system that allows an individual to assemble an arsenal of high power weapons, that have nothing to do with home protection or hunting, has to be addressed. It’s time to, again, revisit what the scope of the Second Amendment means and what we can do as a nation to reduce the body count in this war against Americans, NRA be damned.

Support: Everytown for Gun Safety