The Path to "You Only Live Twice”

You Only Live Twice is one of those movies that I can watch any time, and even if I catch it somewhere in the middle, I will probably stay until the end.  It is one of a handful of films that delivers an actual jolt of nostalgia for me.    

Not that it takes me back to my own childhood or what seemed to be a simpler era.  It’s simply the early Bond saga’s well-earned valedictory lap.

Plus it’s a movie that just works.  Each scene fires on all cylinders and whisks us along to the next one.  Its breezy pace made film critic Pauline Kael dub director Lewis Gilbert “an efficient traffic manager,” and while she’s not wrong, much of the credit should go to screenwriter Roald Dahl and editor Peter Hunt (taking over for Thelma Connell, whose three-hour cut was considered tiresome) and an ensemble of actors who knew what sort of film they were in. 

Additional credit should also go to Alfred Hitchcock, whose North By Northwest added the secret sauce to the spy genre: the great action scene that’s so expertly assembled that it packs a kick even if it makes no sense whatsoever.  The celebrated crop duster scene may be particularly effective because it makes no sense.  The audience can’t predict what will happen next, when it seems that absolutely anything might happen.

Hitchcock’s crop duster sequence definitely inspired Bond’s encounter with a grenade-spewing helicopter  in From Russia With Love.  Without it, the 1963 film would hew closer to the standard espionage thriller of the era.  The helicopter attack and the scene in which a whole flotilla of boats is trapped in a wall of flames, boost the energy level late in the film, despite the fact that, as critic Stanley Kauffman’s complained, it seemed to end a few times before it finally ended.

Death by gold paint already sounds like a means of homicide that Hitchcock might have cooked up or wished he had, but it’s a case where a death that’s merely reported to James Bond in the book, becomes the on-screen starting pistol for the film, as well as the centerpiece of the ad campaign.  After the success of From Russia With Love, filmmakers quickly began amplifying the more outrageous elements of the books at every opportunity.

To take another example from Fleming’s Goldfinger: The one gangster who opts out of the Fort Knox heist takes a fatal tumble down a stairwell, a death evidently deemed much too prosaic for a Bond film.  While much of the movie’s charm is its pervasive nuttiness, crushing Mr. Solo together with his gold bars and a Lincoln Continental does seem a weirdly roundabout way to accomplish a very simple goal.  However, it was hard to argue with the box office gold rush that ensued when the film reached theaters.

Oddball flights of fancy take wing right off the bat in the film version of Thunderball.  No more grappling hooks for Bond, who apparently enters and exits a chateau by scaling the wall with a Bell Jet Belt.  By the time he straps on the aquatic equivalent while muttering “And the kitchen sink” for the climactic undersea battle, any shred of realism has long been abandoned in favor of high-tech hijinks.  

Judging from the all time high ticket sales, audiences evidently found the trade-off more than satisfactory.

The fifth film with Connery in the role of Bond, You Only Live Twice, was given full rein to concoct its own plot, so long as the result was seasoned with locales and just enough names and bits of business from Fleming’s novel that it could be considered an adaptation.  Thus it became the first Bond movie to establish a basic formula: assemble a program of audacious, loosely interrelated scenes that keep the story moving forward until Bond finds the correct button to press or to prevent someone else from pressing.

The bustling pace of You Only Live Twice works in tandem with the “crop duster” effect, which comes into play in many of the big action scenes, giving the audience little time to reflect on whether anything they’re watching makes a whit of sense.  In fact, the death of Henderson, which really gets the ball rolling, seems to have been staged as a salute to the murder of the U. N. diplomat who dies in Cary Grant’s arms with a knife sticking out of his back in North By Northwest.  That movie made no sense, and it was delightful.

After Henderson’s death there is a brief fight between Bond and the killer, which leads to a brilliantly-staged sequence in the Osato Chemicals building, then a high-tech bit of safecracking, followed by a running gunfight, a brief chase, and Bond’s fall through an oubliette that deposits him neatly and only slightly stirred, in Tiger Tanaka’s office.

