ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

Highly imaginative entry in the James Bond series, with all of the traditional Bond elements working at full force: action, humor, exotic locales, evil villains, and Bond's wild knack for reaching into his pocket and pulling out the perfect gadget for the occasion.

Much of the credit goes to the fine script by Raold Dahl.

This time Tokyo is Bonds' port of call, where he teams up with a Japanese super spy who arranges for James to be married to a Japanese girl and trained as a Ninja all part of their plan to smoke out arch-villain Blofeld (whose face we finally get to see after three films -- ah-ha, it's Donald Pleasence!).

Blofeld hi-jacks several Russian and American space capsules right out of orbit; he wants the Russians to think the Americans did it and the Americans to think vice versa. Result: World War III.

The basic idea was reused in "The Spy Who Loved Me", along with the big climactic battle in the villains armored stronghold. Blofeld's base is hidden beneath a dormant volcano with a fake, roll-away lake at the bottom (great sets by Ken Adams). In addition to the climactic battle, there's a terrific aerial dogfight between several well-armed helicopters and a miniature 'copter piloted by guess-who.

Nancy Sinatra sings the title music, one of the better Bond themes. Watch for Charles Gray in a brief role as a British secret agent in Tokyo. Gray was later cast as Blofeld in "Diamonds are Forever". Directed by Lewis Gilbert.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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The trailers for the Sean Connery movies tend to run hot-and-cold, and this one is the best of the bunch.

It promotes the movie beautifully and makes it look like a worth successor to Goldfinger, whereas I've always been very disappointed in Thunderball, the actual next film in the series.

Watch the trailer and be prepared to get in the mood for this movie. Or perhaps you'd enjoy the "making of" special that aired when it came out.
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________________ You Only Live Twice (1967)


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___ Whicker's World - You Only Live Twice Special


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[The Spike]

Bond-san, Blofeld, Asian Delights and Production Value Supreme.

You Only Live Twice is directed by Lewis Gilbert and written by Roald Dahl. It stars Sean Connery, Tetsuro Tamba, Teru Shimada, Akiko Wakabayashi, Mie Hama, Karin Dor and Donald Pleasence. Music is scored by John Barry and cinematography by Freddie Young.

Bond 5 and Connery once again tackles the role of 007. With American and Soviet space craft mysteriously vanishing from space, both nations are laying the blame at the other's door. Sensing a nuclear war could break out, M assigns Bond to Japan to investigate if there might be a third party stirring the hornets nest. Teaming up with the Japanese secret service, Bond uncovers evidence that SPECTRE is behind the plot to pitch the East and the West against each other.

This organisation does not tolerate failure.

Thunderball had broke box office records for Bond, gadgetry, outlandish stunts and a quip on the tongue had proved most profitable. It was planned originally that On Her Majesty's Secret Service would be number 5 in the series, but a change of tack to go for You Only Live Twice as the story gave producers Broccoli & Saltzman the scope for a giganticus enormous production. However, it may be set in Japan and feature a Bond/Blofeld conflict, but Roald Dahl's script bares little resemblance to Ian Fleming's source novel. Although a massive financial success with a Worldwide gross of over $111 million, Bond 5 took $30 million less than Thunderball. Strange since this is a better film. Can we attribute the drop to it being a space age saga? Maybe, the rebirth of sci-fi was a few years away, and of course Bond had lost some fans who had grown tired, like Connery, of 007 relying on gadgets instead of brains and brawn to complete his missions. There was also the rival Casino Royale production, as bad as it was, to contend with, while the spy boom created by Bond had been overkilled elsewhere and was on the wane.

Extortion is my business. Go away and think it over, gentlemen. I'm busy.

True enough that You Only Live Twice has flaws, though they are far from being film killers if you like the gadgets and hi-techery side of the franchise? Connery announced once production was over that he was leaving the role of Bond behind. He had been close to breaking point after Thunderball, but finally the media circus, typecasting, the fanaticism and the character merely being a cypher for outrageous sequences, led Connery to finally call it a day. His displeasure shows in performance, oh it's professional, very much so, but the swagger and machismo from the earlier films has gone. Although Dahl's script tones down the "cheese" dialogue and unfolds as a plot of considerable World peril worth, characterisations are thinly drawn, making this reliant on production value and action sequences. Thankfully both are top dollar. And the ace up its sleeve is the long awaited face to face meeting of Bond and Blofeld.

The firing power inside my crater is enough to annihilate a small army. You can watch it all on TV. It's the last program you're likely to see.

Ken Adam's set design is fit to grace any epic in film history, as is Freddie Young's photography around the Japanese locales, Barry lays a beautiful Bond/Oriental score all over proceedings and Nancy Sinatra's title song is appealingly catchy. The action is excellently constructed by Gilbert (helming the first of three Bond movies on his CV), with the final battle at Blofeld's volcano crater base full of explosions, flying stunt men, expert choreography and meaty fights. Along the way we have been treated to Ninjas, Piranhas, poison, aeroplane peril and the awesome Little Nellie versus the big boy copter smack down! Then there's that Bond/Blofeld confrontation. Well worth the wait, with Pleasence visually scary with bald head (setting the marker for bald villainy to follow in TV and cinema it seems) and scar across his eye. Pleasence is also very low key with his menace, which is perfect, we don't want pantomime and the scenes with Bond work wonderfully well.

It made less than the film before it and it has fierce critics in Bond and Fleming circles. But it's a Bond film that pays rich rewards on revisits, where the artistry on show really shines through in this HD/Upscale age. 8/10
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The quality of mercy is not strnen.

