1960s, Action-Adventure, Crime/Detective, Scifi, Thriller

You Only Live Twice (1967)



Director: Lewis Gilbert
Screenwriter: Roald Dahl

By Roderick Heath

I vividly recall, when I was a very small boy, the first time I saw You Only Live Twice on television. More specifically, it was the opening scene that sank like a fishhook through my imagination. A NASA Gemini space capsule in orbit, carrying two astronauts. One astronaut, Chris (Norman Jones), starts a spacewalk, only for the trackers on Earth to warn some strange contact is approaching. With John Barry’s score swirling in ominous and ratcheting intensity, Chris sees another spacecraft zeroing in, its nosecone splitting apart like a hungry maw and capturing the Gemini. The closing jaws sever Chris’s lifeline, cutting him adrift as the devouring craft moves off. Director Lewis Gilbert conveys something stark and chilling about the notion of death in space in the way the frantic dialogue of the astronauts and the trackers is suddenly severed and Chris drifts away in silence into the cosmos like so much refuse. Not long after, Pauline Kael accused Stanley Kubrick of trying to inflate this affecting vignette into an entire film with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Such a vivid evocation of space and death as harsh and lonely certainly didn’t sit with the usual, larkishly nasty entertainment value of the James Bond series, which in just five years had become astonishingly successful to the point of reorganising much of popular culture in its own image.


You Only Live Twice was also the first Bond film I ever saw and the one that made me a lifelong if sometimes hesitant aficionado, deeply fascinating me with its vivid, iconographic style, particularly the opening credits with their evocation of dreamlike romanticism and seething natural force. John Barry and Leslie Bricusse’s great theme song as sung by Nancy Sinatra warbles over Maurice Binder’s visions of naked geishas and boiling volcanic lava, describing a grandly sensual and mysterious world that treads close to subliminal zones, a vision that powerfully infiltrates the often more boyish fantasies glimpsed in the rest of the film. The relatively modest initial hit that was Dr. No (1962) had made Sean Connery synonymous with the lead role and resulted in three follow-ups, From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), and Thunderball (1965), each of which outstripped the last in astonishing popularity and moneyspinning: the margins of profitability on those films would make modern blockbuster producers weep in yearning. By 1967, the Bond marque had to fight for screen space amongst a plethora of other spies and suave action men, and so the series, which was never exactly realistic but certainly had an initially gritty and intimate approach to its thrills, began exchanging that for grander showmanship and a more overt engagement with science fiction. Sci-fi had been percolating in the series since Dr. No’s plot involving rocket toppling, and it persisted in the futuristic edge to Q’s (Desmond Llewellyn) inventions, as well as the supervillains and mysterious cabals borrowed from old serials and Fritz Lang movies.


To give the instalment some fresh vigour, producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman turned from their settled series team. Directors Terence Young and Guy Hamilton had forged the series in aesthetic terms, working with regular screenwriter Richard Maibaum and cinematographer Ted Moore. Hamilton had affixed a glistening pop sheen to Young’s cool jazz template with Goldfinger, but the relatively languid and indulgent style of Thunderball pointed to difficulties the series would have in reconciling a greater and greater push for fan service with propulsive plotting. Trying to up the stakes, You Only Live Twice saw something like the birth of the modern blockbuster as a genre unto itself, melding special effects and action in a delirious blend. Lewis Gilbert, an experienced and robust director used to handling big productions and just coming off a major hit with Alfie (1966), was taken on as director. With Maibaum busy on another project, Roald Dahl, a writer known mostly for his maliciously witty and cunning children’s stories, was commissioned to write the script. Freddie Young, winner of two Oscars for his work on Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) with David Lean, was hired to give the film a dose of widescreen spectacle. The making of the film proved somewhat fraught, as Connery was getting sick of the role and fearing typecasting, and disliked filming in Japan, leading to his fateful dropping out of the role.


