The James Bond Film Festival. Part 1: Dr. No
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 2: From Russia with Love
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 3: Goldfinger
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 4: Thunderball
1967 was smack in the middle of the Space Age. Project Gemini had just ended, and the Apollo Program was just starting. Television brought us such fare as I Dream of Jeanie (astronauts dealing with a genie), It’s about time (astronauts lost in the prehistoric era), Lost in Space, and of course Star Trek. Cars of the era were “themed”. My dad had a '66 Ford Galaxie 500 whose taillights looked like the back of futuristic rocket engines, and the interior was trimmed in a similar manner. Telstar had been launched a few years before, and technology was improving by leaps and bounds. In spite of the unpleasantness around the world, not the least of which was the war in Vietnam, it was a forward-looking time.
Such is the world in which You Only Live Twice takes place; so naturally, it had a space theme. In a nutshell, SPECTRE is intercepting U.S. and Russian spacecraft and taking them to a remote island in Japan. An Asian country is trying to start a war between the Superpowers, and SPECTRE is intercepting the spacecraft to get the Russians and the Americans to start shooting at each other. Bond must stop SPECTRE before the Americans launch another rocket.
You Only Live Twice is the fifth outing for Sean Connery and the series, and IMO it is a poor one. The concept is far-fetched, but in the context of Bond films it’s okay. Where it really falls down is in Lewis Gilbert’s direction. There are things that just bug me.
In the beginning, Bond is “killed” by assassins in Hong Kong. He is buried at sea – very close to the shore, and in shallow water. This just wouldn’t happen. His bagged “corpse” is extremely stiff, and looks for all the world like a movie prop that is supposed to resemble a bag with a body in it instead of looking like a body in a bag. There is even a hollow “thunk” when the “feet” hit the deck of the submarine on which our hero was taken.
And then there is the death of Henderson (Charles Grey). He is about to tell Bond who he thinks is behind the spacejackings when he is stabbed in the back from behind a screen. He just stopped talking. No cry of pain, no grimmace, no blood. He’s dead, that’s all. Not a very effective death scene, if you ask me.
I had always though that Bond preferred his martinis “shaken, not stirred”. And yet Henderson had made a point of saying “stirred, not shaken”. Maybe I’m wrong, but if I’m right then someone should have done a little research.
And speaking of research, how could Gilbert not have caught the actor playing a mission control specialist for NASA (who was based in Houston) pronoucing Houston as “Hoo-ston”? I only heard Houston mispronounced once, but there it was.
Bond teams with “Tiger” Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba) to search the islands for SPECTRE’s hideout. Q (Desmond Llewellyn) arrives with one of the most famous of the Bond vehicles – an autogyro named “Little Nellie”. “Little Nellie” is armed of course, as Q points out. There are two air-to-air missiles under the cockpit, and Q helpfully points out that they fire at a rate of “sixty per minute”. That may be true, but hardly useful when you only have two missiles!
Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) confronts Helga Brandt (Karen Dor) and Mr. Osato (Teru Shimada) [Doesn’t “osato” mean “sugar” in Japanese? Just curious.] about their failure to kill Bond – who is supposed to have already been killed. As evidence that they are really up against Bond, Blofeld shows them an x-ray photograph of a Walther PPK pistol and declairs that “only one person uses this kind of pistol”. Sorry, but everyone knows that the PPK was a very popular pocket pistol for decades.
Blofeld’s lair is hidden inside of a volcano. Okay, Bond villains must have impressive lairs. It’s in their contract. But it really stretched the imagination to believe this particular one.
Bond must get close to the island without arousing suspicion, so he is made up to look Japanese. He didn’t look remotely Japanese. It was laughable. If I were directing a major motion picture I would have either made the make-up convincing or I would have said, “This isn’t working. Let’s do it another way.”
The monitors that showed the spacecraft: Where were the cameras? How could CAPCOM have nice profile shots of the ships without having a camera ship nearby? Okay, this is a minor nitpick and most people probably wouldn’t notice or care; but still…
There are a some similarities between You Only Live Twice and Dr. No. For example, Bond infiltrates Dr. No’s laboratory by stealing an anti-contamination suit from a henchman. In You Only Live Twice he infiltrates Blofeld’s launch area by stealing a pressure suit from a henchman. And Blofeld’s lair is destroyed in a manner very simlar to Dr. No’s lair. I think there was a little too much recycling in this one, and the screenwriter should have been more innovative.
But there are still some good points to this film. For one thing, we get a rare look at Toyota’s prototype GT2000, of which only three were made (one converted from a coupé). That was a nice-looking car, and it would have been cool if Toyota had persued the idea. The only other Japanese sports car I can think of was the Datsun Fairlady 1600 which predated even the venerable MGB.
“Little Nellie” was fun, and I don’t remember ever seeing an all-helicopter dogfight to rival the battle scene in You Only Live Twice.
The ninja raid on the volcano-lair was spectacular. It was epic in the same way as the underwater fight in Thunderball. Great visuals there, with the ninjas rapelling down their ropes.
Unfortunately the nifty bits don’t outweigh the poor direction and the remarkably implausible volcano lair.
Next week: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
