p e n g u i n d e v i l

Though I’d actually been wanting to watch Live and Let Die, we don’t own that movie, so I settled with a different Bond in You Only Live Twice. As the title says, my Bond fandom has also had two lives. Back in 1980ish, the beloved Guild Theater would play the entire Bond series every January. What this means is that by my mid teens I’d seen all of the first 11 Bond films, in a theater, at least 6 times (except for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). In that youthful naivety I preferred Roger Moore over Sean Connery, but I still considered George Lazenby to be a travesty. Poor guy. Actually, I haven’t see most of the movies since then and I realize that I should give On Her Majesty’s Secret Service another chance, as it was the first movie that I ever walked out of midway through. But enough about that. When I watch a Bond movie, I just can’t help but think over my past with them, and how my thoughts have changed about the various movies since those glorious years when I would see each film once or twice every January. Sadly, it really was what I spent the year looking forward to… More so than summer vacation and Christmas. But back to the movie

In You Only Live Twice, things start of with the the capture of an American space capsule (while in space!) which leads to some accusations from the Americans against the Russians. When a Soviet space capsule is also captured, the cold war really heats up! Then James Bond dies in bed, but it turns out to a an elaborate hoax to help in his quest to solve this mystery before the Americans launch their next crew into space.

Even though the Americans are prepping their button fingers as they are intent that the Russians are behind this, the evidence leads to Japan so that is where Bond is. He teams up with the Japanese secret service (and its big batch of ninjas), goes undercover as a Japanese man himself and goes off against SPECTRE! While it is generally a good tale, as with most Bond films, You Only Live Twice is a mixed bag. It has some great things going for it, primarily Donald Pleasence as Blofeld (in the performance that really set the standard for SPECTRE, though his escape sequence is so odd and dumb that it’s hard to place in the context of a super villain) and his amazing volcano/base set, which must be one of the largest film sets ever built.

But of course, it has some things going against it. The series was starting to get a bit campy with self reference and oh my gosh, the makeup attempts! When they attempt to make Connery pass for a Japanese man, they basically give him a bad haircut and eye shadow! And one thing that has always bothered me is that they go to such lengths to keep him undercover: fake death and funeral and trying to pass him of as Japanese… But no one seems to notice, as the whole time people are making attempts against his life. Who are they? We don’t know. I would suspect SPECTRE, but then you would think that Blofeld would have a better idea of Bond’s whereabouts! Blofeld is a bit of a disappointment, between his great evil villain persona and his crazy plot to start a world war, he suffers from that standard SPECTRE failing of not just killing Bond when he has the chance.

Finally, though the disc itself is good, with a nice picture quality, the DVD titles are terrible. They are some “techie modern” look that doesn’t go with this old movie at all. It’s funny how back in the day they put to together such great opening titles for this movie… You’d think that maybe they could have used them as some kind of a base for the DVD menus, instead of the lame stuff that they did use.