Between the time Henderson dies and Bond drops in on Tiger, we hear one quip from Bond and a brief exchange of dialogue between Bond and a female Japanese agent named Aki.  Otherwise the whole extended sequence is a visual Rube Goldberg contraption with each surprise triggering the next.  Even though no single part is grounded in reality we accept them all because we’ve witnessed the chain of causation every step along the way. 

Freed of any plot constraints imposed by the novel, You Only Live Twice became the prototypical Bond movie, a synthesis of Fleming and Hitchcock, with Hitchcock taking the upper berth.

Everyone on the team seemed to sense that this movie would be the last of its kind.  Money was spent freely but wisely.  Ken Adam had a million dollars to build Blofeld’s volcanic lair.  David Lean’s frequent collaborator Freddie Francis lit it using nearly every available lamp in London and designed the overall super-saturated Technicolor palette for the film.  

John Barry’s title theme, dubbed “instant nostalgia” by the composer, is a bittersweet lament which seems to acknowledge that, while this film marked the end of the road, there would be an afterlife. 

dale@lovewellhistory.com

The Hour of the Gun

Before 2006, the 1969 film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service seemed the closest moviegoers might ever come to seeing a faithful cinematic adaptation of one of Fleming’s James Bond thrillers.

From Russia With Love seldom veered too far off-course, despite the unnecessary complication of having Rosa Klebb report to Ernst Stavro Blofeld instead of her former bosses at the Kremlin.   The film also ends on a sprightly note, unlike the book which concludes with Bond collapsing to the floor as his vital signs fade.

At least the movie version permits Bond to be imperiled by Rosa Klebb’s poisoned shoe-blade, only to be saved at the last second by a timely shot fired by Tatiana.  It was an ending which the filmmakers surely borrowed from Fleming’s Thunderball, and would reuse when it came time to film that book.

Fleming’s Bond was not invincible and occasionally did need rescuing.  Alas, some of his confederates seemed to pay the toll for Bond’s unlikely escapes.  Felix Leiter loses parts of himself in Live and Let Die, Kerim Bey dies on the Orient Express in From Russia, With Love, Quarrel is immolated by dragon-fire in Dr. No, while neither of the Masterton girls lives long enough to witness the final chapter of Goldfinger.  

Goldfinger, the breakout hit of the series, quickly became the glittering gold-standard of Bond films.  The producers came to believe, somewhat superstitiously, that at minimum one young lady needed to be offered up as a sacrifice during the story, though dispatching two would be ideal.

Thus in the film version of Thunderball two women are marked for death, Bond’s ally Paula, and SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe.  When it came time to write the screenplay for  You Only Live Twice, Roald Dahl dutifully penned a touching death scene for Aki (who ingests a dose of poison meant for Bond), and then arranged for a school of piranha to feast on the devious Helga Brandt.  

Like the plot itself, these characters had to be invented for You Only Live Twice, since a strict translation of Fleming’s book would have made no sense, the work having been conceived by Fleming as a sequel to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.   

With the cooperation of the Alpine snow season in 1969, O.H.M.S.S. was adapted rather faithfully for the screen that year, although a few significant events had to be restructured, and Bond was permitted to be naughtier in the film than he was allowed to be in the book.

In the film, Bond treats Tracy rather roughly at the start of their relationship (even if she did pull a gun on him first), and he seems determined to sleep with any number of the young ladies cooped up in Blofeld’s dormitory.  Amusingly, the surname of his first conquest has been changed from “Windsor" to “Bartlett," perhaps to avoid offending the British Royal Family.

In the book, details of Blofeld’s scheme must be pieced together from clues Bond provides when he makes his way back to London.  In the film, Blofeld has confidently spilled the beans out loud before Bond escapes.  The timing of that escape has also been shifted slightly during its transfer to the screen.  In the book our hero hightails it while an associate is being tortured to extract information which would surely put Bond in peril.  In the film, however, Bond’s cover has already been blown when he begins his breakneck descent from Piz Gloria on a pair of stolen skis, and his only confedeerate on the mountain has already been exterminated.