[Krel]

This movie has one of my favorite movie themes by Nancy Sinatra.

When writing the script, Rolad Dahl was told that he could have Bond kill as many people as he wanted, as long as Bond didn't do it in a cruel way (This came from Bond coldly gunning down Dent in "Doctor No"). This led to Bond gunning people down during the rooftop chase.

Part of the reason Connery left the series, is that he was burned out. The first four Bond movies came out a year apart. In this time Connery was also doing other productions. This was a grueling pace. If you watch the movies, you can see him getting more out of shape with each film, and his hair thin.

The fantastic volcano rocket base set cost more than the total cost of "Doctor No".

Donald Pleasence was given a large scar, because they were afraid that he wasn't physically intimidating. They didn't take his talent into account.

The second movie to feature the Gyrojet rocket guns. The Matt Helm movie, "Murderer's Row" was the first.

David.

[Gord Green]

This was easily one of my favorite "BONDS", right after GOLDFINGER, but then it was based on my favorite Ian Fleming novel!

The immersion of Bond into Japaneese culture was well expressed in the movie, but GREAT in the book.

If you haven't read any of the original novels....My God man! Where have you been? I completely agree with Bud's contention that Bond's popularity was tied into the fact that the books were John F Kennedys' favorites and they were a very tangible reflection of "Camelot".

My two favorite novels are "You Only Live Twice" and "Moonraker" (A great book...Nothing like the movie, a great 60's adventure!)

Many of the books were serialized in PLAYBOY....enough to make me able to say I only read it for the articles!

Read them!
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There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[Bud Brewster]

[scotpens]

[Bud Brewster]

[Pow]

IMDB DYK?:

While scouting locations in Japan, the chief production team narrowly escaped death.

On March 5, 1966, producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, director Lewis Gilbert, cinematographer Freddie Young, and production designer Ken Adam were all booked to leave Japan on BOAC flight 911. That flight was departing Tokyo for Hong Kong and London.

Just two hours before departure, the team was invited to a ninja demonstration that they decided to attend, missing their flight.

Flight 911 departed on time. Twenty-five minutes into the flight the plane encountered severe turbulence and disintegrated over Mt. Fuji. Everyone on board was killed.

The S.P.E.C.T.R.E. hidden base volcano set cost almost as much to construct as the entire budget for Dr. No (1962).

Ken Adam's volcano set at England's Pinewood Studios had a movable helicopter platform, a working monorail system, a launch pad, and a full scale rocket mock-up that could simulate lift-off.

The volcano base set required 700 metric tons of structural steel, 200 miles of tubular steel, 200 metric tons of plaster, 8,000 railway ties for the monorail, and 250,000 yards of canvas in order to protect the entire set from poor weather conditions.

The volcano was the largest set in Europe at that time. It was 148 feet tall and cost just over $1,000,000, and required 250 workmen.

379 concept drawings were made for the volcano set.

Noted author, Roald Dahl, was given free rein on the script except for the character of James Bond, and the "girl formula" for the film.

Dahl hated the Ian Fleming novel and felt it was Fleming's worst work. Dahl compared the novel to a travelogue.

For the plot for the movie, Dahl was inspired by two current events. The missing nuclear-armed U.S.A.F. bomber that was missing over Spain. The recent U.S. and Soviet spacewalks of Gemini 4 and Voskhod 2.

Dahl was very pleased with the filmed adaptation of his screenplay.

The title of the movie comes from a poem in the novel: "You only live twice. Once when you are born. And once when you look death in the face."

The movie was the second highest grossing film in 1967 after The Dirty Dozen.

Unlike most James Bond films that are set in various countries, almost this entire film is set in one country.

It was intended that S.P.E.C.T.R.E. would operate out of an ancient castle fort set by the ocean. The production team learned that the Japanese do not historically build castles by the sea, so the base was changed to being inside an extinct volcano.

Sidebar: Whew! We dodged a bullet there. How much cooler
and imposing it was to have S.P.E.C.T.R.E. based inside a volcano instead of an old castle.

Alexander Knox plays the U.S. Secretary of Defense/Pentagon Chief in the movie. In one scene with him in his office you can see on the wall behind him a portrait of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

Somebody was having a little fun here because Knox played the POTUS in the bio-picture Wilson back in 1944.

[Captain Starlight]

I never thought about this before, but the SPECTRE base was allegedly built inside a real extinct volcano — not beneath a fake exterior volcano created by SPECTRE — for three reasons.

1. The volcano would obviously be a well-known, centuries-old landmark. They couldn't just "make a new volcano" and hope nobody noticed.

2. A big construction project to create a fake volcano couldn't be done in secret, and even if it was possible to do so, the sudden appearance of an "extinct volcano" would be a global news event.

3. The actual volcano which SPECTRE used needed to be extinct for a very long time to insure that all the deep excavation of the interior they had to do didn't break into a giant lava pocket.

Even so, how did SPECTRE hide the years of construction they did inside the volcano while it was being built?

[scotpens]

[Bud Brewster]

Good points one and all, gentlemen!

When you start considering all the practical aspects of such a project, you realize that it would create a boatload of problems. For example, when the project is finally finished and "the hundreds of construction and engineering personnel" left, the world would soon know about the "secret base", because those guys would blab about it!

Obviously the occupants of the base would need periodic shipments of supplies — everything from food to toilet paper. How was all that stuff brought in? Admittedly the tunnel that led to the ocean was probably used for that.

To get a closer look at the amazing complexity of the set, watch the video below.

_Climax scene from the Bond movie You Only Live Twice


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Pow]