You Only Live Twice (1967)

User Rating:

7.0/10   

Director:

Lewis Gilbert

Writers:

Roald Dahl (screenplay)
Harold Jack Bloom (additional story material)

Release Date:

13 June 1967 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline:

Welcome to Japan, Mr. Bond

Plot:

Agent 007 and the Japanese secret service ninja force must find and stop the true culprit of a series of spacejackings before nuclear war is provoked.

Plot Keywords:

Helicopter Shot Down | Reverse Footage | Asian | Bond Girl | Japanese Language Spoken

Awards:

Nominated for BAFTA Film Award. Another 1 win & 1 nomination

Cast

Sean Connery	...	James Bond
Akiko Wakabayashi	...	Aki
Mie Hama	...	Kissy Suzuki
Tetsuro Tamba	...	Tiger Tanaka
Teru Shimada	...	Mr. Osato
Karin Dor	...	Helga Brandt
Donald Pleasence	...	Ernst Stavro Blofeld
Bernard Lee	...	M
Lois Maxwell	...	Miss Moneypenny
Desmond Llewelyn	...	Q
Charles Gray	...	Dikko Henderson
Tsai Chin	...	Ling, Chinese Girl in Hong Kong
Peter Fanene Maivia	...	Car Driver
Burt Kwouk	...	SPECTRE #3
Michael Chow	...	SPECTRE #4

Also Known As:

Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice (UK) (copyright title) (USA) (complete title)

Runtime:

117 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English | Japanese | Russian

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.55 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

Canada:PG (Manitoba/Ontario) | Canada:13+ (Quebec) | Canada:A (Nova Scotia) | Ireland:PG | Iceland:12 | West Germany:12 (re-rating) | West Germany:16 | South Korea:15 | Brazil:14 | Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | Netherlands:12 | Norway:16 (original rating) | Sweden:15 | UK:A (original rating) | UK:PG (video rating) | USA:Approved (original rating) | USA:GP (re-rating) (1970) | USA:PG (re-rating) (1994)

Filming Locations:

Akime Village Environs, Akime, Kagoshima, Japan

Company:

Danjaq

Trivia:

Filming was a chaotic affair largely due to the production being continually mobbed by eager Japanese onlookers. The attention was sufficient for Sean Connery to announce halfway through that he would not be returning as James Bond.

Goofs:

Continuity: When Blofeld's control room proves to be less than "impregnable", he flees with some of his henchmen and Bond in tow. Blofeld takes a Webley from Mr. Osato and shoots him with it. He then cocks it and motions at Bond with the pistol. The gun is blasted from his hand and goes off, yet when it is shown on the ground in close-up it is cocked again. The hammer would have to have been re-cocked by hand. Bond then grabs the weapon as Blofeld flees. He joins the ninja assault wielding the top-break British revolver but as he fights, it changes back and forth several times into a Smith and Wesson revolver with a swing out cylinder.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Astronaut - 1st American Spacecraft: Calling CapCom. CapCom, this is Jupiter 16. Do you give a go for fourth orbit.
Hawaii CapCom: CapCom to Jupiter 16. Can you confirm O2 pressure is within limit.
Astronaut - 1st American Spacecraft: Roger. Everything looks good in the environmental control system.
Hawaii CapCom: Okay. Everything looks good from here. You have a go for fourth orbit.

Movie Connections:

Spoofed in Itse valtiaat - Agenttimusikaali (2005) (TV)

Soundtrack:

You Only Live Twice

Roald Dahl's screenplay nearly sinks this one

In this, Sean Connery's fifth (and at the time final) Bond movie has Bond going to Japan to stop S.P.E.C.T.R.E.'s plot to start WWIII. But by this time Connery was clearly just tired of the character and uninterested in the juvenile proceedings in this screen story, which is riddled with continuity and simple logic errors, and marked the beginning of considerable deviation from the plots of the books, NOT a good thing. Although there was a threat of WWIII, there was no real sense of danger or excitement in the story. The movie overall seems rather juvenile and kiddiefied, with FAR too much in the way of gimmicks, uneven pacing, and plot holes aplenty: one which immediately comes to mind is, how the hell could Blofeld have built his lair inside of a hollowed out, inactive volcano without anybody noticing? And, let's say that SPECTRE's plot had worked and WWIII had started, what would SPECTRE have to gain from that, besides successfully starting WWIII? That's never really explained.

Add onto that the lame and obvious jokes (the "Just a drop in the ocean" line makes me cringe) and the mock Japanese wedding- it's cover for Bond? He's a goddamn spy! *That* is his cover! He doesn't need an imitation wedding to use as a cover story, and after all was said and done, Sean Connery ended up looking like a sweaty, hunched over Moe Howard in his disguise. After the car chase, foot chase down the subway, the fall through the trap door, we find out that the person responsible for said chases is Tiger Tanaka, Bond's intended contact? Why didn't Tiger just send a car to pick up Bond and drive him there and then let him in the front door? Ken Adam's set design, often times applauded, here just looks like a prefab warehouse. The fight in the office complex with that Sumo guy is good until Bond picks up a couch and starts jabbing the guy with it. Bond could have had the upper hand and gotten a punch in quicker, or possibly drawn his gun if it weren't for the witless attempt ("Good evening") at a one liner.

I honestly can't understand why the producers even attempted to film YOLT, as the book was unfilmable: hardly anything happens in the book, Bond spends most of his time learning Haiku and the breathtaking art that is 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'. Also, when the producers decided to film that non book considerably out of order with the rest of the series, that only makes matters worse. I enjoyed every book in the series (some more than others) but YOLT is easily my least favourite, and more than likely it's the only one that I won't go back and read again.

YOLT manages to coast along as far as it does on two points: 1. Sean Connery, despite the fact that he was very clearly bored with the inane screenplay, still does more for the movie than the movie does for him. 2. Great on location photography in Japan (but we can watch the Travel Channel, or National Geographic for that) Other than that, none of the few positives of this film can be attributed to Dahl's screenplay.

** out of ****