Just Ask for Diamond

It's a shame. The film sticks quite closely to the book, but is not as good. It starts with a horribly lame opening song. The two detectives are not that great. Tim is meant to be stupid, but here he seems rather like a robot saying lines. Nick is too child-actorish, and just does not seem natural enough.

However, I suspect the director is most at fault. The whole thing lacks pace and tension. One example: the scene with the piano -- which should be a high spot -- is thrown away in a few seconds.

The book depends a lot on verbal humour, a lot of it in the narration. This is mostly lost here.

It's not all bad, but it could have been much, much better.

The basic plot of this movie is two brothers (the world's worst private detective and his wisecracking younger brother) are given a package to look after, but just about every major criminal in London is also after it.

This film is really a mixed bag. The story (based on The Falcon's Malteser, which is essentially a send-up of classic movies such as Casablanca and, of course, The Maltese Falcon) is great as it sticks pretty close to the book, unsurprisingly as the script was written by Anthony Horowitz, the author of the The Falcon's Malteser. Most of the actors/actresses are good especially the late Dursley McLinden, who plays Tim Diamond (real name Herbert Timothy Simple), Patricia Hodge (who plays Brenda von Falkenberg), Peter Eyre and Nickolas Grace (who play Gott and Himmel respectively), but unfortunately Colin Dale, who plays Nick Diamond (real name Nick Simple), and who is the main character, is hopelessly miscast.

Also, I'm not sure that Anthony Horowitz is that good at writing a script for a full length feature film (he has proved he is more than capable of scripting an episode of a TV show, as he has written for, amongst others, Midsomer Murders, Foyle's War and Agatha Christie's Poirot), but it may just be that The Diamond Brothers books (The Falcon's Malteser, Public Enemy Number Two, South by South East, The French Confection, The Blurred Man, I know what you did last Wednesday and The Greek who stole Christmas) just don't make for good adaptations, as a lot of the humour in the books is text based (one example from SbSE: "I can't say I'm a big fan of fun fairs. I can't afford the fares so I never have any fun").

I would recommend this movie, however, even to people who have never read the book, as it does not rely upon people having read the book to be able to understand it. It is entertaining, just don't expect it to be brilliant.

Saw this when I was but a wee nipper - and I remember loving it dearly. It never insulted my intelligence, and the plot has momentum.

Would love to see it again now, were it not impossible to find!

Of course the film Just Ask For Diamond, directed by Stephen Bayly, is different from the novel by Anthony Horowitz. Time (and budget too) demands the story is edited so as to fit over 200 pages of text into 90 minutes of film. Indeed, the result is that a lot of interesting events are cut from the plot as well as many of the novel's original and charming characteristics. Dialogues are shortened, the narrator is more or less removed, violence is toned down. Where the novel has a tough and very cynical 13-year-old who has not got a good word for anyone or anything he has to deal with -the city of London, for instance, is presented as if it were the capital of Hell, the film presents us with sweet and adorable-looking Colin Dale who seems concerned more with maintaining a Received Pronunciation accent than playing a poor kid on the brink of the precipice. And London has come to look about as menacing as the green pastures where the TeleTubbies live. Still, the man responsible for the screenplay is the same as the one who wrote the book and he leaves us with enough to enjoy Just Ask For Diamond (a.k.a. Diamond's Edge). Dursley McLinden is the perfect cast for clumsy Tim, Susannah York makes a wonderful numbed-by-grief Lauren Bacardi, Patricia Hodge is a hit in two widely differing roles, Jimmy Nail looks exactly like what we have in mind when we think of a fascist London cop, there's a half a dozen of talented actors playing the crooks, and even Colin Dale, despite the posh accent, makes a nice lead and makes you wish you could stay a little boy for all your life. A lot of the humour is still there, but since it's mostly on a verbal level one should not rely on subtitles.

Take a wise cracking thirteen year old kid whose elder brother is an inept gumshoe, a host of classic British Actors (Jimmy Nail, Susannah York, Saeed Jaffrey, Roy Kinnear) amongst others, an intelligent plot and witty script from the pen of Anthony Horowitz (based on his own novel 'The Falcons Malteser'), a cult - and rather obscure - Brit heavy rock band (Mammoth) to play a gang of heavies; film it around North London in a classic film noir style and sprinkle with a cartload of tongue in cheek references to some of the greatest noir thrillers of all time and you have cooked up a rather tasty family friendly film that is a real joy to watch.

This film works on so many levels, it's well paced with so great moments of slap stick (such as the dropping of a grand piano onto a van full of bad guys) and full of crooks cartoony enough to entertain the kiddies, yet at the same time if full of enough references and in jokes to movies such as Kiss Me Deadly, Cassablanca and (of course) The Maltese Falcon to keep the hardened film buff entertained for hours.

This is the kind of left field quirky comedy that the British do best and is well worth 94 minutes of anybodies day to watch.