You Only Live Twice is the fifth Bond film by Eon Productions and the fifth outing of Sean Connery as James Bond. He does an excellent job as usual.
This time, the movie is set mostly in Japan. We see sumo wrestlers (including one of Bond’s early adversaries – bringing back vibes of Oddjob from Goldfinger) as well as ninjas (in white gis doing mostly other Japanese martial arts – obviously expecting a naïve audience) plus plenty of beautiful Japanese women – especially the main woman in this movie – James’s initial liaison in Japan, called Aki, played quite well by Akiko Wakabayashi. Akiko seems bright and beautiful, in contrast to James’s cover wife towards in the end of the movie – an agent named Kissy Suzuki, played adequately by Mie Hama. She’s pretty but not stunning, and has a typical bimbo gaze & demeanour.
Aki’s boss (Tiger Tanaka) is played quite well by Tetsurô Tanba.
The main enemy in Japan (Mr Osato) is played well by Teru Shimada, although his company is just a front – he works for Spectre (the main enemy in every Bond movie by Eon up to this point).
Spectre’s boss – their ‘Number 1’ agent – never reveals his face until the end of this movie. Until this point we’d only ever seen his hand stroking a fluffy white cat as he sits in his chair barking orders – this time we learn his name is Ernst Stavro Blofeld and he’s played adequately by Donald Pleasence. He’s a bit of a Dr Evil type character.
Karin Dor also plays a significant role in this movie, as Helga Brandt – a female Spectre agent who Bond thought he seduced, but failed. She later gets killed by Blofeld – she’s dropped in a pond of piranhas, for unwittingly allowing Bond to escape.
This movie is responsible for one of the most iconic & memorable sets in Bond history – the lair built within a volcano, with a sliding roof that, when closed, makes it look like the volcano is full of water to anyone looking down from above. The freeing of prisoners and taking over of that volcano base probably inspired similar antics in The Spy Who Loved Me starring Roger Moore 10 years later – the similarity here may also have something to do with the fact that both movies were directed by Lewis Gilbert – they were his first two of three Bond movies he directed.
Overall I rate this movie as OK – about the same as every other Bond movie so far in the series up to this point, with the exception of Goldfinger which was probably slightly better.
Fun fact 1
My favourite movie of all time is Bloodsport, inspired by the alleged real-life story of Frank Dux who has been widely exposed as a pretender these days. When asked who trained him, he said ‘Tiger Tanaka’, and this worked his way into the movie where Van Damme’s character Frank Dux is trained by a Mr Tanaka. I guess he got the idea from You Only Live Twice and didn’t expect Bloodsport to become the massive cult classic that it became, which has had both positive and negative effects on his reputation due to this controversy.
Fun fact 2
After this movie, Sean Connery asked for a significant pay rise, but Eon Productions refused. So the next Bond movie – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) – starred George Lazenby instead. It was a commercial success, but was still considered a flop in comparison to You Only Live Twice. Lazenby also refused to do a second movie, due to lack of gadgets in his first one. He’d also never acted in anything before this movie. And he was told by the producers not to turn up to the movie premiere unless he shaved his beard and cut his long hair, but he turned up anyway, without shaving or cutting anything. I have to respect him for that, even if he makes a weak James Bond.
So Eon eventually agreed to Connery’s terms for one more outing – Diamonds Are Forever (1971) – marking the 6th & final outing of Connery as Bond on an Eon Productions film, before eventually finding a suitable replacement in Roger Moore, whose era began with Live And Let Die (1973). Roger Moore made 7 consecutive Bond movies, which took us through to the mid 80s and was followed by a couple starring Timothy Dalton which took us through to the 90s. But Connery made one more attempt at a Bond movie, outside of Eon Productions, before the Roger Moore era had ended – Connery was commissioned to star in Never Say Never Again (1983) in the second of the only two Bond movies ever produced outside of Eon Productions. It featured Kim Basinger as well as Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean) and a bunch of other strong but lesser known actors, and was picked up for distribution by Warner Bros, so it’s a very serious movie still.
