What happens when you get the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to write the screenplay for a Bond film? As odd as that question sounds the world was treated to the answer in 1967 when children’s author Roald Dahl adapted Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice to the big screen. With this film, not only did we get a volcano lair and a face-to-face meeting with Ernst Stavro Blofeld but we also got Bond in his most challenging role yet, turning Japanese.
This would be the first time that a James Bond adaptation would discard most of Fleming's plot, using only a few characters and locations from the book as the background for an entirely new story. The previous four Bond films may have switched up a few elements but they still contained the bones of the plot, yet with the film, You Only Live Twice we get what is basically an “In Name Only” adaptation. Flemings book takes place after the events of On Her Majesty's Secret Service which had ended with the murder of Bond’s wife by Blofeld, in this sequel Bond, a depressed man in mourning, is removed from ‘00’ status and given a job in the diplomatic branch and is sent to Japan to liaison with Japan’s secret service intelligence, but while there he comes across Blofeld who is operating some kind of “Garden of Death” and so with revenge on his mind Bond goes undercover to live and think as a mute Japanese coal miner in order to penetrate Blofeld's castle. To say that the movie bears very little resemblance to the source material would be an understatement of volcanic proportions.
There isn’t a single rocket in the entire novel, shocking!
The film deals with a plot by SPECTRE to hijack orbiting spacecraft belonging to both American and Russian space programs, in an act that would hopefully provoke a war between the two nations. The man sent to uncover this dastardly plot is none other than super-spy James Bond (Sean Connery) who fakes his death and is buried at sea in the hopes of giving him a little extra elbow room in his investigations. He teams up the head of the Japanese secret service, Tiger Tanaka (Tetsurô Tanba), and his number one agent Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi), and they help Bond investigate the evil machinations of a Japanese industrialist who just so happens to be in the employ of SPECTRE. With mounting clues pointing to something going on in and around a small Japanese island Bond requests ‘Q’ (Desmond Llewelyn) to bring one of the best gadgets in the Bond franchise, Little Nelly, a heavily armed autogyro.
The more dubious element of You Only Live Twice is the plan to infiltrate the island involving Bond disguising himself as a Japanese fisherman as not only is the very idea of a 6' 2" Welshman passing as a Japanese man to be patently ridiculous, no matter how much latex appliances you use, but this entire section of the movie barely moves the plot forward and thus completely unnecessary. Why exactly does Bond have to turn Japanese and marry a local Japanese girl just to investigate a volcanic island? Are they worried that one of the local fishermen may be a SPECTRE agent? Yet what makes it all the more pointless is that there are two attempts on Bond’s life while he is living as a Japanese man, so clearly SPECTRE wasn’t fooled one bit by this silly ploy.
Maybe passing himself off as a Romulan would have been a better idea.
Stray Observations:
• MI6 staging Bond’s murder, as well as his burial at sea, was a trifle elaborate and as he is later identified while wandering around Tokyo it turns out to have been a rather expensive and pointless ploy.
• The local MI6 operative is played by actor Charles Gray who would later play Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever.
• During a fight with a Japanese killer Bond stumbles across a hidden office safe, good thing he just so happened to have a safe-cracking device in his pocket.
• The villains use the old “Bale out of a plane and leave the hero to crash” scenario when simply shooting Bond would have been more efficient and certainly less costly.
• A piranha pool to remove employees who demonstrate poor performance makes it clear that SPECTRE must not have much in the way of an HR department.
• Aki is easily one of the best Bond girls as not only is she incredibly beautiful but she saves Bond on multiple occasions, unfortunately, she also falls into the Bond trope of sleeping with him and then ending up dead.
• I love me some ninja action but the idea of Bond needing ninja training before attacking a SPECTRE facility is just silly.
What part of ninja training deals with rappelling into a volcano lair?
The plot of You Only Live Twice may not have had anything to do with the source material, other than a couple of character names lifted from the book, but it does bear similar elements to Dr. No, what with SPECTRE’s plan to sabotage the American space program, and the idea of a villainous plot to swallow up crafts from other nations in the hopes of instigating a global a war which would be revisited in the film The Spy Who Loved Me. That all said, despite some of the film’s dodgier elements it is the first entry in the franchise where we finally get a good look at SPECTRE’s villainous leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasence), and this is a real treat for fans and Pleasence gives a chilling performance as this iconic villain. Many actors have played this role over the years but it is Pleasence who will be most remembered, in fact, his performance was so iconic that it became the model for Austin Power’s nemesis Dr. Evil, and with scarred visage and white cat he almost manages to steal the movie with but a mere ten minutes of screen time.
“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Ernst Stavro Blofeld.”
When You Only Live Twice hit theatres back in 1967 it didn’t just have to worry about topping the blockbuster hit of the previous Bond film Thunderball but it also had to compete with the dozens of Bond rip-offs that were crowding the cinemas – one that even starred Sean Connery’s brother – and despite all that the film still managed some solid box office numbers though, to be fair, one would have to admit that the franchise brand had more to do with that than the film itself, what with Connery clearly being tired of the role and him refusing to act if either Harry Saltzman or Albert R. Broccoli were on-set, and add to that a plot that spent way too much time treading water and you have an entry that really struggled with itself. On the plus side, it still had John Barry’s wonderful score, a bevy of exotic Bond girls and the sets by production designer Ken Adams were simply breathtaking – Blofeld’s volcano lair would be the benchmark of villainous headquarters for years to come – and though the film suffers greatly from a “checked out” Sean Connery I'd still say that You Only Live Twice is a helluva lot of fun and a worthy Bond installment.
Note: I love that the Japanese secret service has a special operating theatre for Bond to undergo racial reassignment that is staffed with beautiful half-clad Japanese models.
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