You Only Live Twice already represented a break for the series beyond the personnel changes, as it was the first entry to more or less compose its own storyline and only borrow basic elements from Ian Fleming’s source novel, abandoning the credibility of the early entries, albeit whilst merely amplifying the tropes of futuristic technology and grandiose conspiracy already established. Dahl, who disliked the Fleming novel he was nominally adapting despite having been a friend of the writer, decided instead to offer a more expansive variation of the plot of Dr. No, and You Only Live Twice would itself be recycled in the Bond series, as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Fleming’s book, the last he properly completed in his lifetime, was one of his harshest and strangest entries, with Bond sent to Japan on the hunt for Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the leader of the insidious SPECTRE organisation, after Blofeld had killed Bond’s wife Tracy at the end of the preceding novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Blofeld had taken over an old castle on a remote island and amongst his varying projects had turned it into a garden filled with poisonous plants and creatures as a place where rich people could come to kill themselves. Most of the book, including the finale where Bond was left amnesiac in blissful ignorance, was jettisoned, and the order of the novels reversed in filming, leaving only the basic premise of Bond going on a mission to Japan and battling Blofeld in alliance with local spymaster Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba).


The mysterious spacecraft that swallows the Gemini capsule at the outset has been launched by SPECTRE – the Special Executive for Counter-Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion – from a base secreted within an extinct volcano and carefully hidden from all aerial and satellite surveillance. The USA blames the USSR for taking their craft, but during a heated summit meeting in the ironically frigid climes of Scandinavia where the Americans accuse the Soviets of trying to seize control of space, the British Foreign Secretary (Robin Bailey) reports radar signs the craft responsible returned to Earth around Japan. In Hong Kong, James Bond is currently off assignment and enjoying the fruits of his labour with a local girl (Tsai Chin, best known for playing Fu Manchu’s daughter in the Christopher Lee series), only for her to trap him and let in two machine-gun wielding assassins. When policemen arrive they seem to find Bond dead. Bond is given a burial at sea from the deck of a destroyer in Hong Kong harbour, only for his sail-wrapped body to be collected by two frogmen and brought aboard a submarine, where M (Bernard Lee) and Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) wait: Bond’s death has been faked and he’s being spirited to Japan in the most covert fashion to take up the search for the spaceship.


Dahl’s cruelly mischievous sense of humour and imaginative gift for absurd mechanics, long apparent in his own writing, quietly invaded the Bond style here, meshing with the wistful spiritual overtones suggested by the title and the many games with identity and culture played throughout, to invest the film with a blithely surreal energy. Bond’s once-solid identity is fractured in many pieces to keep pace with the vastly inflated stakes and bizarre new facts in the age of the space race. Dahl’s imprint is particularly obvious in an early run of droll flourishes, like the Hong Kong girl trapping Bond in a spring-loaded Murphy bed, and Bond being put through all the trappings of a naval funeral, before being brought aboard the submarine where M holds court in a travelling version of his familiar office complete with wood panelling. You Only Live Twice skirts satire of the already-settled Bond formula at quite a few junctures, only to prove they were always a moveable feast. Soon Bond, ever a globetrotter who reminds Moneypenny that he “took a first in Oriental languages at Cambridge,” lands in Japan nominally as a dead man and therefore free to experience on a deeper and stranger level. Upon landing on the Honshu shore, after being fired out of the submarine’s torpedo tube (!), Bond looks towards the sun as it sets with mystical import: Bond reborn in a new land in time to take on a new age.