Although Tracy helps Bond elude Blofeld’s henchmen in the book, she is not captured during their pursuit.  Therefore the later assault on Piz Gloria is not a rescue mission, as it is in the film, but merely another round in the high-stakes match between Bond and Blofeld.

The wedding of James Bond and Teresa di Vicenzo, a suitably lavish affair staged at the Draco estate in Portugal in the film, is a simple ceremony performed at a the Munich consulate in Fleming’s novel.  But potentially the most significant detail from the book omitted from the film is the tidbit Bond receives about a phone call placed to the consulate by a German woman claiming to be a reporter, who inquires about the timing of the happy event.

The book sometimes casts an unflattering light on James Bond in its depiction of him as a latter-day Gawain, a knight who fails to live up to a code of honor.  Besides risking a roll in the hay with one of the young ladies under his host’s supervision, Bond skedaddles, leaving a comrade to be tortured to death.  He asks Tracy to marry him just before setting off for another inning of the dangerous game with his enemy, and immediately after the wedding ignores a suspicious call which should set off alarm bells.

For those aware of the book’s debt to Middle-English literature, Fleming provides a ticking clock as the newlyweds ride away after their thrifty nuptials.  Glancing at his watch Bond notes the time as 11:45.  Readers are informed that more than ten minutes have elapsed when the Maserati, which had appeared behind them as a distant red dot, suddenly begins to make its move.

It may have been the exact timing of the Green Knight’s return-blow on New Year’s Day in the Middle-English poem, that gave Fleming the idea of merging Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with an episode of a TV Western, one featuring a famous lawman who decides to hang up his guns for good and settle down with a beautiful but troubled young lady named Teresa.  She was doomed, of course, as was almost any frontier lass who agreed to tie the knot with the leading man in a Western series. 

It must have struck Fleming as more appropriate to end his modern take on the story of a failed Arthurian knight, not with the swing of a blade, but a flash of gunsmoke at high noon.

Pat Garrett holds his slain Teresa in “Bitter Ashes,” an episode of The Tall Man which aired months before Fleming wrote a similar scene for OHMSS

Learning from the Master

A few years ago I heard a pair of YouTube creators agree that Fleming’s From Russia, With Love was largely a retread of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.  Unless I misunderstood the conversation, I’m forced to conclude that both reviewers were unaware that Fleming’s book was published two years before the Hitchcock film arrived in theaters.  In fact, it was published even before Hitchcock’s collaborator Ernest Lehman had finished writing his screenplay, which was a wholly original work.

On the other hand, I do believe they were correct about Fleming taking his cue from an Alfred Hitchcock film, not North by Northwest, however, but a much earlier production.  The 1946 espionage thriller Notorious uses the same basic ploy as Fleming’s novel - dangling a beautiful recruit as bait to snare an enemy agent.  

In Notorious, American operative T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant), convinces Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia Huberman to infiltrate a group of Nazi sympathizers who've fled to Rio.  Devlin, despite having fallen in love with Alicia, reluctantly suggests that she become intimate with one of the group’s leaders, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), a move which will give her access to a vital secret hidden in his wine cellar.  Alicia not only climbs into bed with Sebastian, but decides to marry him.  When Sebastian discovers evidence that his new bride is a spy, he and his mother begin administering just enough poison to keep Alicia incapacitated as her life slowly ebbs.

Besides borrowing the racy plot (while inverting it so that the villains steer the femme fatale into the hero’s bed), Fleming also adopted Hitchcock’s use of a MacGuffin, defined by the director as an object which all of the characters are intensely interested in, while the audience is not.  In Notorious the MacGuffin is a wine bottle filled with granules of radioactive pitchblende.  In From Russia, With Love it’s a Specktor decoding device, much coveted by MI6, but rigged to explode when examined.

