Diamonds Are Forever

Factual error: While Bond and Franks are fighting in the lift, you can hear glass breaking. However, when Franks picks up a shard of it to stab Bond, you can see it's really a piece of Plexiglass. When Franks is forced to let go of the shard, his hand shows no cuts or blood, which would have been unavoidable the way he had been holding it.

Factual error: The first laser beam was not generated via a diamond, as Willard Whyte says. The first functional laser device, which was constructed by Theodore Maiman, used a ruby rod.

Factual error: Shady Tree opens the coffin with bare hands - and keeps his hand on the lid for 6 seconds - notwithstanding the fact that it was just pulled out of a blazing furnace and must have been incredibly hot to touch.

Jacob La Cour

Factual error: In Blofeld's offshore control room there's an Earth-globe turning under a model of the satellite, to illustrate its orbital groundtrack. The way it's arranged, however, shows an orbit which is impossible. It shows the satellite tracing a groundtrack over a constant latitude. The only instance in which this is possible is if the orbit is directly over the Equator, whereas the model shows it over a latitude well within the Northern Hemisphere.

Factual error: When Bond is in the trunk of the car, being taken out of the lower level of the White House, a trap door opens out into the desert. There are two Saguaro cacti shown, one on the trap door and one in the distance. Saguaro cacti do not grow wild any where near Las Vegas.

Dennis Gannon

Factual error: When Bond is inside the oil rig, the shots switch from the satellite control room to the satellite itself orbiting. When the satellite fires at the underground missile, it's orbit direction reverses. Then, when it fires at the Russian sub and the Chinese military base, it stops before it fires. This is impossible, as Newtons 3rd law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For the satellite to reverse or stop, boosters would be needed at the front of the satellite (of which there aren't any) to counter it's speed. And even if they were there, the direction change and stop wouldn't be as sharp as the movie shows.

Factual error: When Mr. Wint and Mr. Kid assassinate the doctor in the South African desert, they use a scorpion. Scorpions are poisonous, but the sting is more like a bee's, and woudn't kill a healthy adult.

Factual error: The satellite uses a laser as its weapon, which can be only as powerful as its root energy source. It obviously doesn't have a nuclear reactor large enough to yield that much power, and it can't be solar power, since the collecting area of the dish is orders of magnitude too small to provide power at a level sufficient to lay waste to whole submarines and missile installations.

Factual error: When the submarine blows up under water the explosion we see shows no water being thrown up.

Factual error: Diamonds, being pure carbon, would burn in the cremation of the body containing them. Cremation temperature is about 1,000 degrees Celsius, diamonds burn at about 850.

Diamonds Are Forever mistake picture Video

Deliberate mistake: The famous car chase ends with Bond's car tipping up on its right wheels to fit through a pedestrian path. However, when it emerges the other side, it's tipped on its left wheels. When the car enters the alley, this was filmed in a studio. When the car exits the alley, this was filmed in Vegas. The first few times the exit was filmed, the car emerged on the correct wheels, but the shots were unusable because of the crowds in the background watching the filming. This shot was temporarily abandoned and eventually re-filmed with a different stunt driver who famously performed the stunt on the wrong wheels. Realising this, the producers filmed a somewhat clunky insert shot featuring a close-up of Sean Connery and Jill St John, which shows the car tip back onto four wheels and then up onto the opposite two wheels, even though the alleyway would be too narrow to manage this.

More mistakes in Diamonds Are Forever

Plenty: Hi, I'm Plenty.
James Bond: But of course you are.
Plenty: Plenty O'Toole.
James Bond: Named after your father, perhaps?

More quotes from Diamonds Are Forever

Trivia: The actor who played the real Willard White (not a Blofeld copy) is Jimmy Dean, of Breakfast Sausage fame.

Mark English

More trivia for Diamonds Are Forever

Question: Why does the archvillain Ernst Blofeld want to eliminate the diamond smugglers (including Tiffany Chase) via his two assassins?

Onesimos

Chosen answer: Blofeld and Spectre has enough diamonds for the laser he is building to hold the Earth hostage. In typical Spectre fashion, since he is finished with the operation, he wants to leave no loose ends that could tie Spectre into the mix.

Zwn Annwn

More questions & answers from Diamonds Are Forever

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