The film still retains some of the flavour of Fleming’s exotic tourism at a time when Japan was truly becoming a world player again after World War II, offering it as a country with a shell of glistening, ahistorical super-modernity concealing a far more potent classical culture at once unfamiliar and appealing to a westerner half in love with death and dedicated to pagan mores like Bond. So Gilbert cuts from that evocative sunset to shots of pulsating Tokyo neon, putting the dualistic sensibility into the visual language. Bond’s adventures in Tokyo nightlife take a hard swerve towards the mysteriously transformative and unstable spirit of Lang and Orson Welles, as Bond makes contact with one of Tanaka’s operatives, Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) at a sumo match, and she takes him to meet his colleague, the local British intelligence officer Henderson (Charles Gray). Bond takes the quick and expedient route of ensuring Henderson is who he says he is by taking his cane and giving one of his legs a whack, accurately establishing it’s false. The beaming Henderson begins explaining why he thinks the mystery rocket really is locally based when suddenly he stops speaking in mid-sentence. Bond realises someone’s stabbed him through the paper wall of his room. He chases down the assassin, knocks him out, and dons his clothes, including the surgical mask he wears, to take his place: another goon waiting in a car spirits him to the skyscraper belonging to the Osato Chemical & Engineering Co.


When the second goon uncovers Bond’s face after hauling him up to an executive office, the two have a brutal battle that Bond wins by swatting his foe with a decorative statue. Bond cracks and robs a safe and flees, with Aki proving to be waiting nearby to spirit him away. When Bond demands to take over, Aki lures him into an underground tunnel where the floor opens up and drops Bond into a chute that deposits him neatly on a chair directly before Tanaka in his secret office. This hilarious flourish of destabilised reality strongly evokes the funhouse sequence in Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (1947) and would itself be filched by Bond fan George Lucas for Star Wars – Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in Luke Skywalker’s plunge out of Cloud City. Bond and Tanaka prove swiftly to be well-matched collaborators and personalities, both being fantasies of man-of-the-world largesse and finesse as well as effective force. Upon inspecting the stolen Osato documents, they find a suggestive list of chemical orders and a photo of a freighter, the Chinese-registered Ning-Po, at anchor off a coastal island that the company has gone to ruthless lengths to suppress.


After Tanaka introduces Bond to the pleasures of a Japanese bath, with his harem in attendance, Bond and Aki become lovers. Posing as a chemical buyer, Bond visits the Osato building legitimately to meet with the boss, Mr Osato (Teru Shimada), and his sultry assistant Miss Brandt (Karin Dor). After sparking another attempt to kill him, Bond heads with Aki to Kobe to inspect the Ning-Po to see if it might be carrying constituents for rocket fuel. Dor, swanning into the film with mane of red hair and eyeliner thick enough to dam the Mississippi, doesn’t get to make as much of an impression as some other Bond femme fatales, like Luciana Paluzzi in Thunderball, as this seems the one aspect of the Bond formula Gilbert and Dahl don’t quite seem to know what to do with, not in the same way they give a new flesh to the familiar figure of the ally-lover-victim in the form of Aki, who overshadows the official Bond Girl. Brandt’s attempt to kill Bond by trapping him in a plane and letting him crash is rather lackadaisically staged. Nonetheless Dor gains a memorable note of sadistic incision as she threatens the captive Bond with a knife used by plastic surgeons for slicing away skin, only to free him and hand the blade over to cut away the straps on her gown. “The things I do for England…’ Bond murmurs.


It’s tantalising and disappointing that no-one involved in the franchise has yet done something with the Sadean poetry inherent in the novel’s concept of Blofeld’s garden of death, imagery that accords strongly with the cult of extreme experience Bond and Blofeld both subscribe to. Certainly it wasn’t however a particularly cinematic concept in a series increasingly defined by action. One aspect of the novel retained was the theme of Bond being immersed in Japanese mores by Tanaka. The very dated bawdiness of Tanaka introducing Bond to the pleasures of the Japan way of life where according to him “men come first, women come second” gives the requisite dose of Bond-as-playboy business as he takes pleasure in being scrubbed over by the harem. Fortunately this stuff is quickly and playfully undercut by the way the film offers Aki and, later, Bond’s second partner and “wife” Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama) as deft agents for Tanaka. Kissy even saves Tanaka with a well-aimed shot in the finale, and the two women are rather more effectual heroines than many from the franchise’s more officially enlightened eras. Aki in particular is a terrific partner for Bond, dashing around Tokyo streets in her zippy white Speed Racer sports car, shimmying down ropes to make a speedy getaway, and calmly calling up the familiar Tanaka surprise for pursuing goons, a helicopter with a dangling electromagnet to pick up their car and dump it in Tokyo Bay.


