Mr. Kidd

## Charles Kidd

**Charles Kidd** or known as **Mr. Kidd** and Mr. Wint are a pair of assassins who appear in the James Bond novel and film Diamonds Are Forever. In the novel, Wint and Kidd are members of the Spangled Mob. In the film, they are henchmen for the villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld. He is portrayed by Putter Smith.

## Film biography

### Background

Mr. Wint and his partner Mr. Kidd are assassins working for Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Their assignment is to kill everyone in the diamond-smuggling "pipeline" running from South Africa to the United States via The Netherlands. The pair takes a sadistic pleasure in their work — for example, Kidd photographs the body of Mrs. Whistler and jokes about sending the pictures to the primary-age children to whom she was a school teacher. This is typical of an overtly morbid sense of humour they share, completing each other's sentences as a game and delighting in competing over laboured, blackly humorous puns.

Several scenes in the film very strongly suggest that they are engaged in a homosexual relationship: for instance, the two are seen arm-in-arm in an affectionate pose on two occasions. Mr. Wint also has a habit of spraying himself with women's perfume, shown prominently in several scenes of the film. Finally, when the two are on the same flight as smuggler and Bond girl Tiffany Case, Mr. Kidd notes that she is "quite attractive"; Mr. Wint glares at him, prompting Mr. Kidd to qualify his comment with "for a lady."

### Dismantling the Pipeline

The two use numerous methods of killing their targets (or trying to), some highly creative. Starting at the beginning of the pipeline, Wint and Kidd murder a South African dentist by placing a scorpion down the back of his shirt. Shortly after, the dentist’s contact arrives and they blow up his helicopter with a bomb. Next, they deliver the diamond package to school teacher Mrs. Whistler, who they shadow to Amsterdam and subsequently drown in the Amstel River. Boarding a plane for Los Angeles, they follow James Bond (who they assume to be smuggler Peter Franks) to a crematorium and attempt to kill him by sealing him in a coffin bound for a furnace. Believing that Franks is dead, they murder the next link in the chain, stand-up comedian Shady Tree.

The following day the pair visit the home of Tiffany Case - the last link to be murdered - only to find Plenty O'Toole. Believing her to be Case, they tie her feet to a concrete block and throw her into a swimming pool. Later that evening the duo are given a second chance to kill Bond when Blofeld's gas-venting elevator renders the spy unconscious. Driving him into the middle of the Las Vegas desert, they bury Bond alive by putting him into a length of pipeline which is due to be buried. However, their taste for plotting overly elaborate deaths allows Bond to escape.

### If at first you don't succeed...

After Bond foils Blofeld's plot, he and Case depart from Los Angeles aboard the Canberra. Unbeknownst to the couple, Wint and Kidd have also boarded the cruise liner intent on killing the spy. They pose as stewards in the couple's suite, serving them a romantic dinner complete with dessert - La Bombe Surprise. However, Bond is quick to suspect that something is wrong. He exposes Wint's ignorance of the wine he serves him at dinner and links the smell of his cologne to his prior misadventures.

Realizing that Bond has blown their cover, the pair immediately turn against him. Mr. Kidd ignites the kebabs he is holding in both hands, aiming to torture Bond to death while Mr. Wint strangles him with a chain. Bond first neutralizes Mr. Kidd by splashing Courvoisier over the flaming skewers, setting Kidd on fire. Within seconds, he is burning uncontrollably, and in desperation jumps overboard to his death. As Wint continues to strangle 007, Case throws the dessert at the assassin; she misses, and the dessert turns out to be concealing a bomb. Bond gains the upper hand against Mr. Wint, pulling his arms between his legs and tying his hands and the bomb together with his coattails. Bond then flips Mr. Wint overboard, and the bomb explodes while he is falling toward the water, killing him.

## Behind the scenes

Jazz musician Putter Smith was invited by Harry Saltzman to play Mr. Kidd after a Thelonious Monk Band show. Musician Paul Williams was originally cast as Mr. Wint, but when he couldn't agree with the producers on compensation, Bruce Glover replaced him. Glover said he was surprised at being chosen, because at first producers said he was too normal and that they wanted a deformed, Peter Lorre-like actor.

## Trivia

* The original names of the henchmen were supposedly Wint & Gore, but Ian Fleming changed Gore to Kidd at the request of his wife's cousin, who was nicknamed "Boofy" Gore. However, the name Gore does occur in some versions of the novel.
* Likewise, Kidd's original nickname was "Dolly," and appears as such in early British editions of the book.
* Mr. Wint is played by Bruce Glover, the father of actor Crispin Glover.
* There are now two diamond stores in London trading under the name 'Wint & Kidd'
* In an Alternate Version found on a documentary on the Diamonds Are Forever DVD, instead of placing the Scorpion down the back of the doctor, Wint jams the scorpion into his mouth. The Censors found this too shocking and requested the scene to be changed.
* In the Fallout 3 add-on **Broken Steel,**there are two ghoul characters named Kidd and Wint.
* In a deleted scene made available in DVD release, the pair's shooting of the character Shady Tree is achieved via a joke prop gun that first produces a flag with "BANG!" written on it, then a real bullet.
* The archetype of the incredibly polite pair of villains has been parodied numerous times, most notably as Mr. Wink and Mr. Fibb in Codename: Kids Next Door and — to a far more ridiculous extent — the characters "Fat Man and Little Boy" in Sin City. In Codename: Kids Next Door, when Wink and Fibb talk to each other, they end sentences with "Mister Fibb" and "Mister Wink", respectively, as in the Bond movie.