Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd

Background

In the novel, where they are plain Wint and Kidd, they are killers and enforcers for the Spangled Mob who make sure the diamond smuggling runs without a hitch and persuade anyone who errs never to do so again, taking sadistic pleasure in it, as when they pour boiling mud over a jockey's face. Tailing the courier from London to New York they pose as American businessmen W. Winter and B. Kitteridge. Although both are hardened assassins, Wint is pathologically afraid of traveling; when he must do so he wears an identifying name tag and a sticker that says "My blood group is F", and has to be paid a special bonus by his employers.

Because of his phobia Wint picked up the nickname Windy, while Kidd is nicknamed Boofy due to his pretty-boy appearance, and Felix Leiter suspects that they are both homosexual. Outside Las Vegas they give Bond a "Brooklyn stomping" in football cleats, and after they kidnap Tiffany Case on the Queen Elizabeth Bond dives into her cabin through the porthole, shoots them both and fakes a murder-suicide.

The film makes them American assassins assumed to work for Blofeld, though they never share a scene with him, dismantling his diamond pipeline from South Africa through the Netherlands to the United States by killing everyone who touches the stones. They share an overtly morbid sense of humour, completing each other's sentences as a game and competing over laboured, blackly humorous puns. Although working closely as partners they never address each other by their first names, preferring the courtly title "mister", and it is strongly implied that the two are lovers: they hold hands in one scene, Mr Wint has a habit of putting on women's perfume, and when Mr Kidd remarks that Tiffany Case is attractive, Mr Wint looks at him jealously.

The two use numerous and creative methods of killing their targets. They place a scorpion down the shirt of Dr Tynan, a South African dentist, and use a time bomb to blow up the helicopter piloted by Joe. They drown Mrs Whistler in the Amstel River. Mistaking Bond for Peter Franks, they seal him in a coffin and send him into a crematorium furnace.

They drown Plenty O'Toole, mistaking her for Tiffany Case, in a swimming pool just deep enough to cover her face. They also bury Bond alive by putting him into a length of pipeline in the desert outside Las Vegas.

Their final attempt on Bond and Tiffany comes aboard the SS Canberra after Bond foils Blofeld's plot: posing as stewards, they serve the couple a romantic dinner whose dessert, La Bombe Surprise, hides an actual bomb.