Bond and Aki’s foray to Kobe justifies a sequence that sees Gilbert and Young delighting in their unfettered sense of the cinematic as they shoot Bond battling off a horde of dockyard thugs, set upon them by Osato, in an ebullient helicopter shot watching Bond punch and thrash his way through opponents as he dashes along a pier rooftop, with Barry’s scoring surging joyously on the soundtrack. Bond escapes them a display of physical daring and skill and he leaps onto piled cargo from on high, only to be knocked out as he calmly tries to walk away. After escaping the villains’ attempt to kill him in a staged plane crash, Bond has Q bring to Japan one of his inventions, Little Nellie, contained within four suitcases, which proves to be a gyrocopter festooned with weaponry. Bond uses Little Nellie to search for the SPECTRE base, and gets to use all her talents in a terrific aerial action, a few ropey, interpolated model shots notwithstanding, as four SPECTRE helicopters appearing seemingly out of nowhere and attack him, only to be out manoeuvred and outgunned by the nifty little vehicle. This sequence augments another familiar element to new importance: where before Bond’s gadgets had been used as part of more functional action scenes, this time an entire scene is contrived purely for a ritual display of what Bond can accomplish with Q’s ingenious weapons. Gilbert employs a puckish cinematic joke as Little Nellie is assembled in an array of still shots without the constructors, the finished machine only becoming coherent in the last.


In spite of his jokes and flourishes of weirdness, Dahl’s script is also notable for having a remarkably solid plot by the series standard, and for actually letting Bond do real and effective spy work. As opposed to, say, Goldfinger where the plot depends on him being incredibly incompetent at his job but then doing Pussy Galore so well she rats out the entire evil plan. By contrast in You Only Live Twice Bond successfully uses ruses to uncover his enemies and collects information that yields clues that describe the increasingly tangible outline of what he’s facing. He also contends with enemies with an edge of real guile and brutality, like Osato, who uses an x-ray machine in his desk to uncover the fact Bond is armed when posing as a buyer, and Brandt, who uses Bond for sex and subversion in the same way he often uses others to get him where she wants him and then tries to kill him. Gilbert conveys all with his hard, clean, rigorously flowing images that play off the specific landscape of 1960s Tokyo. He builds to spasms of terrific action like Bond’s combat with the fearsome goon in the Osato office, a small masterpiece of stunt fight staging, and rendering even episodes of comic-surreal weirdness like Bond’s fall into Tanaka’s office somehow coherent.


You Only Live Twice has significant rivals to being called the best Bond film, particularly From Russia With Love, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), and Casino Royale (2006). Tellingly, each of them retains a more intimate sense of Bond’s character in professional travails and emotional risk, whereas Bond here is necessarily at his most acquiescent at the dizzying flow of violence and strangeness thrown his way, in one of his most serial-like adventures. You Only Live Twice fully codified some aspects of the series most beloved of lampooners and apt for generalised caricatures, the first Bond film that really adheres to the popular lore of what an old-school Bond film was like. Where before the intimations of awesome force and alien threat represented by Blofeld and SPECTRE were kept fairly minimal and suggestive, here they step out into the open, with their colossal lairs and technology, their nasty paraphernalia for mistreating weak employees, and their nice line in futuristic fashion and architecture. But You Only Live Twice also lacks significant flaws its rivals films have: it doesn’t contend with an awkward lead performance like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or a first half crammed with franchise-building make-work as Casino Royale, and it moves faster than the relatively slow-burn From Russia With Love.