From Russia, With Love is the box of Crackerjacks of Bond novels, with a succession of prizes tumbling out in every chapter.  Mixed in among the fairytales and Disney references are sly salutes to the thriller-writers of Fleming’s youth, beginning with a mention of P. G. Wodehouse on the very first page of text.  Bond’s nom de voyage is “Somerset.” Red Grant cautions him against trying any “Bulldog Drummond stuff.”  The Third Man is called out repeatedly, while an Eric Ambler paperback reinforces Bond’s cigarette case in hopes of making it bulletproof.

Did Alfred Hitchcock also make the cut - if not by name, then with one of Fleming’s custom-made calling cards, a sort of i.o.u. for borrowing someone else's plot device?  It’s just possible that Fleming did slyly acknowledge a small debt to “the Master of Suspense.” 

A quick accounting of Fleming’s vocabulary shows that he seldom employed the word “notorious” in his writings, only once or twice in the earlier books which I sorted through, for a total of perhaps three occurrences total in all of his novels prior to From Russia, With Love.  

In this novel alone he uses the word “notorious” three times.  Of course it could be mere coincidence.  But, no, twice would be coincidence.  

It also may be no coincidence that Hitchcock returned the honor by making the hapless protagonist of his very next film (Cary Grant again) make a long journey on a westbound train in the midst of a nest of spies, including a seductive young woman whose allegiance is questionable.

Shortly after From Russia, With Love rolled off the presses to a generally warm reception, rumors were floated about the possibility of a film version directed by Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, teaming up to recapture the box office allure of To Catch a Thief.  When the director’s latest film, Vertigo, was met with hostile notices and audience disinterest, the rumor mill quickly went dry on the subject of Mr. Hitchcock’s involvement in a Bond film.

A few years later the cross-pollination between Fleming and Hitchcock would bleed over into the Eon film series, with the production team lifting the crop-duster scene from North By Northwest to add some fireworks to the movie adaptation of Fleming’s novel. 

Not only would Hitchcock’s return volley be bold, but it would ultimately alter the public’s perception of James Bond for decades to come.

The Matter of Succession

In a recent post I took an inventory of the men who’ve been cast as James Bond thus far in the seemingly-inexhaustible film series.  This was a cursory summation at best.  I did not refresh my memory by rewatching everything, or by catching up with some entries for the very first time on streaming services.  Rather, it is my recollection of how the various entrants struck me at the time while sitting in a theater seat with an inexpensive box of popcorn cradled in my arm.

Back when moviegoing was still cheap entertainment I watched most of the Connery series, starting with Goldfinger, sometimes, several times each.  After a delay of almost a full decade I finally got a look at the first two entries in the series at a drive-in, a few months before the premiere of Diamonds Are Forever.  Thus, while some segment of the population considered Sean Connery irreplaceable, I had only seen him in three Bond films before George Lazenby stepped in.

In fact, the Bond movie which garnered the most repeat viewings from me upon its initial release was On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the one which had also been buffed to highest sheen of technical accomplishment thus far.  What’s clear in retrospect is that the company should have used the previous star’s departure as an opportunity to reboot.  Instead they seemed bent on trying to gaslight the audience.

A model whose specialty had been dressing as James Bond for a series of commercials, and who only turned 30 after filming wrapped, George Lazenby shows promise in O.H.M.S.S.  He is entirely believable as a raw recruit being handed his first assignment, but perhaps not as a living legend in the spy trade.    

“This never happened to the other fella,” Lazenby laments during the pre-title sequence.  The title montage includes snippets from earlier entries in the series.  During playful office banter with the new 007, Moneypenny squeals, “Same old James - only more so!”  Bond daydreams at his desk while rummaging through souvenirs of past missions as the soundtrack plays familiar John Barry cues from previous films.  

It’s as if the filmmakers decided to force the audience to watch a heavy-handed treatise on the concept of recasting a part, before the movie quite gets going.

