Diamonds Are Forever 1971: Cast, Plot and Ending Explained

Diamonds Are Forever is about James Bond (Sean Connery) hunting Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the man he blames for the death of his wife Tracy, and then being sent to find out who is stockpiling smuggled diamonds and why.

After the Blofeld hunt, M sends Bond to look into the diamond trade. To get inside the pipeline, Bond takes the identity of a smuggler named Peter Franks and travels to Amsterdam to meet the contact Tiffany Case (Jill St. John). Together they send a shipment of diamonds to America, and Bond follows it to Las Vegas. That is the whole setup, and the rest of the running time answers one question: what does anyone want with that many stones?

In release order the film follows On Her Majesty's Secret Service and comes before Live and Let Die. If you are planning a full run through the series, the James Bond movies in order guide shows where it sits, and the hub lists all James Bond films.

In the full plot of Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond kills a Blofeld double, goes undercover as diamond smuggler Peter Franks, and stops Ernst Stavro Blofeld using a diamond-powered laser satellite from an oil rig off Baja California. Spoilers follow, so skip ahead if you have not seen it.

The film opens with Bond tracking down Blofeld, who has been using lookalikes. Bond kills a Blofeld lookalike in the opening, but the real Blofeld is still alive. M then sends him to look into a diamond smuggling pipeline, because someone seems to be hoarding South African stones. Two odd assassins, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, are killing the people along that pipeline, so the job has a body count before Bond even lands.

In Amsterdam, Bond takes the place of the smuggler Peter Franks, kills the real Franks and fakes his own death. He and Tiffany Case hide the diamonds in Franks's corpse and send it to Los Angeles. This is the cleanest trick in the film: the courier is the cargo. In Las Vegas the diamonds pass through a funeral home to the smuggler Shady Tree. Wint and Kidd try to cremate Bond alive, but he survives because the diamonds in play are fakes that Bond and the CIA planted.

Bond then follows the real stones to a lab owned by the reclusive tycoon Willard Whyte and learns that they are being used to build a laser satellite. He finds that Blofeld has taken over Whyte's business, and he is trapped and left for dead in a pipeline, but he escapes. Bond rescues Whyte, and Blofeld has Tiffany kidnapped.

By now the satellite is already in orbit. Blofeld uses it to destroy nuclear weapons sites and then offers the world's powers a chance to bid for it. Whyte points Bond to Blofeld's base on an oil rig off Baja California. The CIA attacks by helicopter while Bond wrecks the control room with the rig's crane, and Blofeld's escape in his mini submarine ends in his apparent death.

On a ship home to Britain, Bond and Tiffany are served dinner by Wint and Kidd, who are disguised as waiters and have hidden a bomb. Bond turns the tables and sends both men overboard, and the bomb goes off.

Diamonds Are Forever had a reported US release on December 17, 1971 and a reported UK premiere on December 30, 1971; neither date is confirmed.

The reported Australian release was December 28, 1971. The US date comes from The Numbers, and the UK and Australian dates come from TMDB. No source names a premiere city or venue for the film.

In the UK the film carries a PG certificate, in the US it is rated PG and in Australia it is rated M.

The film runs 120 minutes.

For viewing today, JustWatch data on TMDB, checked on November 2, 2026, lists the film as streaming with Amazon Prime Video in the US, with rent and buy options on services such as Apple TV and YouTube. Availability changes, so check the service first.

Yes, Blofeld apparently dies at the end of Diamonds Are Forever, when his escape from the oil rig in a mini submarine ends in his apparent death, but the death is only apparent.

Here is the sequence step by step. Bond wrecks the control room of Blofeld's Baja California base with the rig's own crane while the CIA attacks by helicopter. Blofeld then tries to escape in the mini submarine, and that escape ends in his apparent death. Earlier, in the opening, Bond kills a Blofeld lookalike, which is why the real man staying alive until the rig matters. The film has told us from its first scene that Blofeld uses doubles, so a death at sea without a body is the one kind of death the audience has learned not to trust.

The last scene is a separate payoff. Wint and Kidd, dressed as waiters on the ship home, serve Bond and Tiffany a dinner with a bomb hidden in a course. Bond exposes them, both men go overboard, and the bomb goes off. In my opinion, that is the neater ending of the two, because the assassins' dark humor finally has a clear answer. It also closes a thread the film opened early: the pair kill their way along the smuggling pipeline, try to cremate Bond in Las Vegas, and only on the ship does Bond turn the method back on them.

The loose end is the satellite. Tiffany notices it is still in orbit and asks how the diamonds could be brought back to Earth, which leaves a loose end rather than setting up a specific sequel. Compared with the clean personal stakes of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, where Bond's loss drives the story, this ending feels more playful than final. It also differs from the way the next film, Live and Let Die, is positioned in release order, as a new entry rather than a continuation of the Blofeld story.

No list of filming locations for Diamonds Are Forever is published in the credits and release data for this film, so the places it can be tied to are the ones in the story.

The story moves from Amsterdam, where Bond meets Tiffany Case as the smuggler Peter Franks, to Las Vegas, where the diamonds pass through a funeral home to Shady Tree. It ends at Blofeld's oil rig base off Baja California and on a ship bound for Britain. These are story settings, not confirmed shooting sites. Ken Adam is credited as production designer and Ted Moore as director of photography, the two credits most responsible for how those places look on screen.

Diamonds Are Forever trivia starts with its numbers: a production budget of $7.2 million and a worldwide gross of about $116 million.

• The film made about $43.8 million domestically and about $72.2 million internationally.
• Guy Hamilton directed the film, his second Bond film after Goldfinger.
• Tom Mankiewicz co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Maibaum.
• Blofeld has been using lookalikes, and Bond kills one of them in the opening.
• It is the seventh film in both release order and chronological order, and one of the 25 official EON films.