You Only Live Twice (1967)

You Only Live Twice (1967)

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Starring: Sean Connery

Welcome to Japan, Mr Bond.

During a routine space mission a US shuttle mysterious goes missing just after a second vessel is detected on their radars. The Americans blame the Russians and with the two superpowers almost coming to blows it’s up to the British and James Bond to prevent the cold war warming up.

Sean Connery is back once again in James Bond’s fifth adventure You Only Twice and if I had to choose just one word to describe this movie I’d have to go with ‘iconic’. When people think of a of a Bond villain they generally think of this movie. When people think of a Bond villain lair they most likely think of this movie. It’s the most parodied and lampooned film of the series and the movie Austin Powers lifted the most things from. In many ways this along with Goldfinger are the go-to examples of what a Bond movie is. However if I could use a second word to describe the film it would honestly be ‘boring’. It sounds crazy calling a movie iconic and boring at the same time but that’s just how bi-polar I feel this film is. I’ll start with the positives because what this film does well, it does very well indeed.

Okay I mentioned it briefly but we have to talk about the villain’s lair because it is simply an astonishing achievement. I have done nothing but praise set designer Ken Adams for his work in the first few Bond movies and the Ipcress File but You Only Live Twice is his masterpiece. This is the first time we see the face of SPECTRE leader Blofeld (the Great Escape’s Donald Pleasence) and his lair is a hollowed out volcano. The volcano has been mocked endlessly in the years since both lovingly and as a critique on the ridiculousness of the franchise as a whole but to see it in on screen it is completely convincing. The set is simply awe-inspiring in its size alone and then there’s a life-size model of a rocket, a helipad and helicopter, a working monorail, a retractable roof, a piranha tank with an automated bridge and the walls of the base that genuinely look like that of an empty volcano. It’s incredible easy to scoff at how silly the idea of building a headquarters inside an old volcano is, and yeah it is silly, but when you watch the film and you see it on screen it looks like Ken Adams has actually done it for real.

My second favourite thing about You Only Live Twice is Nancy Sinatra’s theme tune. Oh my goodness. It is just exquisite. Those strings melt my heart every time. Sinatra has gone on record as having been terrified when recording the song and actually asked the producers whether they would rather have Shirley Bassey back but she needn’t have worried as I think he voice here is as lovely as the strings arrangement that accompany her. The lyrics are kind of silly but when it sounds this good I’m more than willing to overlook them. There is a shot late in the film where the wonderfully named Bond girl Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama) is on a boat with the sunset behind her and the song just makes the moment so magical. I think the song is so good in fact that it was only this time on what must be my tenth or so viewing that I noticed that the sunset is a terrible rear-screen projection.

Speaking of good shots there is one of Bond on the roof of a factory filmed from a crane that is stunning. We see Bond fighting some goons on the roof and then the camera zooms out and we get an amazing ten second shot of 007 battling and trying to out run twenty odd guys whist Barry’s excellent 007 Theme plays. It’s a breath-taking shot and for many people the best moment of the movie. I think when director Terrence Young left the franchise the Bond movies lost that classy feeling and with a couple of exceptions the Bond movies afterwards the films were less exotic and even kind of tacky at times, but the crane shot is a surprisingly artistic touch for a Bond film so kudos to Lewis Gilbert for that.

Another highlight is the gyrocopter Little Nellie. For the second 007 film in a row we have Q out in the field and here he presents Bond with one of his most memorable gadgets. It was not the first film to feature an autogyro but I’m sure for many people watching something that as Bond ally Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba) points out really looks like a toy actually fly and seeing it be assembled from four suitcases might have been completely novel. Also once again just like the jetpack from Thunderball it was another case of the Bond producers using all the latest gadgets available to make memorable scenes. The fact Nellie is equipped with flame throwers, mines and air-to-air missiles is just the icing on the cake. It was also an incredibly dangerous scene to film and one of the camera men ended up having their foot severed whilst filming.

That wasn’t the only element of danger that happened as director Gilbert, Ken Adams, the producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman in addition to the director of photography Freddie Young almost died. They were all in Japan scouting for locations and were booked on a plane back home but they cancelled their flight the day before they were due to fly and the plane they were supposed to be on crashed soon after take-off and killed everybody on board. The reason they cancelled was because they were invited to attend a ninja demonstration.

And that brings me to another plus- ninjas! The film’s use of Japan is fairly good overall and there’s an inspired part where Charles Grey’s character Henderson (who gives Connery a drink that is stirred not shaken in one of the best laughs) is stabbed through one of the paper thin Japanese walls, but it’s the use of ninjas that I love the most. There’s no great explanation I have for liking their inclusion other than the fact that ninjas are freaking awesome! Here we have throwing stars, kendo sticks with concealed blades and we even get a training scene that features a very brief one-take of a ninja taking down several guys with a katana that honestly rivals any shot from Come Drink with Me or The One Armed Swordsman. There’s also a fantastic moment where a ninja assassin attempts to kill a sleeping Bond by dripping poison down a piece of string. It’s inventive, it’s tense and it ends on a tragic note when it is Bond girl Aki (Akika Wakabayashi) who is killed instead.

