Suits & Shirts · The Bond Wardrobe Files · 1971
Diamonds Are Forever: Sean Connery’s Complicated Goodbye
A record paycheck he gave away, a tailor who had dressed him since 1962, and a performance history still can’t agree on. What the tailoring in Connery’s last official Bond film actually tells us.
George Lazenby played James Bond exactly once. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is now regarded as one of the series’ best entries, but in 1969 the audience wasn’t ready to accept anyone who wasn’t Sean Connery, and Lazenby himself walked away from the role before the film even opened. United Artists needed the one thing that could guarantee Diamonds Are Forever would work: Connery, back in the part he had already tried twice to leave.
What it cost them made headlines on its own. What Connery did with that money says more about the man than any line of dialogue in the film. And what his tailor put on him for two hours in December 1971 is the last word in one of the most influential wardrobes in cinema — whether or not the performance around it was Connery’s best work.
Why Connery Came Back
Connery had left the role after You Only Live Twice (1967), worn down by a salary dispute and by the loss of privacy that came with being recognized everywhere. When Lazenby’s one-and-done tenure left the franchise needing a course correction, United Artists made the decision Broccoli and Saltzman hadn’t wanted to make: pay whatever it took.
What it took was a then-unprecedented $1.25 million fee, 12.5 percent of the film’s gross, and a contractual promise that United Artists would back two future films of Connery’s own choosing. It was, at the time, the largest sum ever paid to a film actor — a Guinness World Record.
Here is the detail that complicates the easy “he only did it for the money” reading: Connery gave almost the entire fee away. He used it to found the Scottish International Education Trust, a charity funding higher education for Scottish students, which is still active today. Whatever else motivated his return, the record paycheck itself wasn’t what he kept.
Contempt, or a Proper Send-Off?
The honest answer is: both readings have evidence behind them, and neither one fully explains what’s on screen. Connery visibly gained weight between films and looks noticeably older than he had four years earlier — a physical change contemporary reviewers and modern critics both point to. Several accounts describe him as coasting through certain scenes, and some of the film’s comic set pieces — the fight with Bambi and Thumper, the moon buggy chase — have the loose, unbothered energy of a star who knows he’s already being paid regardless of effort.
But “on autopilot” is not the same as contempt, and it is worth separating the two. Connery’s charisma and comic timing are still fully intact — critics who dislike the film rarely blame him for it, and several single him out as the one element still working at full strength. What reads as indifference in some scenes reads as confidence in others: a man who has played this character five times before and knows exactly how much effort each beat requires.
The tailoring argues for the send-off reading more than the performance does. This is the largest and most varied wardrobe of Connery’s entire run as Bond — more suits, more evening wear, more careful attention to fabric and cut than any of the previous five films combined. Whatever Connery’s state of mind, nobody around him was treating this as a film to phone in visually.
Anthony Sinclair’s Last Bond Wardrobe
Anthony Sinclair had dressed Connery’s Bond since Dr. No in 1962, developing the pared-down, softly structured silhouette that carries his own name in tailoring circles today: the Conduit Cut. For this film he returned one final time, and by his own account it was an important swansong for both men.
The cut itself had matured with the decade. Lapels are noticeably wider than in the early films, pocket flaps deeper, ties broader — Sinclair moving the Conduit Cut forward without abandoning its structure. Trousers lost their pleats for a cleaner front. For the Las Vegas desert heat, Sinclair built a cream linen suit, paired in the film with a shockingly bold pink tie — a genuine style risk that divided opinion then and now, but one entirely in character for a Bond determined to look expensive in every scene.
The film is also unusual for its sheer formalwear count: three separate dinner jackets appear across the runtime, including, in Bond’s final scene of the official series, a midnight-navy shawl-lapel velvet jacket — as elegant an exit as any character has been given in a Bond film, whatever was happening around it on the page.
- —The cream linen suit. Built for Las Vegas heat, single-breasted, full Conduit Cut, worn with a bold pink tie that remains one of the most debated accessory choices in the series.
- —The lightweight grey worsted. A paler, cooler grey than the flannels of the early 1960s films, with wider lapels and a closer fit — Sinclair adapting the house cut to 1971 without losing it.
- —Three dinner jackets. An unprecedented count for a single Bond film, closing with the navy velvet shawl-lapel jacket in Connery’s final scene as the character.
The Gun That Never Fires
Bond carries his Walther PPK throughout the film, keeps a silencer hidden in his attaché case, and draws the pistol at least once while searching his Las Vegas hotel room for bugs. He never once fires it. The film’s violence is handled instead by CIA agents with Thompson submachine guns and Blofeld’s guards with Danish Madsen M50s — a small but telling detail about a Bond who spends this film talking, seducing and improvising his way out of trouble rather than shooting his way through it.
The Watch You Can Barely See
This is the film where Bond’s most famous accessory nearly disappears. Every previous Connery outing had built its own small mythology around the Rolex Submariner on his wrist — so much so that collectors still call the reference 6538 the “James Bond Submariner.” In Diamonds Are Forever, a watch does appear on screen, but only briefly and unclearly enough that most researchers believe it’s the same understated gold dress watch — likely a Gruen Precision 510 — that Connery wore, largely off the Fleming script, in You Only Live Twice.
There is no gadget, no reveal, no Q-branch briefing built around it. For a franchise that would turn Roger Moore’s Rolex into a literal weapon two years later in Live and Let Die, this is a small, useful reminder: the Connery version of Bond never needed the watch to do anything except tell the time discreetly on a well-dressed wrist.
A Mustang, Not an Aston Martin
Bond’s main car in this film is a red 1971 Ford Mustang Mach 1, supplied to the production directly by Ford. Its Las Vegas chase produced one of the most famous mistakes in film history: Bond tips the car onto its right two wheels to slip through a narrow alley, but the following shot — filmed separately at Universal City — showed it exiting on its left two wheels. Director Guy Hamilton caught the error too late to reshoot, and solved it with a quick insert of Connery and Jill St. John rocking sideways in their seats to explain the impossible switch. It remains one of the most cited continuity errors in the entire franchise.
On Linen for Hot Climates
Sinclair’s cream linen suit is still a useful reference today for anyone facing a summer wedding or a business trip somewhere genuinely hot. Linen breathes better than almost any other suiting fiber, but it wrinkles on purpose — that texture is the fabric doing its job, not a tailoring failure. Where the 1971 suit still gets it right: a single-breasted, softly structured cut that moves with the body instead of fighting the heat.
⚠ What Not to Take From This Film
The bold pink tie with a cream suit is a genuine style risk that worked because everything else in the outfit was restrained enough to carry it. Attempted without that restraint — a loud tie, a loud shirt, and a loud jacket all at once — it stops being confident and starts being noise. Borrow the contrast, not the excess.
The honest verdict on Diamonds Are Forever is that Connery’s performance and Connery’s wardrobe were not pulling in the same direction. The acting has the loose energy of a man who has already been paid and knows it. The tailoring has the care of a man — or at least a team around him — determined to send the character out looking better than he ever had.
Anthony Sinclair didn’t treat this as a film to coast through, whatever was happening in front of the camera. The Conduit Cut he built for this film is as confident and as current as anything from the earlier, more celebrated entries — proof that a wardrobe can carry a send-off even when the performance around it is ambivalent about being there.
Whether this was contempt or a proper goodbye is still worth arguing about. What isn’t up for debate is the suit.
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