00 Week: Whatever happened, he would put up no resistance to his old skin being sloughed off him on the other side of the world

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

1967

Directed by Lewis Gilbert

Written by Roald Dahl and Harold Jack Bloom (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

In Ian Fleming's bibliography, Thunderball—long sought-after by Eon Productions and finally adapted in 1965—is actually followed immediately by The Spy Who Loved Me.  The experience of stealing half of Thunderball from Kevin McClory had evidently somewhat recharged the exhausted Fleming's writerly batteries (not, obviously, his biological ones), and Spy* reputedly experiments significantly with the Bond format.  After that (for it was not particularly well-received), Fleming simply picked up where Thunderball left off, taking a big stride down the new avenue that his previous novel had opened up for his hero, namely a loose serialization in pursuit of the master of SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  Naturally, then, Eon had planned their next adaptation to continue Bond's hunt for Blofeld in On Her Majesty's Secret Service—their assumption in this respect sufficiently strong that there's a clumsy excision from the end titles of Thunderball, where it originally would've told us that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN" (or "WILL BE BACK," as this small element of the formula wasn't nailed down for a while) in exactly that film.  But when they couldn't find appropriate snow-covered hills (let alone for the landslide to bring them down), due, apparently, to unusually warm weather in Switzerland, they had no choice but to call it off.

Instead, they skipped ahead to You Only Live Twice, the direct sequel to Secret Service, which sounds fucking insane if you know what happens at the end of Secret Service, as sixty years later you probably do.  You Only Live Twice wouldn't even be that book's name if describing the aftermath of Secret Service were not its plot, although it's given a more literal reflection in the form of a haiku Bond writes and the whole infamous and less-offensive-than-it-is-laughably-pointless racial subterfuge that Bond has imposed upon him by his Japanese ally.  But it is, after its fashion, about Bond's afterlife.  Although Fleming ultimately blinked, making promises of further Bond adventures in its closing paragraphs, right up until that last page, Bond, an amnesiac known to himself only as "Taro Todoroki" and somewhat sexually enslaved to a Ryukyuan islander—I don't believe Fleming contemplated the ethics of it, because he didn't even contemplate the bare plausibility of it—Live Twice feels exactly like Fleming had intended on ending things here, allowing his weary hero peace, yet, tellingly, only far away from civilization, British or otherwise, and as another man entirely.  Considering that Fleming barely finished The Man With the Golden Gun, allegedly less polished than previous Bond novels (holy shit if true), I kind of wish Live Twice was the end.  It would be a weird but satisfying end.

So yes, it sounds insane, but only if you haven't actually read Live Twice, which is only at length about Blofeld, and when it is about Blofeld it's a bizarre reconception of the character as an entirely different bowl of nuts, largely unrecognizable as the terrifying computer-brained world-beater of Thunderball (though given how undermined he was by Secret Service, it's still arguably a course correction), with Blofeld's new obsession turning out to be assisted suicide—I mean that unironically; he monologues to the effect that he's making the world a better place, and retcons his own motives for Thunderball to those of "inspiring nuclear disarmament"—except because it's still a Bond novel, Blofeld's public service is still wholly sinister, performed by way of enticing (and occasionally forcing) suicidal-yet-novelty-seeking citizens into ingesting horrible poisons or swimming in piranha-infested pools or jumping into volcanic geysers in a so-called "garden of death."  (It is, I imagine, also symbolic for Bond.)  But Bond himself isn't on a vengeance quest.  Bond bumbles into vengeance by grating coincidence, while actually being on a long and low-impact diplomatic mission, and what Live Twice is, mostly—no less a figure than Fleming's personal friend and the primary screenwriter of this very movie, Roald Dahl, called it precisely this, in precisely these terms—a travelogue dedicated to Japan, almost as much an expansion of a section of Fleming's non-fiction travelogue Thrilling Cities, and, I'd add, a travelogue written by a racist (which you would guess even if you didn't already know) who nonetheless genuinely likes these particular people, so it's breathlessly excited to stuff every exoticized fact or factoid about Japan that Fleming had learned or imagined into a book that eventually, not completely resentfully, still has to be a Bond thriller, doing so by way of what, even for Japan, represents a pretty exaggerated death-drive, though in the production's second-least-fun anecdote it happens that co-star Mie Hama did, indeed, threaten suicide if they sent her home due to her virtually nonexistent English.  The upshot, anyway, is that we have the first Bond film that has basically nothing to do with the book it takes its title from, besides character names and being set in Japan.  Yet, weirdly, because the film also hopscotches across Honshu and Kyushu and spends a reasonable amount of time dovetailing its much-more-immediate Bond thrills with "look at this neat Japanese thing!", it captures as much of the spirit of the book as well as any of the Bond adaptations to date, though, inevitably, it's going to remain mired in the franchise's "every Bond book is a romance, every Bond movie is a porno" relationship to sex.

