Diamonds Are Forever (1971) is a British spy film directed by Guy Hamilton and the seventh film in the James Bond series. Sean Connery returns as James Bond, now investigating a diamond-smuggling pipeline that leads from South Africa to Amsterdam and then on to Las Vegas. Posing as smuggler Peter Franks, Bond meets Tiffany Case, played by Jill St. John, and follows the diamonds into a larger plot involving reclusive billionaire Willard Whyte and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Charles Gray plays Blofeld, with Lana Wood as Plenty O’Toole and Jimmy Dean as Willard Whyte. The film mixes crime caper, Las Vegas glamour, comic villains and large-scale Bond spectacle, and is especially remembered for its desert setting, Shirley Bassey’s title song, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, the moon buggy escape and the Ford Mustang chase through downtown Las Vegas.
Diamonds Are Forever was filmed across the United States, the Netherlands, France and England, but Las Vegas gives the film its strongest location identity. The Whyte House casino-hotel was represented by the International Hotel, later the Las Vegas Hilton and now Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, while Circus Circus, the Riviera, the Tropicana, the Mint, Fremont Street and other Las Vegas locations appear throughout the film’s casino and street material. The production famously used the Las Vegas Strip and downtown streets for the Mustang chase, giving the film one of the clearest early-1970s screen portraits of neon Las Vegas. The desert outside the city was used for the moon buggy chase and the South Africa material, while the Johns-Manville Gypsum Plant near Las Vegas stood in for the Tectronics facility. Amsterdam provides the film’s European diamond-smuggling world, including the Magere Brug and Reguliersgracht, where Tiffany Case’s canal-side apartment is located. In California, John Lautner’s Elrod House in Palm Springs appears as Willard Whyte’s winter house, the striking modernist setting where Bond encounters Bambi and Thumper. Additional production work was carried out at Pinewood Studios in England, with France used for the opening beach scene at Cap d’Antibes. The result is one of the most location-driven Bond films of the Connery era, moving from canals and diamond traders to desert labs, mortuaries, casinos, modernist architecture and the exaggerated neon world of Las Vegas.
Skinny Bridge
In Diamonds Are Forever (1971), the iconic Skinny Bridge serves as a key location where the body of Mrs. Whistler is removed from the Amstel River.
Tiffany Case’s House
Tiffany Case’s House has appeared in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), where its exterior represents the Amsterdam apartment of diamond smuggler Tiffany Case.