Who is your favourite James Bond? My formative years coincided with the Roger Moore era so I tend to regard him as my favourite Bond, with Live And Let Die my favourite Bond movie. However, the definitive Bond, the one with the correct measure of roguish charm and cool sophistication, rugged masculinity and sex appeal, but also gifted by the stylistic elements of the Sixties (was there a cooler car than the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 driven by Bond in Goldfinger?), has to be the recently-deceased Sean Connery.
Connery made seven Bond movies beginning with 1962’s Dr No but today I’m looking at the fifth in the series, 1967’s You Only Live Twice, which particularly thrilled me as a kid (despite connoisseurs generally comparing it less favourably to its predecessors). With screenplay by one Roald Dahl, it is the first James Bond film to discard most of Ian Fleming’s plot, using only a few characters and locations from the book as the background for an entirely new story. In the film, Bond is dispatched to Japan after American and Soviet crewed spacecraft disappear mysteriously in orbit, each nation blaming the other. The Secret Service suspects a third party, however, and Bond travels secretly to a remote Japanese island to find the perpetrators. He comes face-to-face with Blofeld (Donald Pleasence), the head of SPECTRE, which is working for the government of an unnamed Asian power to provoke war between the superpowers.
Director Lewis Gilbert, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, production designer Ken Adam, and director of photography Freddie Young spent three weeks in Japan searching for locations, with SPECTRE’s extinct volcano headquarters being a particularly good find. The group was due to return to the UK on a BOAC Boeing 707 flight on 5th March 1966, but cancelled at the last minute after being told they had a chance to watch a ninja demonstration. That flight crashed 25 minutes after take-off, killing all on board: such a lucky decision for the party and their families, and also for the entire future Bond franchise.
John Barry produced the score, and (as is typical with John Barry) the result was sensational: the incidental theme music, and Nancy Sinatra’s stunning main theme song, knit the elements together so well. Those elements include all the usual tropes: car chases, fights, assassination attempts, love action and glamorous Bond girls (notably the beautiful Kissy Suzuki, played by Mie Hama), gadgets and gismos (including bullet-firing cigarettes and a heavily-armed gyrocopter), and witty one-liners. However, the movie is also having an obvious love affair with Japan, and so as well as a whole lot of ninja action, we get some sumptuous Japanese landscapes and ceremonies.
The whole thing is of course majestically absurd but stonkingly good fun. Here is a nice montage of clips from the movie alongside Nancy Sinatra’s winning theme song.
