Diamonds Are Forever

Skippable, and it is the film that throws away the best ending the series ever had. On Her Majesty's Secret Service closed on Bond's wife being murdered. This one opens with ninety seconds of him roughing up informants, kills Blofeld in a pre-title sequence that is then immediately undone, and never mentions her again.

Connery came back after Lazenby's single film for what was reported at the time as the largest fee ever paid to an actor, most of which he gave to a Scottish educational trust, and he is visibly less interested than in any of his other five. The film around him is loose, campy and set almost entirely in Las Vegas, with a tone closer to a caper than a thriller.

Charles Gray plays Blofeld as an urbane host with a line in drag disguises, which is a long way from Pleasence two films earlier, and the series' willingness to recast its recurring villain three times in four films tells you how little continuity mattered. The two assassins, Wint and Kidd, are a genuinely odd creation and are written with a leering homophobia that is hard to watch now.

The moon buggy chase and the car on two wheels through a Vegas alley are the memorable sequences, both of them silly. Skip it. Connery's run effectively ends with the previous film he made.