The major quality as a consequence of You Only Live Twice is that it surely represents the finest balance the glib and absurdist aspect of the series with the side defined by a tough and percussive sense of adventure. Despite its enormous box office success Thunderball had evinced signs of the self-indulgence that would often dog the franchise, as Terence Young had been both the perfect man to kick off the series and a vexing one to continue it precisely because of his strong identification with Bond. Broccoli and Saltzman were wise to turn to a talent like Gilbert to take over. Son of music hall performers and a former actor and screenwriter before making his directorial forays as a documentary maker, Gilbert was a skilled classical storyteller with a talent for evoking atmosphere and finding strong human dramas within big-budget spectacles, with war films as excellent as Reach for the Sky (1956), Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), Sink the Bismarck! (1960), and H.M.S. Defiant (1962), as well as more intimate and ironic movies like Ferry To Hong Kong (1959), The Greengage Summer (1961), The 7th Dawn (1964), and Alfie. A connecting thread between many of his diverse movies was a fondness for studies of sardonically disaffected and detached characters who find themselves trapped between worlds figuratively and/or literally, often trying to convince themselves they’re not affected by their quandaries and heroically, or sometimes tragically, discovering they’re right.


Bond fits neatly into this attitude, the existential survivor and gladiator who feels it when one of his lovers dies but doesn’t let it divert him one iota, the perfect British swashbuckler who finds more self-recognition in Japanese culture, and who is, eventually, even transformed into a Japanese man with makeup at Tanaka’s insistence so he can infiltrate a fishing community. You Only Live Twice evolves a uniquely precise atmosphere for a Bond film, largely thanks to the pulse of Barry’s scoring, constantly revising and recapitulating the essential theme to offer a permeating sense of exotic fancy to accompany Gilbert and Young’s lush visuals, and the sense of double identity and duplicitous appearance that defines the film stems from the interplay of sound and vision. One particularly affecting scene in this regard comes when Bond has to marry Kissy, one of Tanaka’s operatives and an Ama girl who can give him good cover in his search for the SPECTRE base. On one level the scene involves a rather crass joke as Bond dreads the wedding because Tanaka has told him his bride has “the face of a pig,” only to behold the lovely Kissy. But Gilbert pays close attention to the evocation of ritual and a different cultural sublimation of a common act. It’s perhaps the closest the series ever came to reconciling its intensely romantic impulses and its celebration of louche behaviour.


The way Gilbert shoots Bond’s first glimpse of Kissy, with Barry’s surging music, packs an unexpected jolt of romantic intensity, and suddenly Bond’s act of tourism becomes a genuine immersion within the spiritual and sexual life of Japan (Gilbert would later offer a semi-remake of the film with an explicitly romantic gloss with 1976’s Seven Nights in Japan). It also suggests a new act in Bond’s sputtering evolution, setting the scene for his marriage in the subsequent film. Meanwhile SPECTRE’s plot hits its climactic phase as their rocket swallows a Russian capsule, pushing the Soviets and the US on the brink of war as the former accuse the later of a revenge attack. With the second snatching, Gilbert this time follows the mysterious craft through its descent into the atmosphere and landing within the volcano lair. The rocket is a delightful piece of hardware, beyond what rocket engineering was at the time and yet strongly resembling more recent attempts to build a lander. Here, we gain glimpses of Blofeld, his presence still only signified by the infamous white cat he pets and his ruthlessly commanding voice. In From Russia With Love and Thunderball Blofeld’s presence had been suggested with actor Eric Pohlmann’s plummy European accent wielding sonorous menace, offered as an enigmatic, near-abstract source of evil lurking behind the schemes Bond fought, commanding and terrifying his underlings from behind veils of mystery and remote-controlled punishment.


For Blofeld’s first proper appearance Donald Pleasance was cast, but his revelation is left until the climax. Until then he’s the same unseen source malignancy lurking in an apartment off the lair that, like M’s mobile office, mocks the pretences of old European power with its art and tapestries even whilst adapted to a new landscape of cyclopean metal and hewn living rock, high life for the age of the nuclear bomb shelter. Blofeld pushes a lever with his foot that dumps Miss Brandt from a footbridge into the pond filled with ravenous piranha to punish her for her unsuccessful attempt to kill Bond, a moment that still packs a disquieting note, although it’s neatly dispersed by the deadpan comedy of the bridge snapping back into place and Osata scurrying off in alarm to obey Blofeld’s orders. This scene also sees Blofeld meeting with the people who provided the plot’s financing and equipment with the strong hint they’re Chinese Communists, fitting the film neatly into an odd run of movies and TV shows around the same time, also including the likes of Battle Beneath The Earth (1967) and The Chairman (1969) based around a paranoid feeling the Chinese were quietly outstripping the rest of the world.


