You Only Live Twice (1967)

Bond at His Biggest

You Only Live Twice is the film where the Bond series went fully into spectacle. The plot involves spacecraft being captured in orbit, a secret rocket base inside an extinct volcano, an army of ninjas and a villain with a white cat and a scarred face, and the whole thing is staged on a scale no spy film had attempted. It’s gorgeous to look at and often thrilling, and its story is thinner than any Connery Bond before it.

Lewis Gilbert directed it for a June 1967 release, the fifth Bond film and the fifth with Sean Connery. It was a big hit, though smaller than Thunderball, and Connery, exhausted by the role and the press, announced it would be his last. I give it a 7. The volcano alone is worth the ticket, and the rest is uneven.

It’s the Bond film I have the most fun looking at and the least fun thinking about. Whenever the story needs a reason for something, the answer is another set, another gadget or another gorgeous shot of Japan, and for long stretches that works on me. Then the plot stalls and I start waiting for the next piece of spectacle. That push and pull is the 7.

Roald Dahl’s Script

The screenplay was written by Roald Dahl, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a friend of Ian Fleming’s who had never written a feature film before. The producers told him to throw away most of Fleming’s novel, a dark, strange book about Bond’s grief and revenge, and to keep only the Japanese setting and a few characters. Dahl built a new story around a formula the producers gave him: three women, a villain’s lair and a lot of gadgets.

The result is a script with a fairy tale’s simplicity and a children’s author’s love of big, bold ideas: a rocket that opens its nose to swallow spacecraft, a secret base in a volcano, a girl who lives on a fishing island. It’s less a spy story than an adventure, and it set the template the series would follow for the next fifteen years.

Dahl later said he found the job frustrating and the formula mechanical. His playful imagination is visible all the same, and several of the film’s best ideas carry his fingerprints. The swallowing rocket in particular feels like something from one of his children’s books, grand, simple and slightly absurd.

A Faked Death

The film opens with Bond apparently being killed in Hong Kong, shot in a bed that folds up into the wall, and buried at sea in a naval funeral. Divers retrieve his body, and he turns out to be alive, his death staged so SPECTRE will stop hunting him. It’s a clever, witty opening, and it gives the film its title. It also tells the audience, from the first minutes, that this will be a Bond film about theatre and illusion.

Meanwhile, an American space capsule is swallowed in orbit by an unidentified spacecraft, and the Americans blame the Soviets. The world is on the brink of war, and British intelligence suspects the mysterious craft is launching from somewhere near Japan. Bond is sent to find it before the superpowers destroy each other.

The space scenes, with their gleaming capsules and the menacing rocket that swallows them, look dated now, and they still have a certain grandeur. They also tap into the space race anxieties of the sixties, when the idea of war starting in orbit felt plausible. The Cold War paranoia gives the fantasy an edge it would otherwise lack.

Japan

Most of the film was shot on location in Japan, and it’s among the most beautiful Bond films. Gilbert and cinematographer Freddie Young capture Tokyo’s neon streets, sumo wrestlers, traditional gardens, Himeji Castle and the rugged coast of Kagoshima, and the film has a travel-brochure glamour that Western audiences of the time had rarely seen.

Bond works with Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service, played by Tetsuro Tamba with charm and authority, and with Aki, an agent played by Akiko Wakabayashi, a more capable Bond woman than most in the early films. She drives, fights, rescues Bond more than once and is poisoned in his place in a sad and sudden scene.

The film’s view of Japan is affectionate and often exoticised. It treats the country as a land of ninjas, geishas, bathhouses and ritual, and it has little sense of the modern nation. That view was typical of its time, and it’s the root of the film’s worst misstep.

Bond Turns Japanese

To infiltrate a fishing village near the volcano, Bond is disguised as a Japanese man. Makeup artists alter his eyes and hair, he’s given a Japanese wife of convenience, the pearl diver Kissy Suzuki, played by Mie Hama, and he’s expected to pass as a local fisherman. Nobody on screen, and nobody watching, is convinced. The film plays the whole thing straight. That makes it worse.

The sequence is the film’s great embarrassment. It’s a clumsy piece of yellowface, and it looks worse with every passing year. It’s also pointless in story terms, since Connery is obviously a six-foot Scotsman in a wig, and it leads to some of the film’s most awkward scenes. Any modern viewing has to take it into account.

This sequence makes me cringe more than anything else in the Connery years. The altered eyes are bad enough, and being asked to accept that a village full of fishermen can’t spot a six-foot Scotsman is worse. I’d have cut the whole disguise and sent Bond in as himself.

The ninja training that precedes it, at a school at Himeji Castle, is more fun, with ninjas climbing, fighting and training in the castle grounds. The film’s respect for Japanese martial arts sits oddly beside the crude disguise, and the contradiction tells you a lot about how Western films of the sixties saw Asia.

