You Only Live Twice (1967)

PG, but 1967 James Bond PG.  This is a movie with...stuff.  Most James Bond movies are about objectifying women, encouraging promiscuity, murdering people in droves, and drinking to excess.  All that is still included in this movie.  But also, some weird choices for yellowface.  While the purpose of yellowface is either to mock a culture or to hire a white actor to play an Asian person, You Only Live Twice has a diagetic reason for Bond's yellowface.  He's undercover, so he becomes an Asian man.  Nothing about it is handled with self-awareness and the results ultimately just look like Sean Connery with a different haircut.  Still...PG.

DIRECTOR: Lewis Gilbert

I think I did it, guys.  I think I finally made it through my 50th Anniversary James Bond Blu-ray box set...eleven years later.  I mean, I watched them all a few movies ago.  I can't say that I didn't get my money out of this set.  But I hadn't been writing the blog when I bought this box, so I had to go back and add all of the Sean Connery's before I could say that I watched them all.  In a perfect world, when I post this blog, I will soon post something on the Collections page.  It's a personal victory.  I think I probably care about it more than anyone else will.

I read an article by Charlie Higson, the guy who writes some of the James bond and Young James Bond stuff today.  I'm talking about the novels.  For what I understand, he has nothing to do with the movies.  It was a defense of people saying that Bond has gone woke.  I loved what Higson said, saying, basically, that James Bond isn't one thing.  He's a character that adapts to the needs of the mission, regardless of what it calls for.  The reason that he was a misogynist in the past was that it was what the world needed.  While I would be hard-pressed to find anything "woke" (a word I absolutely despise because of the way it has been co-opted from the right), I would love to live in a world where Higson was right.  I mainly point at this era of James Bond.  Sean Connery, as much as I love the dude, was infamously uncomfortably traditionalist.  There's an interview you can probably watch on YouTube where he advocates for giving women hard smacks to get them in line.  You Only Live Twice might be Connery at his most Connery.  The worst part is, I really like this movie.

People really rally that Sean Connery is their James Bond.  I have no real fight with that. I'm in the camp, "Like what you like".  In some ways, I have a fondness for every Bond era.  I, at one point, lauded my love for George Lazenby because I --without reservation --adored On Her Majesty's Secret Service.   But I honestly view Connery hardliners as people who simply like tradition.  It's not hard to stand by "Connery was the best Bond" because he's the guy who established the role.  It's just that...this movie feels like Connery is bleeding through more than Bond is.  (Again, I'm going to talk about how much I like this movie.)  He looks slightly annoyed for a lot of this film.  I remember that there were all kinds of issues by the time this movie came around.  Connery hated being typecast as James Bond and he was already starting to distance himself from the franchise.  (I watch a lot of special features and documentaries when it comes to James Bond movies.  I'm sorry for this glut of extra information.)  There are times where I'm watching this movie and I just think that Connery himself must feel silly at times.  He, honestly, flies an adorable attack helicopter at one point and never cracks a smile.  Maybe that's a character choices. But I get the vibe that it is a character choice that is being motivated by what the actor might be feeling.

This is a movie that was written by Roald Dahl.  I almost want that to be a paragraph all by itself.  That one sentence.  "A movie written by Roald Dahl."  The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory guy.  The James and the Giant Peach guy.  It blows my mind every time I see it.  Now, does it make a weird sense that Dahl had a broad view on Japan, often colored by being Welsh?  I don't know.  Maybe.  But it's hilarious what he sees as what it must mean to be Japanese with this movie.  Mind you, he's going loosely from Ian Fleming's source material, an equally-if-not-more silly understanding of Eastern culture.  Dahl's involvement creates problems for this movie itself, but I also think that he has a sense of wonder about the East.  This is a movie that doesn't despise Japan.  It's someone who is in awe of Japan and wants to create the great adventure there.  (Again, there's a good chance that Roald Dahl just got a dumptruck full of money at his front door and wrote a movie loosely based on a novel that did pretty well.) 

The thing that the Connery movies do really well is almost embrace their setting harder than the following movies.  Dr. No was an embrace of the Carribean.  From Russia with Love, ironically, was about a love for Turkey.  Goldfinger was as rootin' tootin' American as it comes.  Thunderball might have been the one that slipped on that front more than other films, almost revisiting the vibes of the first movie with Nassau.  While this is a movie that finally pays off a confrontation wth Blofeld after all the previous movies teased him, ultimately Roald Dahl is just fulfilling a love-letter to Japan.  Sure, it's a Japan that doesn't really exist.  While I get that this version of Japan is based on something, You Only Live Twice is almost an idealized travel video.  Now, when I say "idealized", I'm aware that this movie almost prides itself on the notion that the Japanese are misogynists.  After all, "In Japan, men come first.  Women come second."

You Only Live Twice also really set the stage for future Bond movies to steal a format.  Now, I do want to back up a little bit by saying that the third act of Goldfinger, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice are all the same final act.  The Roger Moore movies would also subscribe to this as well as George Lazenby's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But I'm talking more about the threat that presents itself in this movie.  It's amazing how much of the Space Race plays into the plots of some of these OG Bond movies.  The fact that there's a James Bond space theme that reoccurs in multiple Bond movies kind of states that it is almost a conscious choice.  But a lot of that is a reflection of the era.  It's odd that we're almost bored by the notion of space and the concept that the next battlefield might be in the stars.  You Only Live Twice is a fun look back at what we considered to be real threats.  It's bizarre too.  This is the first time that I really watched You Only Live Twice with a sense of criticism about the plot.  It's so bizarre to think that the United States and Russia were so close to the brink of war that any inconvenience to either superpower was an act of war. But if you think about it, if either country really wanted to declare war on the other, would they go through the most convoluted way of creating a space vehicle that captured other space vehicles?  Also, big red flag (no pun intended), but no one on either side of the Iron Curtain picked up on the fact that they weren't stealing the other side's rockets?  It kind of screams "third party", right?

My final thought (I think!) about You Only Live Twice is the absurd framing device of the movie.  The movie starts off with James Bond being murdered by Chinese agents and then being buried at sea.  That's a really fun opening and it is one of the more memorable things in the early Bond pre-credit sequences.  But it plays almost no part in the film itself.  The idea that Bond fakes his own death to take the heat off of him fools only Sato, who isn't exactly that important of a character.  It's almost like they fit the event to match the title of the novel, realizing that the title had no value based on the events of this story.  (Note: Ian Fleming's James Bond novels often had little to nothing to do with the screen adaptations.  WIth the case of You Only Live Twice, some of the characters appear in both and Japan plays heavily into both versions.) It's silly, but that's okay.

Anyway, this might have been the most fun Connery to watch.  It's been a while since I wrote up a Bond blog, and it's nice to know that I ended on a good note, despite being an absolute goofball-fest while watching it.