So off Eon went to Japan for a whole lot of pre-production (interior principal photography of course happened at Pinewood), a banality I wouldn't even mention except for the extraordinary fact (this is the production's first-least-fun anecdote) that right at the end of their journey they blew off a doomed transpacific flight to catch a cool ninja exhibition instead, which definitely ought to serve as the plot of a Final Destination prequel one of these days.  (Imagine Ken Adam sets, but they kill people!)  It's a real film history what-if: had producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman and production designer Adam boarded that flight, alongside new Bond director Lewis Gilbert and new Bond photographer Freddie Young, I can't imagine that the Bond series does anything except stop.  Meanwhile, on the same scouting trip, Broccoli and Saltzman caught up with their disaffected editor, Peter Hunt, now an unemployed vacationer, for he had perceived that he was in line to direct Live Twice and quit when he was passed over for Gilbert.  This meeting wasn't as fortunate as avoiding a plane that disintegrated, but it was still quite lucky, since Gilbert's chosen editor Thelma Connell turned in a disastrous three-hour cut (one I'd still be enormously curious to watch, for perhaps it "captures the spirit" of a meandering-ass novel even more), and as Eon had managed to persuade Hunt to at least direct second-unit again, he was on hand to edit it after all—thereby sealing his paramount importance to the first era of Bond, with Eon's implied promises honored the next time around.  (Gilbert, for his part, is only a little bit less important to the second era of Bond; directors recede a bit when talking Bond, but he would necessarily earn the title "my favorite.")

There was one trouble: Sean Connery was tired, and feared his career was going to be defined by Bond—he avoided this fate, if arguably only for a while—and he gave his notice before ever stepping in front of a camera for his fifth turn in the role.  (I do think it's somewhat suggestive that I've seen no indication that he gave any shit whatsoever whether Eon got the books backwards.)  This could prime you for one disengaged Bond performance, but I don't think that's what we get here.  Rather, it's a perfectly charming and professional one—and not one obviously ramped down in terms of Connery getting tired of, specifically, getting abused by stuntmen and stunt coordinator Bob Simmons, while Connery reportedly made every effort to help his frequently-confused Japanese leading ladies (legitimately, and not as a euphemism, as Connery is not actually James Bond)—and, frankly, that performance is as much a function of a Bond movie that, even for a Bond movie, is totally frictionless in terms of character dynamics.

Possibly the most Connery gets to act, outside of default smirking indifference (frequently involving demonstrations of alcoholic conoisseurship) and the occasional flash of determined anger, is being amused that his fake wife, Kissy Suzuki (that's Hama), the fourth woman Bond gets with this movie, is insistent that they sleep on different futons on opposite sides of the room, because he's read the script and knows fully well what film franchise he's in.  Though I suppose I just described a special case of smirking indifference, so Connery's most diligent acting might actually come when his Japanese MI6 contact (Charles Gray—watch out for that one!) offers him a stirred-not-shaken martini off mistaken information (the story I've heard is that Gray himself got the line backwards) whereupon, through intense irritation, and perhaps improv, Connery forces Bond to be gracious anyway and declare his fucked-up cocktail "perfect."

