You only live twice
Once when born and once when you
Stare death in the face
Poor mannys, only living twice. Of course we cats live nine times, because cats are best. The "You" in the title refers to James Bond, as we shall see.
1967 saw the peak of Bondmania. As well as being the year You Only Live Twice was released, it was also the year when the first film of Casino Royale came out, and when The Prisoner began its deconstruction of the spy genre on television. About the only manny in the world who wasn't excited about James Bond at that time was Sean Connery, which is unfortunate since he was James Bond. With that in mind, let's look at the fifth properly Expensive Luxury James Bond film, You Only Live Twice.
It starts in space where two spacemannys are doing space stuff, which must have been topical in the late 1960s back before the moon landings. A young Ed Straker telephones them to warn them about "an unidentified object closing on you fast." Now there's a crossover I wasn't expecting! A bigger spaceship has snuck up on them and it noms their little spaceship.
It then cuts to a meeting between mannys from the USA and USSR, where a future Number Two of the Village (David Bauer) is pretending to be an American diplomat, and accuses the Russian diplomats of being responsible for the spacenoming. A British diplomat (Robin Bailey) who will one day go on to be Judge Graves in Rumpole of the Bailey tries to mediate, and says they think the spaceship landed somewhere near Japan.
James Bond starts as this film means to go on, with a bit of racism.
"Why do Chineshe girlsh tashte different from all other girlsh?"
The girl responds by pressing a button that traps Bond in the wall and then letting in two other mannys who empty their machine guns in to the wall where Bond is - a bit of an overreaction, maybe? Policemannys soon arrive and they think that Bond is ded.
This leads into the title sequence, where the song gives away that, even if Bond is ded, he has a second life he can go on to - and without even having to change actors yet.
The style of the title sequence is a bit Tales of the Unexpected, I wonder why that is?
Oh.
Bond's body gets thrown off a ship into the sea, where it gets collected by some underwater mannys (didn't we get enough of them in Thunderball, mew?) and taken to a submarine. Inside it turns out that Bond is alive after all, and he goes to get his mission from M. Miss Moneypenny tells Bond the password so that he will know when he meets any of the Japanese secret agents is
"I love you."
Lol.
Bond then goes to Tokyo (thanks for not being in Japanese, convenient establishing sign) where he visits a sumo wrestling match. There he meets Aki instead of Henderson, the manny he thought he was going to be contacting. Despite saying "I love you" to Aki (which, Bond being Bond, he would probably have done anyway) he doesn't trust her immediately when she takes him to see Henderson.
Henderson is played by Charles Gray, which is confusing to us cats because Gray would later play Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever - no wonder Bond is so suspicious of him! I suppose we can tell he isn't Blofeld in this film because he doesn't have Number One with him. Henderson tells Bond to contact Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service, and says
"You can see Tiger tonight."
A tiger? This film is getting better already! Henderson then spoils it by making a classic goof with Bond's drink:
"Oh, that's stirred not shaken. That was right, wasn't it?""Perfect. Cheersh."
says Bond, who is ether being polite or else it's Sean Connery not giving a shit. Henderson is about to give Bond a clue when he gets stabbed through the wall, which gives Bond a different sort of clue - of the 'if they attack us it must be a clue' variety.
Bond chases the killer and kills him, then steals his disguise so that he can fool the manny's getaway driver into mistaiking Bond for his friend. The driver takes Bond to "Osato Chemical Engineering Co. Ltd." (thanks again for not being in Japanese, another convenient establishing sign) and they go right inside before Bond finally has a fight with him.
After the fight Bond notices a safe, so naturally he breaks into it and steals some papers. He sets off an alarm and gets chased away by some guards until he meets Aki in her car. He gets in, but he still doesn't trust her so she runs away and it is Bond's turn to do the chasing.
He chases her until a trapdoor opens under him and he falls down a slide and into a chair. We do like the way Bond falls into the chair in such a way that he looks cool, like he meant to do it on purpose - very catlike behaviour.
The manny he meets there is Tiger Tanaka, who is sadly not an actual tiger but who is also quite cool... for a manny.
"If you're Tanaka, how do you feel about me?""I love you."
Purr.