This all sounds pretty good so far and yet I previously described this film despite its strengths to be boring, so why is that? Well sadly it’s largely because of Sean Connery. I know some of you are gasping and spitting your vodka martinis (or Heineken for the Daniel Craig fans) out at your screens right now, but I am sorry to say that Sean Connery is awful in this film. I am a huge fan of Connery and if you’ve read my four previous Bond reviews you’ll have noticed how often I’ve praise him and while I don’t want to give away my opinion on the later films in the franchise I’ll give a minor spoiler alert now and say that he’s my favourite 007, but it doesn’t change the fact that he might as well have stayed in Scotland and not travelled to Japan as he just phones in his performance. Connery was said to have grown tired of the role by this point and after making five films in six years you can’t really blame the guy, but it totally comes across on screen. He reportedly told the producers while making the film that this would be his last time playing Bond and he simply looks bored in the role and more to the point I am bored watching him. He’s also massively hurt by such a weak script by none other than beloved author of children’s books Roald Dahl. I, like everyone who grew up with his novels and short stories, adore Dahl but the dialogue here is so unmemorable. In Thunderball I had such a tough time choosing my favourite quote out of ten or so incredible lines but here I am struggling to find good one. The dialogue is as flat as Connery’s performance.

The supporting characters aren’t much better either. As a child I loved Donald Pleasence’s take on Blofeld, but I think that was only for the facial scar. In From Russia with Love and Thunderball Ernst Stavro Blofeld was intimidating. His character in those films had murdered his henchman who had failed to kill Bond and while we do get that here in his best scene when he drops Spectre #11 Helga Brandt (Karin Dor) into his pool of piranhas, but overall he’s just not just not very scary. In From Russia with Love that films main villain Rosa Klebb was petrified of Blofeld, but I actually think she should beat-up Donald Pleasence. I think Pleasence is a fantastic actor and I have enjoyed him in every movie I have seen him in but no amount of good acting or facial prosthetics could convince me that this very short softly spoken guy is in any way a threat to 007.

It’s unfair to complain too much about Pleasence’s Blofeld as he did well and I like his dead-eyed emotionless portrayal as that does match the previous incarnation very well but nothing he could have done would have lived up to our expectations or imaginations after seeing the faceless guy from the other two films. However the little we did see of Blofeld previously we saw he had a full head of hair and wore an immaculate suit-and-tie combo with booming voice which is a far cry from the bald headed, Mao-suit wearing Blofeld here. He’s not the worst version of Blofeld, far from it in fact, but it’s just a case of the payoff not matching the build.

Elsewhere he have the two Bond girls first the ill-fated Aki and then Kissy Suzuki. Aki actually starts off pretty well as a competent agent but her romance with Bond comes from nowhere and she just kisses him out of the blue and ceases to be interesting at that point. However she is likeable and her death does make you feel for her. That makes it five films in a row where one of Bond’s allies dies. Aki does have perhaps the most beautiful car in the series however with the Toyota 2000GT.

Kissy looks good in her white bikini but it’s obvious that she is only in the film because Bond needs to sleep with someone at the end. Yeah there is the whole ludicrous premise of Connery turning Japanese (not in a Vapours way!) and needing a wife as part of his disguise but for me it was just an excuse for Bond to sleep with someone else. This is proved by the rough outline Roald Dahl was given to work with where he explained that he was told Bond needed to sleep with three women; good girl, a henchman, both of whom must die, and then the main girl. Dahl even called it “the Bond girl formula” so you can see how cynical her inclusion was. Also the producers cared so little as to who got which role that they switched Wakabayashi and Hama’s roles around at the last minute due to the latter’s poor English. Also this film’s perception of women is awful with the “In Japan men come first, women come second” being an extreme low-point. Bond saying that Chinese girls taste different than other girls during the opening Hong Kong scene made me annoyed too.

The henchwoman is Helga Brandt, the piranha food favourite I mentioned earlier, and with her scarlet hair and villainous ways she instantly draws comparisons to Thunderball’s Fiona Volpe it does her no favours at all. Volpe had a fierce, driven, playfully cruel personality but again like so many characters in this film Brandt is a cardboard cut-out. She’s not a person she’s but an archetype, a plot point rather than a character. Fiona used sex as a weapon and pretends to be seduced by Bond’s charms but only does so until her men have had time to get to her room and capture James.

I have no problem with Helga wanting to have sex with Bond, he’s a good-looking guy and seeing a woman in these films treat themselves to a spot of self-gratification is cool, but you’re a Spectre agent damn it- do your job! Her arc is all the over the place going from cold confident torturer which gets her information she needs, to faking falling victim to Bond’s-magic-penis trope for sex, but then reveals that she was acting all along and tries to kill 007 in one of the most amusing over-the-top ways ever. But why pretend to Bond that you’d changed your ways for so long when it didn’t benefit you in any way and not just kill him after the sex? Did you just enjoy killing people in preposterous silly ways? If so that’s awesome and I wish we had seen more of that before you turned into fish food.