Unlike the novels, where Fleming cast Bond as the mortal enemy of the KGB, the Bond films liked to avoid dealing with the Cold War too explicitly, playing up SPECTRE instead as a foe. The series even recast the plot of From Russia With Love from a SMERSH operation to one cooked up by SPECTRE, which is rather an supra-national organisation formed from the human refuse of clashes between political systems – their cover, as glimpsed in Thunderball, is a refugee resettlement organisation, which also hints this is how they recruit operatives – and aggressively committed to subverting and leeching off all such blocs. Blofeld even forces the Chinese backers in this film to give him more money before committing to the last part of the plot, and when one retorts furiously, “This is extortion!”, Blofeld coolly replies, “Extortion in my business.” This concept of SPECTRE as something rather larger, more insidious, and more efficiently malignant than any rogue terrorist operation or even rival spy group gave the early Bond films much of their cohesive force, and less random than the later pool of lone wolf tycoons that would provide most of Bond’s foes. It’s also an idea the more recent revivalist entries with Daniel Craig have tried to leverage but have yet to properly exploit.


You Only Live Twice offers Alexander Knox as an American President who’s all terse business and warlike grit, dismissive of the British theory and determined to forestall another snatching, putting the world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Fleming’s book had meditated on the decline of British standing in the Cold War game, but the film cleverly points the way forward for the series and Bond as a character in presenting the British influence as a mediating one, a level head outside the whirlwind of Cold War intransigence, and Bond as the hard human edge of that attitude. The regular production designer for the Bond films was Ken Adam, whose style almost invented a way of thinking about the future in his cavernous, Spartan spaces, a touch he also applied to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The similarity of Adam’s war room designs here certainly reflect his design principles but also accords with the vision, not at all dissimilar to Kubrick’s, of nuclear brinksmanship as something harsh, alien, incomprehensively destructive and real yet also waged through the prophylactic of telecommunications, and so entirely modern. This contrasts the supernal retention of homey environs M prefers. Like Dr. Strangelove, You Only Live Twice beholds an age of annihilating terrors and readily provoked national egos. Only Bond is big enough, in various senses of the word, to hold it off.


This thread runs right through the early Bond series, albeit mostly only explored on a specifically visual level, the tension between futurism’s homogenising power and the peccadilloes of established order. Attempts to dissect or revise Bond from a more politically correct angle are always doomed to fail because they don’t understand this tension is fundamental to the series’ popular cachet. This entry even was the first to start making constant jokes about Bond’s traits a ritual facet, in repeatedly making sport of his smoking habit. Blofeld, once revealed, resembles a kind of full-grown misbegotten foetus, the scarred and malignant, asexual embodiment of a world defined by radiation and pollution and monstrous will to power. The immediate follow-ups, which cast Telly Savalas and Charles Gray in the part (and, much later, Christoph Waltz), failed to live up the specific charge of perversity personified Pleasance offered. By comparison the whole of Japan is presented as embodying the dualism of contemporary existence, again according with Bond himself, the primal man enclosed by a loose glaze of civilised mystique.


