After watching a number of intense movies lately, on 8 June 2022 I decided to view something lighter and light-hearted – so I duly selected my DVD of the British film noir spoof movie Just Ask For Diamond (released in the USA as Diamond's Edge).
Directed by Stephen Bayly, with a screenplay and story by English mysteries/suspense novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz, and released in 1988 by 20th Century Fox, Just Ask For Diamond was based upon Horowitz's 1986 novel The Falcon's Malteser. As you will have guessed from its title, this in turn was (very) loosely inspired by, and hilariously spoofed, the classic 1941 American film noir The Maltese Falcon, which was of course adapted from the classic 1930 crime novel of the same title by Dashiell Hammett. Moreover, The Falcon's Malteser is just the first in an ongoing series of film noir spoof novels and short stories by Horowitz featuring the Diamond Brothers. OK, now that we've got all of that out of the way, here's what this movie is all about!
Set in what was then contemporary (i.e. 1980s) London, Just Ask For Diamond features a hapless private eye in his late 1920s who calls himself Tim Diamond (played by Dursley McLinden), even though his real name is Herbert Tim Simple – with simple being the operative word here (as in simple by name, simple by nature!). For Diamond is totally clueless in every way, which is hardly a plus for someone who hopes to earn a living from detective work, and not surprisingly his business is forever teetering upon the brink of bankruptcy.
Indeed, all that gives Diamond hope (that's a pun for all you gemologists reading this!) is his 13-year-old brother Nick (Colin Dale). Unlike Tim, Nick is most definitely clued-up, a veritable young Sherlock Holmes, in fact, who solves with ease those few cases that do come their way, but allows Tim to take the credit, if only to ensure that they keep a roof over their head and a tin of beans in their kitchen – even though they no longer have a tin opener, because Tim pawned it!
Happily, however, just as snowy December arrives to add the risk of being frozen to death to their ever-growing list of woes, so too does a client, a vertically-challenged South American named Johnny Naples (José René Ruiz). He offers them the princely sum of £100 if they will keep hold of a small but mysterious parcel for him for just three days, after which he will return for it and give them another £100.
Not surprisingly, the Diamond Brothers readily accept this odd assignment, but as soon as Ruiz is gone they entirely fail to resist the temptation to open the package – only to discover to their bewilderment that it simply contains a box of Maltesers (a very popular, inexpensive British confectionary consisting of small milk chocolate balls with malted milk centres). Nor will they ever obtain an explanation for this anomaly from Naples, because before the three days are up, so are his days, all of them. See Naples and die, they say – or, in his case, be Naples and die!
And so it is that this ostensibly innocuous box and its equally inoffensive contents plunge the Diamond Brothers into a murky morass of intrigue, double dealings, and multiple murders, as they (or, rather, Nick!) pit their wits against several different agents from the criminal underworld, including the evil but nowadays sauna-slimmed Fat Man (Michael Robbins), all of whom will go to any lengths to seize that box of Maltesers – but why?
After Tim is wrongly arrested for Naples's murder by Chief Inspector Snape (Bill Paterson) and his brutal cohort Boyle (Jimmy Nail), they inform him that somehow the box holds the key to a secret cache of diamonds worth a considerable fortune that international master criminal Henry von Falkenberg aka The Falcon (Forbes Collins) had stashed away before his own unforeseen demise. When Tim is subsequently released by Snape, he and Nick receive a tip-off that Naples's girlfriend, a club singer wonderfully named Lauren Bacardi (Susannah York), may be able to offer them some clues. But she and they are soon apprehended by a pair of fiendish German operatives named Gott (Peter Eyre) and Himmell (Nickolas Grace), with their future looking anything but rosy, or even ongoing, for that matter! Diamonds are forever? Probably not, unless the ever-resourceful Nick can save the day for them yet again.
Add to this melodramatic mix the sinister form of The Falcon's so-called Black Widow, Brenda von Falkenberg, who keeps an alligator named Fido in her swimming pool (as you do), for extracting information from her victims before Fido extracts their internal organs from them (which Nick almost discovers first-hand at one point!), plus the mysterious case-within-a-case of the exploding barcode-reader belonging to the Diamond Brothers' local mini-supermarket owner Mr Patel (Saeed Jaffrey), and you have a scenario that soars so far over Tim's head as to be all but invisible to him.
Moreover, this cryptic case even taxes Nick's grey matter, until, just like Archimedes, the answer suddenly materializes while he's taking a bath. Happily, however, unlike Archimedes, he does not promptly dash naked into the street shouting that he has it! Instead, he rather more calmly phones all of the necessary dramatis personae, friends and foes alike, to meet him at a set time the following morning in the cemetery where the late Henry von Falkenberg's imposing, aptly falcon-decorated mausoleum stands, and all will be revealed, including the diamonds.