After a manly handshake, Bond and Tiger are soon best friends. Bond shares the papers he took from the safe with Tiger so that they can investigate the clues together. The best clue is a photo of a ship called "Ning-Po" which Tiger sets his mannys to trace. Then Bond and Tiger decide to have a bath together. It is here that Tiger delivers the much-parodied (by Austin Powers, among others) line:
"In Japan men always come first, women come second."
Naughty Tiger. Bond's lines aren't exactly any better:
"Japaneshe proverb shay: Bird never make nesht in bare tree."
Naughty Bond. Aki comes in and joins in the entendres with:
"I think I will enjoy very much serving under you."
Naughty Aki.
The next day Bond returns to Osato Chemical Engineering Co. Ltd. to meet Mr Osato. Remembering that "James Bond" is supposed to be ded, he even uses a fake name, Mr Fisher (which sounds like the sort of false name a cat would use, lol). Despite possessing this unbreakable alias, the mannys there are still suspicious of him.
Bond meets Osato and Miss Brandt and they have a friendly meeting where the conflict between Bond and these two obvious baddys is entirely in the subtext of their dialogue. Only when Bond leaves does Osato turn to Miss Brandt to say
"Kill him."
This is attempted in a ludicrously unsubtle way - as soon as Bond has left the building a manny with a gun drives up behind Bond and shoots at him. He is saved by Aki driving up and they get away in her car, leading into a chase scene.
A helicopter joins the chase, but for once it is on Bond's side - it picks up the pursuing car with a great big komedy magnet and drops it into the sea.
Tiger has located the Ning-Po, so Bond and Aki go there for the next part of the plot. They see the ship and then realise all the mannys there are baddys. Bond sends Aki away while he stays to have a fight with as many of them as possible.
What could have been an exciting scene done in long takes of action is spoiled somewhat by the director's decision to accompany the long takes with long shots - presumably needed to hide the stuntmanny taking over from Connery in this bit. When there are eventually too many baddys from him to fight with Bond tries to run away, but he gets knocked out by the traditional blow to the back of his hed. Osato comes in and says
"Take him to Number 11."
Number 11 is Miss Brandt, who has Bond tied to a chair.
"Whatsh a nice girl like you doing in a place like thish?"
he asks her, probably because he just can't help himself. This does get her to kiff him, though, so maybe it's a cliché for good reason? Later they are both in a plane trying to escape from Japan when it turns out that she was just pretending to go along with him.
Miss Brandt parachutes out of the plane, leaving it to crash with Bond still on board. Obviously he manages to get away safely before it blows up. Meeting up with Tiger and Aki, they tell Bond that the Ning-Po delivered its cargo to an island, so that's the next place Bond wants to investigate.
This leads into a great scene with Q, who is annoyed at having to come to Japan and put up with Bond's "juvenile quips." Tiger wants to know what this "Little Nellie" is that Q has brought with him, and when Q's mannys have finished building it he exclaims:
"A toy helicopter?""No it's certainly not a toy!"
Q gets defensive - it's not only Bond he's annoyed with.
Q tells Bond about all the weapons mounted on Little Nellie, so that we know he will definitely have to use them in upcoming scenes. Little Nellie takes off to the sound of the really exciting incidental music, and then Bond uses it to troll Q and Tiger by flying over their heads, lol.
Bond flies over the island's volcano, but doesn't see anything suspicious until he is suddenly being chased by baddy helicopters that seemed to come out of nowhere. In the ensuing fight scene Bond uses every single one of the weapons Q showed him in order to blow up the baddys.
Now that we're roughly halfway through the film, an interlude in the action sees a Soviet spaceship suffer the same fate as the American spaceship at the start of the film. Cleverly, even though there are no subtitles for what the Russians are saying in Russian, we don't need them because we already know what is happening to them from having seen the same sequence of events play out before.
We then see something new - the noming spaceship returns to Earth and lands inside a hollowed-out volcano lair. The pull-back-and-reveal of the lair is... spectacular.
Either that lair is huge, or those mannys are tiny.
Inside the lair we see Osato and Miss Brandt are there, along with Burt Kwouk and another manny who is sitting mysteriously with his back towards the camera. As he turns his swivel chair we can see he has in his lap...
SECTRE Number One!
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