Of the three latter Sean Connery Bond films, which do you feel is the best?
As stated elsewhere in this forum, Thunderball, for (a) the fight with the guy in drag and (b) the jet pack in the teaser, (c) the sequences with the Vulcan, (d) the cool underwater gear, (e) the theme song performed by Tom Jones, and (f) **Oh-my-God, yes! **Luciana Paluzzi. :o
Oh, yeah: I also like the first few minutes of the movie proper, when Blofeld snuffs one of his operatives and a new chair is quietly installed in his space. One of the coolest moments **ever **in cinema! 
I tend to think Thunderball and YOLT epitomize Connery’s Bond the best. They’re not as well-written as From Russia With Love, or as iconic as Goldfinger - but they’re basically where every trope of his Bond - good, and bad - became defined. Thunderball is where Connery really hit his stride in the role, IMO.
YOLT is my personal favorite, though I’d be hard pressed to prove that it’s significantly better than the other two. I love Ken Adam’s vast volcano base set and the wild imagination of Roald Dahl’s script. However, when people refer to YOLT as the point where Bond started to go off the rails, I sympathize. There are plenty of things in it that simply don’t make sense. There’s a helicopter with a giant electromagnet ready to go on a moment’s notice to pick up bad guys’ cars and drop them in the ocean? Seriously?
Thunderball is great, though the underwater scenes always seemed a bit slow and tedious to me. Diamonds are Forever is a little too campy for my tastes.
The whole sequence in YOLT where they turn Bond is so bizarre. Connery looks like a Romulan, or something out of a Hammer horror film.
Not only does the helicopter magically appear, Bond and his squeeze can watch the whole thing on remote TV in their car. And how about all those Kung Fu-fighter scenes on the roofs, eh?
My favorite sequence is the one with Little Nellie. I want one of those! :o
But yeah, the underwater scenes in ***Thunderball ***could stand to be trimmed by about two-thirds.
I’m going to give the nod to YOLT, for Little Nellie. Also for the fact that it was the first Bond film I ever saw and when I realized that there were nekkid women in the credits. Made me a fan.
You Only Live Twice is definitely the most memorable for me, so I’ll vote for that. It really is quite silly, though.
YOLT is the best, mostly because the other two are pretty unbearable.
The angle of the broadcast Bond was watching also meant that there was a second helicopter there just to film the first one.
You Only Live Twice, followed by Diamonds, and Thunderball ina very distant third since it is my least favorite Bond.
The secret bases – good and evil! – in YOLT are so damn cool. The volcano base, of course, is magnificent, but the MI6 base in the sunken ship is also a total delight.
I hate the scene where the retired agent – Henderson, played by Charles Gray – (I had to look it up on IMDB) – um –
snuffs it
Nekkid women make everything better! :o
I notice that sometimes in movies; a character watching something on a TV when there really couldn’t be a camera to provide the signal.
Especially when it’s cold in the studio!
How do you launch orbital rockets anywhere in Japan and not have thousands of people seeing the vapour trails?
I favour Thunderball of the three listed, in large part because it alone has a plot that isn’t utterly preposterous.
I like them in descending order as they appear in the thread title. Each was not quite as good as the one before it.
YOLT makes me think of Austin Powers and Virtucon, and how Virtucon makes more money from legal ventures than from terrorism, revenge or extortion.
If, in 1967, you have rocket tech that can take off and land vertically, from inside a freaking volcano, with minimal safety requirements, that can bring back (and, conversely, probably take into orbit) an 8000 pound payload, find and locate and capture other objects in space, and said spacecraft can fly with apparently 100% success rate, then why do something illegal with it? You could have a monopoly on space travel and make more money with it than even SPECTRE would know what to do with. 50 years later and we STILL don’t have spacecraft that can do what the one in the movie did.
My vote is for Thunderball. I guess I’ll have to rewatch it, but I don’t remember the underwater scenes being that tedious. Not anywhere near as tedious as pretty much everything in YOLT, such as the aforementioned electromagnet (that never gets caught in power lines), and the offensive Bond-as-Mickey Rooney-in-BAT makeover. And that’s without mentioning the death-ray machine used to check guests for weapons - how large an X-Ray does do people routinely get in that place?
DAF is just a silly coda to Connery’s tenure. It’s about as bad as View To A Kill.
You Only Live Twice is stupid. Was stupid, is stupid, will always be stupid. But not as insipid as Diamonds Are Forever. Thunderball was good enough to be re-made later and still be good. I thought Goldfinger and Thunderball pretty much nailed the Bond movie epitome. It took the movies a LONG time after that to strike that paydirt (though I have always thought that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service should get better press, as it is one of the most watchable).
I have to admit to soft spot for You Only Live Twice, the first Bond film I ever saw, and also because it’s set in Japan. It has some supreme moments of Cool (especially the Kendo Ninja taking out all the SPECTRE operatives with his sword), but it is suffused with Dumb. a lot of the effects, even at the time, looked fake (the erupting volcano at the end, in particular. And the running-the-film backwards to make it look as if the sub is coming up under the raft at the end doesn’t work after the first time you’ve seen it.). But it had lots of cool gadgets, that wonderful volcano lair, and the Nancy Sinatra title song. But, overall, and especially in retrospect, not all that great.
I’ve already weighed in on Diamonds are Forever, just a few weeks ago on this Board. It’s easily dumber than YOLT.
But Thunderball was Bond at his peak. The length of the underwater battle doesn’t bother me. I admit that some effects don’t quite hold up.(The sped-up action they sometimes use, especially during the Disco Volante wild ride at the end, is particularly absurd) But overall a good entry in the series.