Fittingly, Tanaka has Bond join his cadre of trainee ninjas who will when the time comes attack the SPECTRE base. The ninjas are presented as both modern warriors but also still proficient in an ancient arts, thus achieving perfect balance and fusion. Amidst their number Bond has to slay a couple of moles out to kill him. One of them sneaks into the house he shares with Aki and tries to poison him by dripping poison down a thread, only to kill Aki by mistake. It’s to You Only Live Twice’s credit that it actually feels connected with some genuine Japanese thriller films of the period (the manner of Aki’s death is borrowed from one), true to the baroque, even surreal lilt many have, if far short of the bravura lunacy of someone like Seijun Suzuki. A lot of Japanese thrillers, like their sci-fi, were attuned to the same tensions as the Bond films, the feeling that the modern world was the insubstantial hallucination, not the past. Tamba, Hama, and Wakabayashi were popular faces in Japanese cinema at the time, and the two women had appeared in both King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and the Toshiro Mifune vehicle Samurai Pirate (1965) together.


When Bond, Tanaka, and Kissy head to a small village in the region where they think the base is hidden, they and the other ninjas blend into the populace. They’re forced to spring into action as it’s announced the next American launch has been moved forward, and Bond and Kissy act on a clue presented by the death of a local Ama girl: inspecting where she died, they realise she was killed by gas warding off inspection of a volcanic tunnel linked to the SPECTRE hideout. Bond and Kissy’s relationship is initially defined by Kissy’s insistence they’re engaged in business, not indulging themselves, but heats up as they take a time out from climbing the volcano for a bit of smooching, an act that fortuitously makes them look innocuous to a helicopter that flies into the volcanic crater. Once Bond establishes that what looks like a lake in the crater is in fact a huge metal hatch, he sends Kissy back to fetch Tanaka and penetrates the lair. There, he finds the captive American and Russian astronauts and breaks them out, and attempts to pose as one of the SPECTRE astronauts to take command of their craft. But Blofeld spots the deception and has Bond brought to him, cueing Blofeld’s unveiling, eyeing Bond like a frog blinking out of the water with sadistic intentions.


Today the makers of many franchise works and blockbusters fret over giving audiences too much of what they want, but You Only Live Twice has no such compunction: it promises James Bond and an army of ninjas rumbling with SPECTRE in their hideout to decide the fate of the world, and it delivers. Moreover, the Bond films had properly anointed themselves by this point as the inheritors of old-fashioned Hollywood values despite all their pop-age chic, the Roman Forums of recent epics now giving way to glistening abodes of super-science. Adams’ set for the SPECTRE base, the largest ever constructed for a film at the time, is still an awesome piece of movie infrastructure. The set’s enormity helps give the film palpable drama: all this absurdity seems like it could actually be happening, fusing a precise depiction of functional detail and scale with an edge of the dreamlike, another aspect of the film that anticipates the Star Wars series. This is a world where radically different realities nest within the apparent, lethal beasts planted within beautiful landscapes. SPECTRE’s method in capturing the space capsules rather than simply blowing them up seems to be based in the charge of menace the act evokes for the audience: an explosion would be blatant and clear-cut, but the act of swallowing is stranger and leaves no trace, making it seems as if in space there literally be dragons.


The rush of action in the finale is perfectly organised and delivers every gleeful absurdity you could ask for, the ninjas rappelling into the lair, complete with a katana-wielding badass carving his way through SPECTRE operatives. The running joke about smoking being bad for your health finds its punchline as Bond requests a last cigarette only to launch a tiny rocket at the controller for the lair’s hatch, allowing the ninjas access. Blofeld guns down Osato as a lesson in failire, but Bond’s life is saved when Blofeld next means to shoot him when Tanaka plants a throwing star in the megalomaniac’s wrist. Bond himself has to fight his way past Blofeld’s hulking bodyguard Hans (Ronald Rich) in order to make the swallowing ship self-destruct before it intercepts the next American capsule. Hans of course finishes up as food for the piranhas and Bond manages to blow up the craft in time. The injured but unbowed Blofeld sets off the lair’s self-destruct system, the explosions reawakening the volcano and forcing the heroes to flee via the sea tunnel, and the air force drops rubber rafts for them. There Bond and Kissy seem ready to consummate their marriage at last, only for M’s submarine to surface directly under them. Someone always wants to wake you from a good dream.