Needless to say, however, nothing is ever quite that straightforward in the labored lives of Nick and Tim. I won't give away the denouement, other than to say that in spite of Nick's skilful detective work, the Diamonds are not greeted by the diamonds after all – someone else had made the same canny deductions as Nick, but had got there first. Not all is lost, however, as Nick subsequently receives one of the diamonds in the post from that person, the sale of which will keep him and Tim afloat until the next case comes along. And who knows, they may even be able to retrieve their tin-opener from the pawn shop!
Just Ask For Diamond is a very funny comedy movie, made even more so by the deliberate dead-pan acting of the criminals, Tim's disaster-strewn bursts of enthusiasm and total ineptitude portrayed exuberantly by McLinden, contrasting so comprehensively with Nick's razor-sharp gumshoe instincts and intellect as conveyed so effectively by Dale, plus a wonderful supporting cast of British actors who in addition to those already named here include Roy Kinnear, Michael Medwin, and Jim McManus, as well as even a special appearance by British heavy metal group Mammoth, playing the Fat Man's heavies.
I thoroughly enjoyed Just Ask For Diamond, whose frenetic pace never slackens for a moment, with its laconic asides and one-liners firing constantly from all sides like a perpetual hail of machine-gun bullets, and I only wish that there could have been more Diamond Brothers movies (but sadly, as I'll explain shortly, this was not to be).
(Incidentally: I am personally mystified that although Dursley McLinden's face appears on the front cover of some official DVD releases of Just Ask For Diamond (including the one that I own), his name is not included in the front cover's list of actors and actresses appearing in this movie, meaning that you have to turn to the back cover in order to discover who he is. Not how one might expect the actor playing a movie's title character to be treated, surely?)
Anyway, Just Ask For Diamond proved popular enough for the British TV channel ITV to launch a six-part British TV series in 1991 entitled The Diamond Brothers, in which McLinden and Dale reprised their eponymous roles. It was directed and written by Horowitz, who subsequently adapted it into a new Diamond Brothers novel, South By South-East, which, as its title suggests, has fun with the plot of the famous Hitchcock film noir movie North By Northwest. Sadly, however, the series was only ever screened once, but copies of it do exist (it has not been wiped, the awful fate of so many TV shows in the past), so perhaps one day it will be again.
This would be particularly welcomed by fans of Dursley McLinden, whose lead role in Just Ask For Diamond was his only significant appearance on the big screen. Born in 1965 on the Isle of Man, long before he became Tim Diamond Dursley had established himself as a very popular, major star of musical theatre in London's West End, appearing on stage in the likes of Gigi, Phantom of the Opera, and Follies. By the late 1980s, moreover, his fame had begun to furnish him with roles on TV too, which led to his appearing in such high-rating, well-loved shows as Mr Bean, After Henry, and, most famously, Doctor Who – as a principal supporting character, army soldier Sergeant Mike Smith, throughout one 1988 story, 'Remembrance of the Daleks'.
Just as Dursley seemed poised to break through into the big time both on television and in the movies, however, tragedy struck. His health rapidly deteriorated, so much so that he virtually gave up acting after 1991, and in 1995, aged only 30, Dursley died from AIDS. The death of so popular an actor at so young an age hit the British entertainment world hard, as he had made so many friends in it, and had inspired so many others globally with his tireless work for AIDS charities and awareness when he was no longer able to continue acting full-time. One of those friends was the TV screenwriter/producer Russell T. Davies, who based the lead character (a young actor named Ritchie Tozer, played by Olly Alexander) in the 2021 AIDS-themed Channel 4 TV drama series It's A Sin upon Dursley. And as a further tribute to him, Davies included in this same series a scene in which Ritchie is being filmed playing a character named Trooper Linden in a dalek-featuring Doctor Who story entitled 'Regression of the Daleks' (this story was fictitious, but the scene was intended to recall Dursley's appearance in 'Remembrance of the Daleks').
Just Ask For Diamond is another lasting tribute and testament to Dursley's great talent as an actor, offering us a potent yet all-too-brief insight into how his acting abilities and power would certainly have developed and expanded had he not been taken from our world far too soon. Consequently, I sincerely hope that whoever has the authority to rescreen The Diamond Brothers TV show will do so, and even release it on DVD, so that Dursley's last major on-screen contribution will be fully available for everyone to enjoy for all time, adding significantly to his body of accessible preserved work.
Finally: if you'd like to spy on the zany, harebrained crime capers in which only the Diamond Brothers could find themselves embroiled, be sure to click here to watch an official Just Ask For Diamond trailer on YouTube.
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