So, as regards that frictionless story that Dahl wrote (American Harold Jack Bloom provided nebulously-described "additional material"), we begin, frictionlessly indeed, in the near-vacuum of orbital space, where we find, firstly, a pair of American astronauts, and, secondly, that there was just the most enormous gulf in big-budget special effects between 1967 and 1968 if 2001: A Space Oydssey is to be taken as representative of the latter.  Those astronauts are about to be swallowed, capsule and all, by some utterly mysterious spacecraft designed for the purpose, though in point of fact due to a spacewalk one actually gets sent spiraling out into oblivion, and the inescapable conclusion of the Americans, propounded by their representatives at a geometric abstraction of a summit meeting with the Soviet Union and Great Britain, is that the commies did it.  The British are not so sure, for they tracked the object's return path not to the USSR but Japan, and they have just the man to send to Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba), head of the Japanese secret service and whom Dahl does not go out of his way to describe as either an ex-member of the insidious Kempeitei or a thwarted kamikaze, though in its place Dahl has inherited from Fleming, and I'd say intensified, some interestingly subtle politics for his movie, equating Britain and Japan to some degree as restless provinces within a burgeoning American Empire and compelled by recent history into subservience, but who now get an opportunity to team up to fight the good fight, even saving America's skin along with theirs, without any American help whatsoever and right under their witless masters' noses.  Yeah, well.  How many people did you send to the moon?  (Just wait till Diamonds Are Forever.)  Anyway, for all its exoticization, I'd be genuinely interested to know how big Live Twice was in Japan.  Whatever else, Toho was more than happy to help Eon out with their acting personnel.

The man Britain sends is, of course, James Bond, presently in Hong Kong and about to get laid, but his lover (Tsai Chin) has betrayed him, snapping him right up into the wall with her murphy bed while a couple of gunmen blast him, and if you think he survived, when the bed comes back down, there Bond's body is, leaking red liquid so he must be dead, and if the story just kept going instead of this image catapulting us right into Maurice Binder's credits sequence, I think you'd probably manage to ask in real time whether any of this shit makes any sense beyond being an awesome way to open the movie, despite this being a series where the openings are supposed to be disconnected short film adventures.  Said credits sequence is not a favorite.  Backed up by Nancy Sinatra's resolutely-okay title ballad (John Barry's music is better-employed in his score for the rest of the film), it kicks off with the graphic superimposition of an umbrella through which an Asian woman's face dissolves-in, and that's largely it—the major notability of the sequence is that for the first time we get unambiguous nippleage, albeit so unambiguous I harbor a suspicion that they're actually rigid appliques to the silhouetted women's breasts—but you can't say it doesn't tell you what the movie's going to be about: Asian women and volcanoes.  Bond, in any event, has faked his death with the connivance of MI6—so, uh, did the killers know about this?—and there doesn't seem to be a particularly compelling reason for it, except to justify the film's title, and to set-up the cool, sneering villain line, "You only live twice, Mr. Bond."  Regardless, the corpse dumped into the ocean turns out to be perfectly fine, even chipper, upon its retrieval by a British sub, which also brings us the first in a long line of "M has set up shop in an incongruous and unlikely place" scenes, with M (Bernard Lee) and Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) awaiting the spy in a ridiculously large office, complete with shelves full of books, and a reception area, in the back of this submarine.  I'm of two minds about this tradition: it's always funny because it's always stupid.  (Later, Q (Desmond Llewelyn) arrives in shorts to deliver Bond a fearsome miniature autogyro; "Q in the field" scenes aren't my favorites either, as they tend to truncate or obviate Llewelyn's offended dignity, and often they don't even have the absurdity of "here's M in some Egyptian ruins now" to justify them.)

