BEFORE: I find I'm starting to hum the famous Monty Norman Bond theme at various times during the day now. Still with the Connery films (#5) but they'll soon be coming to an end.
THE PLOT: Agent 007 and the Japanese secret service ninja force must find and stop the true culprit of a series of spacejackings before nuclear war is provoked.
AFTER: OK, first the good news, Bond has entered the late 1960's. America has a space program and everything, and the franchise finally has some money set aside for real special effects. Also, Bond meets Blofeld face-to-face for the first time, and his dialogue is not dubbed! They figured out how to record an actor live on set!
Now the bad news, this film is unforgivingly sexist and racist, which presents me with a dilemma - do I judge the film by today's PC standards, or the mores of the time it was filmed? I've sort of decided that the early Bond films are a bit like a toy or board game you played with as a child. You might find the toy again while cleaning out a closet or something, and although you remember having great fun with it in the past, you may find you can't do so again. The toy is the same, only you grew up. Anyway, how would that look, a grown person playing with a children's toy?
By the same token, the Bond films haven't changed, but the world of filmmaking matured, in terms of story, special effects, and treatment of women and minorities. Perhaps this is really the way Japan was in the 1960's, but to have Bond and his Japanese contact being bathed and scrubbed by four scantily-clad Japanese girls each, while discussing all of the things that Japanese women are expected to do to please men, objectifying the women while they're right there in the room, is pretty disgusting. They don't seem to have any choice in the matter - but they're not prostitutes, just average women expected to put out.
Bond's got this other dick move, I saw it twice in "Thunderball" but forgot to mention it - he's kissing a woman, or dancing with her, and he sees a muzzle flash from the corner of his eye, or perhaps the reflection of a thug with a cudgel about to attack, and he whirls around so that the woman gets shot or knocked out. She was probably an enemy agent anyway, but it still shows an appalling lack of chivalry. For someone who loves women as much as Bond supposedly does, he sure treats them as disposable. Who hurt you, James? Oh, right, it was Vesper.
Bond gets "yellow fever" in this one, and even gets eye surgery (performed by those same lingerie-clad women, they're very versatile) to pass as Japanese. Umm, that doesn't work, he just looks like Sean Connery recovering from Lasik. Then he's taken to a "ninja school", where they teach him swordplay and karate, and everyone screams a lot. (NOTE: Ninjas are supposed to be quiet, they don't scream.)
I remember the big hubbub when "Miss Saigon" opened and the actor Jonathan Pryce was criticized for wearing eye prosthetics to play an Asian character. They tried to soften it by claiming the character was "Eurasian", but Actors' Equity and some Asian groups wondered why they couldn't just cast an Asian actor, which I think is a fair question. You have to regard any attempt to simulate Asian features as being equivalent to blackface, and just steer clear of it.
Nowadays we seem to be going through the same sort of casting questions with gay actors playing straight characters (and vice versa) and recently the upcoming TV remake of "Ironsides" was criticized for hiring a physically fit actor to play a wheelchair-bound detective. Actors with disabilities wondered why they weren't considered for the role, but from a writer/producer's standpoint, I can almost understand it - they may want to do a storyline later where the character regains some use of his legs, and this casting gives them options - as well as puts a well-known actor in the role. For fun, also check out the film "Tiptoes" where Gary Oldman plays a little person - although I'm sure he was willing to remove most of his legs for the role, they ended up doing a lot with special effects and trick photography. They also hired a lot of genuinely small actors for the film, so really any criticism was somewhat misplaced, but once the protests started, the promotional damage had already been done.
I think this is really where the franchise starts to perk up, though - most of the elements here are what was parodied in the "Austin Powers" films, from the look of the villain to the volcano hideout and the tank full of piranhas. Did you know that piranhas are not as dangerous as the movies would have you believe? They're always depicted as little fishy chainsaws that can rip a person to shreds in seconds, and that's just not the case. Back in 1913, Teddy Roosevelt was visiting the Amazon rainforest, and to impress him a bunch of locals starved a school of piranhas for about a week, then dragged a live cow into the water to show the U.S. President the massive eating capabilities of the carnivorous fish. Roosevelt wrote about the savage fish in a book, and that's how myths and legends get started.
But, under regular conditions they don't swarm or tear people apart - I've seen people on nature shows swimming in schools of (presumably well-fed) piranhas, with no ill effects. OK, a little research on Wikipedia tells me that dozens of people each year are injured or killed by piranhas in Brazil, but I'm betting those attacks are not as instantaneous or visually intense as movies would have us believe.
But if you're willing to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, you can probably have a lot of fun watching "You Only Live Twice". Me, I can't get over the misogyny and terrible stereotypes, and the appalling lack of research concerning how the space program and carnivorous fish actually operate.
LOCATIONS: Hong Kong, Japan
VILLAINS: Blofeld, Helga Brandt
BABES: Aki, Kissy Suzuki
ALLIES: M, Q, Henderson, Tiger Tanaka
PASTIMES: Sumo wrestling
CARS: Toyota 2000 GT Coupe (Bond doesn't drive in this film, though)
GADGETS: Mini-helicopter (auto-gyro) with guns and missiles, cigarette gun
THEME SONG: "You Only Live Twice" by Nancy Sinatra
Also starring Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell, Desmond Llewelyn (all carrying over from "Thunderball") Donald Pleasance, Akiko Wakabayashi, Mie Hama, Tetsuro Tanba, Charles Gray, Burt Kwouk (last seen in "Goldfinger").
RATING: 4 out of 10 katanas
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