Lazenby isn't terrible in the part.  He’s just a freshly-minted novice who’s trying to avoid tripping over the cables.  In that respect he’s a bit like the Connery of 1958’s Another Time, Another Place.  Appearing as Lana Turner’s doomed love-interest, the freshman leading-man had been given pages of lines to recite but no real character to play.  By rights the role should have gone to Roger Moore.

My favorite anecdote concerning O.H.M.S.S. is the one where Harry Saltzman asks an attendee at a press screening, “So what do you think of my new monster?” 

“You screwed up, Harry,” the man replied.  "You should have killed him and kept her.”

Any story concerning Lazenby’s departure should be taken with a grain of salt.  The version which has Lazenby being pressured by his agent to turn down a lucrative multi-picture contract to keep playing Bond, in favor of making trippy counterculture flicks on shoestring budgets, may have been an invention designed to save face all around.  The fact is that replacing Connery had turned out to be harder than expected.  So producers lured him back with an unprecedented payday.

Connery’s most prestigious motion picture credit before Dr. No had been the young male lead in Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People, on the heels of playing loutish, oversexed villains in Action of the Tiger and Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure.

Watching a vintage recording of Connery as Alexander the Great in Terence Rattigan’s Adventure Story, a televised drama from 1961, gives us a glimpse of an actor clearly on the brink of stardom and looking for new worlds to conquer.  He played Rattigan’s Alexander, Tolstoy’s Count Vronsky and Sharkespeare’s Macbeth within a matter of months, one year after winning the standout role of Harry Hotspur in the BBC’s An Age of Kings.

When Connery could not be convinced to stick around for a follow-uo to Diamonds Are Forever, producers decided to seek another actor with a proven track record.

After three years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he perfected a Mid-Atlantic accent and the art of raising either of his eyebrows or both at once, Roger Moore had gradually built up a resume of supporting roles and third-billed leads on television and in films.  His career received a major boost in 1958 when he was cast in the title role of the TV series Ivanhoe, which was followed by steady work in Warner Brothers Westerns, including a short stint as Beau Maverick.

Moore scored the part  of Simon Templar in the lead-up to the long-running TV series The Saint in 1962, the same year Connery starred in Dr. No.  After The Saint left the airwaves in 1969 Moore teamed up with Tony Curtis as a mismatched pair of do-gooders in The Persuaders, a series which ended its short run just in time to free up Moore for Live and Let Die in 1972.

I had seen Moore as Beau Maverick, as Simon Templar, and as Tony Curtis’s urbane partner, and wasn’t looking forward to his impersonation of  James Bond.  I needn't have worried.  If Moore could be guaranteed to turn every role he played into some slight variation on the suave, earnest, imperturbable gentleman he had perfected over a decade of mostly forgettable films, at the very least he was an actor who seemed to know what he was doing.  

There was also the propulsive energy of Paul McCartney’s title song and George Martin’s accompanying score to smooth over the rough patches.  Besides, Bond films had become a phenomenon less concerned with fantastical schemes to be foiled ingeniously, than with a series of zany chases punctuated by one-liners and perfectly-timed pyrotechnics.   

The Man With the Golden Gun was another matter.  Fleming’s book is barely an outline, a means of settling up accounts and putting Bond back into play without the weight of emotional baggage from past transgressions.

Today it’s difficult to remember what the film version is even supposed to be about.  There is talk of an energy crisis and some sort of solar-powered contraption.  A bounty is placed on James Bond’s head.  That amusing Southern sheriff from the previous Moore film pops up for laughs.  Somewhere in the proceedings a car executes a midair corkscrew maneuver accompanied by a slide-whistle sound effect, while moviegoers groan. We see a man, or perhaps two men, sporting an extra nipple each, and a gentlemanly duel gets underway on a beach.  Then, for some reason, everything starts to explode while Bond dashes about with a bikini-clad girl.  

The audience in my theater began trudging up the aisle before the end credits rolled and I was tempted to join them.  I have seen the movie exactly once.