Presently, Bond gets shot out of a torpedo tube at Japan, where he wanders about Tokyo until he's picked up by Tanaka's lieutenant, Aki (Akiko Wakabaysahi, whose superior English led to solving Hama's linguistic problem by having the two actors switch roles, to the substantial benefit of both, given that Aki's role has at least twice as many lines, and while her character may be reasonably described as "your basic Bond Girl," she's vastly more dynamic than officially-anointed Bond Girl Kissy thanks in part to Wakabayashi's wonderful ebullience—hell, give or take Lotte Lenya's, it's the best female performance in the franchise to date—whilst Nikki van der Zyl dubbed Hama anyway).  Anyway, through a delightful bit of unclear allegiance and faux thrills, Bond falls into a hole, where he finds himself confronted with Tanaka in his super-spy hideout, but since they both have good senses of humor, they proceed to getting to the bottom of whatever it is happening betwixt Japan and space.  Their first lead is chemicals magnate Osato (Teru Shimuda)—Bond learns that if you mess with a mid-century zaibatsu they will try to murder you right in front of the building, and soon thereafter Osato's secretary Helga Brandt (Karin Dor) pretends to have been seduced long enough to trap Bond in a plummeting airplane—but what the clues that Bond and Aki have uncovered about rocket fuel and freighters making massive deliveries of nothing to Nowhere, Kyushu, turn out to reveal is that SPECTRE is back, and their evil genius leader Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) has plotted to trick the Americans and Soviets into war on behalf of Probably China by way of his own private space program, dedicated to the theft of spacecraft and kidnapping of spacefarers because a fucking ASAT (let alone a radar jammer!) wouldn't be nearly as much pulpy fun.  Blofeld has just brought home a Soviet capsule, and, the third time being the charm, he's about to do it again to the Americans.  To further Tanaka's counter-strategy, Bond marries Kissy, whom I'd swear is never even actually given that name here (at this point, incidentally, Aki's eaten it, "it" being the poison on a string meant for fitful sleeper Bond), and Bond surreptitiously moves into Kissy's house in Nowhere, Kyushu's rural fishing village (by "surreptitiously" I mean he's taken on a Japanese identity under astonishingly-lazy yellowface, which has no function in the novel and the only function it has in the movie is for the outright surrealism of a transracial transformation effected by Japanese women in shiny bikinis in a super-science operating theatre, which I concede is a function).  After wandering around the volcanic coastline, it's up to Bond to realize that that volcano is a volcano lair.  Now, with Tanaka's ninja army's assistance, they have to stop Blofeld before he can start World War III.

This is, contrary to my verbosity, very smooth, and I belabored it mostly because it's just such silly fun bullshit, easy to be glib about, without too much of it also being annoying bullshit.  (The most egregious is simply that Blofeld keeps Bond around for an idiotically long time.  It's just "genre," even if it's not remotely as plausible as it was with needy Goldfinger's desire for an audience, so the annoying part is that Blofeld actively returns the means by which Bond foils him, his gimmick cigarettes.)

Despite that aside, one of the fun things about Live Twice is a good villain, and apparently history has agreed with that assessment, Blofeld being a fixture of this series across multiple iterations.  Counting stand-ins, Blofeld's been played by as many actors as Bond has, and although it's not actually the highest bar (and it's possible I'll have to eat these words), Pleasence is the best of them, a small, squirrelly, even slightly sickly-looking presence that projects a malign and almost-inhuman intellect.  He's somehow quietly shrill, like he's constantly restraining himself from shrieking—a lot of this is bound up in Hunt's most effective cuts in the whole film, a number of inserts that viscerally impress upon you the mechanically cruel and horribly absent-minded way he seems to be attempting to stroke the head right off his pet cat (a very good and potentially partly-sedated cat, who unfortunately practically blows a take in the climax because it's finally started behaving like an even vaguely-conscious animal)—and Blofeld, however in command of all he surveys (which is an enormity we'll get to) simmers with tension, right up until he shouts in triumph, "Goodbye, Mr. Bond!", which becomes a scream melded with crying metal.  Or maybe it's just how dangerous the film's structural gambit makes him feel: teased for two non-consecutive Bonds and still teased for most of this one, we truly meet Blofeld only when Bond does, with Pleasence's eyes gazing right through the screen, partly a result of the overbearing scarring makeup that the actor hated yet found an unnervingly effective workaround for, in the way he has to turn his head and swivel his eyes back to look at anything.  Most everyone else makes some positive impression (Tamba, and his dubber Robert Rietty, meet Connery smirk for smirk—I'm not even especially curious what Eon's overly-obvious first choice, Toshiro Mifune, would've done), though while I couldn't bear to lose the gnarly ninja-ness of Aki's accidental assassination, I wish Kissy had been her twin or something so Wakabayashi could've stayed in the picture, and that Hama could've just gotten some counseling or whatever.