Little Nellie

The film’s most beloved gadget is Little Nellie, a tiny one-man autogyro that Q delivers to Japan in several suitcases. Bond assembles it, flies it over the volcanic landscape and is attacked by four helicopters, and he destroys all of them with Nellie’s rockets, flamethrowers, mines and machine guns.

The aircraft was real, designed and flown by the British aviator Ken Wallis, who performed the flying himself in dozens of flights over Japan. The sequence is thrilling and funny, and the image of Connery in a flying helmet in a tiny open cockpit has stayed in viewers’ minds for decades.

Little Nellie is my favorite stretch of the film. A tiny autogyro that comes out of suitcases and takes down four helicopters is exactly the kind of cheerful nonsense I want from Bond, and knowing Wallis did the real flying gives it a danger no model shot could fake.

The filming came at a cost. An aerial cameraman, John Jordan, was badly injured when his foot was struck by a helicopter’s rotor during filming, and he lost part of his leg. The accident shows the real risks behind the series’ spectacle. Jordan returned to aerial filming afterwards, and he remained one of the most daring cameramen in the business.

The Volcano

The film’s centrepiece is the lair Ken Adam designed inside an extinct volcano. SPECTRE’s rocket base is hidden beneath a sliding crater lake, and inside is a vast control room, a launch pad, a monorail and a helicopter landing pad. Adam built it at Pinewood Studios, and at the time it was one of the largest sets ever constructed in Europe, with a working monorail and a helicopter that could fly inside it.

The set cost around a million dollars, more than the entire budget of Dr. No, and it’s on screen in every frame of the finale. The assault on the volcano, with Tanaka’s ninjas abseiling down from the crater and battling SPECTRE’s guards across the enormous space, is a spectacular piece of action filmmaking.

The volcano became the definitive Bond villain lair, endlessly imitated and parodied, most famously in the Austin Powers films. It’s the image most people see when they picture a Bond villain’s secret base. Adam’s design did for villainy what the Aston Martin did for gadgets, and it raised the bar for every production designer who followed.

The volcano is the reason this gets a 7 from me instead of a 6. Ken Adam built a place I’d happily wander around for an hour, and when the ninjas start dropping down those ropes I’m grinning like a fool. I think it’s the best set in the whole series.

Blofeld’s Face

After two films in which Blofeld was seen only as a pair of hands stroking a white cat, You Only Live Twice finally shows his face. Donald Pleasence plays him as a small, bald man with a long scar running down one side of his face and a soft, sinister voice. The reveal, in the volcano’s control room, is a genuine event, and it established the look every later parody would copy.

Pleasence is creepy and effective, though he has little to do beyond giving orders, feeding a failed henchwoman to his piranhas and threatening Bond. Blofeld’s scheme, starting a war between the superpowers on behalf of an unnamed Asian power that’s paying him, is grand and rather vague. The character would be played by different actors in the next two films, each with a different interpretation.

Nancy Sinatra’s Theme

Nancy Sinatra sings the title song, with music by John Barry and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, and it’s a lovely theme, lush and dreamy, built on a soaring string melody. It has been widely covered and sampled, most famously by Robbie Williams in Millennium. Its opening bars are instantly recognizable to people who have never seen the film.

Barry’s score leans hard into romance, with lush strings and a few Japanese instruments, and it gives the film an exotic, melancholy mood that suits its location. The music does as much as the photography to make Japan feel like a dream, drifting through the quieter scenes with a gentle sadness. I’d put this score near the top of Barry’s Bond work, and it carries me through the draggy middle when the plot won’t.

Connery Wants Out

Connery was tired of Bond by 1967. He resented the press intrusion in Japan, where photographers followed him everywhere, including into the bathroom, and he felt trapped by the role and underpaid by the producers. His performance is professional and relaxed, and it lacks some of the energy of the early films.

He left after this film, frustrated and worn out, and George Lazenby took over in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Connery returned for one more official film, Diamonds Are Forever, in 1971, and one unofficial one, Never Say Never Again, in 1983. You Only Live Twice marks the end of his first run, and the beginning of the series’ bigger, sillier phase.

Where It Falls Short

The plot is thin, the middle drags, the disguise is embarrassing and Connery looks bored in places. The women, apart from Aki, are underwritten, and the film’s view of Japan is dated. Spectacle comes first here, story second. The pieces are spectacular. The connections between them are loose.

It’s a 7. The volcano, Little Nellie, Japan and the Barry score make it a pleasure to watch, and its influence on the series and on popular culture is enormous. Watch it for its scale and its style, and be ready to wince at the disguise. Few Bond films look better, and few have less going on beneath the surface.

Craft Note

The Verdict on You Only Live Twice

My verdict is a 7. The volcano, Little Nellie, Japan and that Nancy Sinatra theme give me more pure pleasure than plenty of Bond films with better scripts, and I’d happily sit through the finale any day. What keeps it from an 8 is the thin plot, a Connery who looks ready to hand in his license to kill, and the disguise, which gets harder to sit through the older the film gets. Come for the scale.

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