My favourite Bond film: Diamonds Are Forever

Let's get the caveats out of the way first. Judged against the usual checklist of what makes a great James Bond movie, Diamonds Are Forever is not a great James Bond movie. Sean Connery's last official outing as 007 lacks the radioactive virility of his first three assignments. Nor, for that matter, does it possess the playful snap and panache of the first three Roger Moore vehicles that followed. Diamonds is the Bond series' unlucky number seven: punch-drunk and paunchy, wanton and woozy. I think it may be my favourite.

Connery thought he was out but the studio pulled him back in – offering a then-unheard sum of £1.25m (equivalent to £20m today) to re-engage the actor's services and thereby salvage a stuttering franchise. And yet Connery clearly does not want to be there. He shuffles through the motions like some ageing heavyweight showboater, flirting with disaster, his toupee slipping. When Bond is not fighting for his life and banging his elbows inside a cramped Amsterdam elevator, he's being kicked to hell by a pair of self-regarding girl acrobats in the Nevada desert. He's knackered, out of shape, halfway through the exit door. Legend has it that the very last scene Connery actually filmed was the one at the crematorium, in which Bond is knocked senseless, dropped inside a coffin and pushed towards the flames.

But the genius (intentional or otherwise) of Diamonds Are Forever is in the way it takes its lead from Connery's bruised, jaundiced performance. The later Roger Moore missions (Octopussy, A View to a Kill) made the mistake of variously disguising or compensating for Bond's advancing decrepitude and wound up looking ludicrous. Diamonds, by contrast, matches the star's tone and tempo quite beautifully.

Fittingly, the plot seems to drift in and out, like ground-fog or the frequency of a long-distance radio broadcast. Bond is on the trail of diamond smugglers and the trail leads him first to obligatory Bond girl Tiffany Case (Jill St John), who keeps changing her hair colour, and thence to the upper-crust Blofeld (Charles Gray), who plans to hold the planet to ransom and auction nuclear supremacy to the highest bidder. "The satellite is at present over Kansas," he explains, eager to demonstrate the power of his outer-space warhead. "But if we destroy Kansas, the world may not hear about it for years."

The film comes into its own during its extended middle portion, played out amid the casinos, circuses and funeral parlours of Las Vegas. This is an upside-down, hall-of-mirrors landscape in which an elderly hoodlum is booked to perform a standup show at 6pm and where a pair of dubious gay killers skip hand-in-hand through the desert beyond town (I like to see this as 007's touching concession to the Stonewall era).

Much of the action, meantime, pivots around the invisible figure of Willard Whyte, a thinly-veiled Howard Hughes, gone to ground in the penthouse suite of the palatial "Whyte House" and apparently running business from a bank of phones while sitting on the toilet – much as Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have done. "This is not the real White House and he's not the president," cautions Bond at one stage. The reminder, though, only adds to the suspicion that it is and he is – and that we are basically adrift in a corroded parallel America in which Vegas plays Washington DC and the moon landings are mocked up on a neighbouring sound-stage.

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Is this the western democracy that 007 is fighting to preserve? If so, his mission appears fatally hobbled from the opening credits. If so, moreover, nobody around him gives much of a damn. After stumbling across the moon-landing set, our hero boosts a car and lights out across town with the Vegas cops in hot pursuit. In the midst of the chase, director Guy Hamilton suddenly, devilishly, opts to cut away to show the chase from the gloomy interior of a Fremont Street arcade. Inside, under glass, the tourists are lined up like zombies at the slot-machines, utterly oblivious to the screeching tyres and wailing sirens just yards from their heads.

No doubt each era gets the Bond it deserves. Cubby Broccoli's franchise started out in the early 60s fired by a sleek moral certitude, prowling a world of clearly defined good and evil before slipping into jokey self-parody during the mid-to-late 70s. Diamonds, though, is the missing link, the crucial transition; ideally placed at the turn of the decade and implicitly haunted by noises off in the nation at large. Here is a Bond film in which the old glamour has lost its sparkle and the resolute hero has lost his way. It's jaded, uncertain and disillusioned. It's vicious, mordant, at times blackly comic. It's oddly brilliant, the best of the bunch: the perfect bleary Bond film for an imperfect bleary western world.

Favourite line: I do like "Alimentary, Dr Leiter" (Bond's neat response when asked the whereabouts of the diamonds on Peter Franks' body). But my real favourite is Jill St John's caustic rejoinder to the little boy at the water-balloon stand: "Blow up your pants!"

Favourite gadget: The electronic voice machine that enables Sean Connery to speak in a flawless American accent. If only he could have taken it away with him.