The evil plot is a really good one, prototyping the great one of The Spy Who Loved Me, and with its own gonzo filigree—stolen spacecraft!—without any of that plot getting in the way of the almost-anarchic collection-of-sequences structure that Thunderball had previously pioneered.  The single corner of the globe we get is no impediment: they make running around Japan feel sufficiently globetrotty that it's not only the first but the best of the Bonds that fully serve as fun ethnographic dioramas for the stupid child inside all of us, e.g., "come check out the secret ninja school I run out of the world-famous Himeji Castle apparently," and it achieves this partly thanks to this Bond movie having so many non-white characters in meaningful speaking roles.

Meanwhile, it isn't even momentarily logy about doling out the action and thrills like Thunderball, presenting some great novelties.  Bond's aerial battle with SPECTRE helicopters might be slightly risible, except the damn autogyro is real, so even if it's almost as goofy as the poster makes it look (the smirk's not actually that constant), your brain won't accept it as anything less than exciting, for it seems like it shouldn't be able to hold stunt-flyer and autogyro-engineer Ken Wallis up, let alone do crazy maneuvers, yet it does.  I'm also very fond of the big brawl atop Osato's dockside warehouses, its penultimate gesture involving a surprisingly long helicopter-shot take of Bond engaged in running battle with a dozen dudes, before topping itself off with some stuntman sleight-of-hand that's such obviously telegraphed sleight-of-hand that it has the tenor of a private joke between friends.  And because this film has such justified confidence in its capacity for spectacle, its very best mano-a-mano fight can be offered up early (though I do still love the mano-a-mano module in the climax over Blofeld's piranha pit** with a man whom I refer to mentally as "Red Grant Kai" (Ronald Rich)); it's another entry in the line of awesome Simmons-coordinated fistfights, held in the Osato offices and involving an improvised, brutal, yet delightfully-cartoonish struggle—Bond bludgeons his adversary (Peter Fanene Maivia) with a couch—and playing with Adam's terrific design of the Osato compound, this lovely yet perverse combination of straight-outta-a-cartoon modernist lines and traditionalist Japanese elements.  (One always enjoys Bond bursting through a paper wall; later, I enjoyed Osato's curiously-thick metal desk, and its built-in x-ray receiver, for literally screening his visitors .)

And that brings us to Live Twice's most important achievement, which isn't Blofeld, or fistfights, or intercultural dialogue, but the culmination of Adam's extraordinary production design throughout in the single most iconic set of the entire series, and a shortlister for the most iconic set in any movie ever made, the reason you know exactly what I mean when I say the words, "volcano lair."  As an idea but vaguely suggested by the novel, it is in a sense the reason this movie exists at all—Adam conceived a "volcano lair" whereupon Eon told Dahl to write a screenplay about a volcano lair, so Adam should by rights receive a Goddamn "story by" credit—and it is everything a volcano lair could be and should be.  (Does it erupt at the end?  Buster, are you kidding me?)  It's one of those sets you could reasonably measure in acres—cubic acres, if you wished.  It seems impossible until they force you to accept its existence, with Gilbert and Hunt happily treating it almost like an effects shot model, yet within it the tiny colorful little people move, and as we begin investigating it, and moving about its expanse, we are compelled to realize that those terrifyingly unsafe hypermodernist stairs are real, and that monorail is actually functional, and at points even the spacecraft is a real giant prop, and if the control room isn't really attached, the illusion is complete.  Jesus, they fly a helicopter inside it.  It provides the basis for not the best (Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker have at least equal claims), but perhaps the most perfect "Bond's army storms the base" scene in the series—the dozens of ninja-commandos rappelling down into the maw of the volcano is an unforgettable image—with Hunt cross-cutting between the multiple threads of action, and the Americans ready to declare global thermonuclear war, all so expertly you can forget how radically sophisticated it is for this series, or 1967.  The movie has to punch holes in Blofeld's brain just to get the movie to end properly, and that's a weakness, but one that arises from its strengths: this set is world-beating supervillainy, rendered into steel and plaster, and only a finale that's the very definition of ridiculous super-spy action could possibly overcome it.

Score: 8/10

*Much like calling it "MI6" instead of the SIS, I decided against using initialisms for the titles in this series, and almost immediately knew I'd made a mistake.  Nevertheless, we've committed.

**Though I regret the piranha pit's not gorier.