It had been ten years since Goldfinger took the world by storm and now the last of Fleming’s Bond thrillers had finally been committed to film, in some form or other.  Somehow, it did not seem to be a milestone worth celebrating.   

Mixing Up the Order

You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service came close to being filmed in the appropriate order, if only the weather had cooperated.  

Instead, Fleming’s haunting sequel to OHMSS became the capstone to the current run of Bond films starring Sean Connery, a series which had been launched with a thinly-veiled adaptation of Walt Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  Fittingly, the screenplay for the new film was pieced together by Fleming’s friend and former Disney collaborator Roald Dahl, who shared the author’s piquant sense of humor and sense of outlandish adventure.

The book’s Bond, a broken and hollowed-out figure following the death of his wife, is dispatched to Japan to borrow the world’s most advanced code-breaker.  With the help of Tiger Tanaka, the head of Japan’s Secret Service, Bond passes along the translated text of an intercepted message which helps avert what might have escalated into thermonuclear war.  

Now indebted to Tanaka, Bond is offered a dangerous mission to eliminate a mysterious figure known as Dr. Shatterhand, who presides over a botanical “Disneyland of death,” where young Japanese are lured with the promise of an honorable demise.  Realizing that  Shatterhand is really his old enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Bond accepts.  

While the plot had to be jettisoned, Bond having no motive as yet for seeking personal revenge on Blofeld, the film manages to salvage some of the book’s texture.  Bond saving a world on the brink of war, Bond’s fall through an oubliette, a “civilized” bath, Tiger Tanaka, Kissy Suzuki, Dikko Henderson, a faux marriage, Ama diving girls, Blofeld’s volcanic lair, even Bond’s apparent death and his Japanese makeover - are all repurposed from Fleming’s text and molded around a new threat.

It almost seems that Roald Dahl decided to bookend the Bond series to date, with a more extravagant version of the first entry, Dr. No, another film in which a secretive mastermind sabotages the space program.  Besides Disney’s 20,000 Leagues, the result also has glimmerings of another Jules Verne title, Master of the World, in which a half-mad genius launches his convertible airship from an extinct volcano.

A more direct influence on Dahl’s script came from a list of detailed suggestions provided by the production team, based on what had worked best in previous films, especially Goldfinger.  For instance, while it was almost mandatory to sacrifice one female victim early in the story, it would be better to sacrifice two.  Thus, in addition to poisoning Bond’s ally Aki, the YOLT script required Helga Brandt to be fed to a school of Piranha.  Neither character appears in Fleming’s novel.  Both were conjured up to die for the sake of a formula.

If women still had to be sacrificed, at least they weren’t batted around by the hero this time.  Critic Pauline Kael noted that for all of the mayhem in You Only Live Twice, Connery plays a kinder, gentler Bond here, his sexual liasions actually resembling “love relationships.”

Both the book and the film seem to tip a hat to Walt Disney.  Where Fleming’s previous novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, traces the origin of Walt’s surname, the sequel compares Blofeld’s volcanic castle to a lethal version of Disney’s Anaheim theme park.  Designer Ken Adam’s staggering concept for the climax of the film actually seems to combine the hollowed-out Matterhorn, the park's encircling monorail track, and Tomorrowland’s moon rocket poised on a launch pad, to create a literal realization of Fleming’s whimsical metaphor.  It’s the star of the show.

Freed from the constraints of Fleming’s plot, You Only Live Twice was the first Bond film to venture into pure, outrageous, formulaic spectacle.  That it made less money than Thunderball, can be chalked up to the glut of secret-agent content in theaters and on television that year.  You Only Live Twice wasn’t even the only James Bond film that opened in the spring of 1967.  

For all its silly extravagance Casino Royale arrived in theaters first and probably siphoned some of the gas from the second film’s tank..

Still, Sean Connery’s supposed swan song as Bond performed well enough that it would serve as a model for two later entries in the series, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.  Unused elements of the Fleming novel would get a much-belated transfer to the screen in No Time To Die.