Speaking of fish food there is the other henchman Hans (Ronald Rich) who seems to have been created in another carefully planned cynical way. I can imagine it now “Okay shall we make another great henchman?” “Nah let’s just copy the three we already have. Helga has red hair so that’s Fiona covered. It was the simply red hair that made Fiona special after all. That just leaves us with Oddjob and Red Grant.” “Okay I have a plan. Red Grant was tall and blonde. Oddjob was super strong and mute. How about if we combined both and had a tall, strong, blonde mute?” “Genius! Now we just need cool death scene for him.” “Or just give him the same as Helga’s.” They even bring back Burt Kwouck from Goldfinger! The Pink Panther’s A Shot in the Dark had already come out at this point so it’s not like we aren’t going to recognise him again. It would have been cool if they said he was the same character from Goldfinger under new employment but sadly not.

The bad script, performances and characters are also sunk by so many absurd moments that make no sense. I mentioned a few in Goldfinger and Thunderball that were also stupid but I was able to overlook them as the rest of the movie around those gaffs were so impressive and enjoyable. By contrast I found myself face-palming so many times at the huge leaps of logic. I was going to compile a long list of my grievances at first but that would require putting more effort into this review than what many put into the movie itself but here are just some;

·         First of all we see Blofeld watching his rocket in space but who the hell is filming this? Does he just hire a camera crew to fly into space and record his rocket and if so why doesn’t that show up on the US radars?

·         Again Bond watches a helicopter pick up a pursuing car with a magnet and then drop it into the sea on a monitor but who is filming that? It’s like they are watching the movie they are in which is the only explanation I can find.

·         Bond carries around a safe-cracking devise. I get that. It makes sense that he may need to use one. Carrying around suction pads just in case you will need to climb onto a metal retractable roof of a hidden volcano base you had no idea was even there. No. I’m not having it

·         Blofeld escapes and nobody bothers to go after him even though it surely should be easy to find one man that is either scaling a mountain or swimming to safety especially when you have a whole army of ninjas at your disposal! Guess when Bond wants to get laid nothing else matters.

·         They spend ages trying to convince people that a tall Scotsman with unmistakeable accent could disguise himself as a Japanese farmer. That is silly, but if that’s what you want to do with your story, fine. But why does his disguise vanish the moment he is captured? What was the point of any of that side plot?

·         What exactly was Bond’s plan when he was entering Blofeld’s rocket? Was he actually going to fly into space? Really Bond? Being a commander is not the same as being an astronaut. You may want to go into space, we all do, but don’t you think one of the astronauts you just freed would be a better option? You didn’t think that you might be more use in the enemy base fighting Blofeld with your licence to kill than a group of cosmonauts? Also didn’t one of the American astronauts get on the rocket? So did Bond just kill him when he exploded the vessel?

·         I’m not too sure I buy the faked death at the start either. It’s implied that the woman he was in bed with was in on staged murder, but if so why didn’t she give him a heads up before flipping the bed? The medic who checked his pulse must have been part of the plan but what about the gunmen? I used to think they were actually trying to kill Bond but maybe the underside of the bed was bullet proof but that doesn’t work as the wall behind Connery had bullet holes, so what gives? How did he survive that then? Also if the gunmen were part of this plan too then why did you have to go to such lengths and not instead just publish the newspaper story and hold a fake funeral? The fact Blofeld works out Bond is alive because he has a Walther PPK is maddening but also renders the whole thing pointless anyway! Oh whatever, here is Nancy Sinatra to take our minds off all that with her wonderful song.

That is exactly why this film is beloved by so many I think. You see even with all the tedious, dull stuff all anybody actually remembers from the film is Nancy Sinatra’s song, Pleasence’s iconic image, the fun Little Nellie scene and that volcano. It often ends up near the top on a lot of critics list but I think that comes from people who haven’t watched it in a while and the fact the “Connery is the best Bond” belief is so wide-spread and repeated so often that it blinds people to the fact that Connery’s tenure wasn’t all hits and he did indeed have some misses. This to me is one of those misses. But by the same token even I can’t overlook what this film does well and that volcano set design by Ken Adams. It’s easy to say “Well if the volcano set wasn’t there You Only Live Twice would suck” but I hate that logic. Yes it kind of is true but the fact is the volcano set is there and it’s wonderful. So we are left with a deeply flawed movie with unforgettable memorable moments. Boring yet iconic.

5/10- A very weak entry in the series elevated by breath-taking sets and an beautiful theme tune that ensures that while the film isn’t very good nobody remembers that. I can’t blame people for only remembering the good stuff either. After all why focus on all the negatives when you can instead bask in the magnificence of that volcano?

Best quote: “Bon appetit.”

Best scene: The first reveal of the volcano lair.

Kick-ass moment: I am going for the short one-take of the ninja laying out six of his fellow trainees and then putting the katana back into the sheaf as quick as lightning. Give that extra a raise!

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow will enter 1968 and we see a Ford Mustang face off against a Dodge Charger on the streets of San Fran-freaking-Cisco! I can not wait.