You Only Live Twice

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

ALTHOUGH there’s a lot more science-fiction than there is first-vintage James Bond in “You Only Live Twice,” the fifth in a series of veritable Bond films with Sean Connery, there’s enough of the bright and bland bravado of the popular British super-sleuth mixed into this melee of rocket-launching to make it a bag of good Bond fun. And there’s so much of that scientific clatter — so much warring of super-capsules out in space and fussing with electronic gadgets in a great secret underground launching pad—that this wayout adventure picture should be the joy and delight of the youngsters and give pleasure to the reasonable adults who can find release in the majestically absurd.
Are your nerves frayed and mind bewildered by the war in the Middle East? Give them a rest via this violent excursion with Double-O Seven in Japan. Go with him on this crucial mission to find out whence come those cannibal capsules that move in to devour those American spaceships that are innocently orbiting the earth, and plunge with him into the strange crater of that dead volcano on the Japanese coast to discover it isn’t the Russians who are doing the mischief and save us by a hair’s breadth from World War III.
You may find the noise slightly deafening when the chasing autos scream around those Tokyo curves, or the four massive enemy helicopters loose their machineguns on the minicopter carrying Bond, or especially when the Japanese commandos rain down upon that secret launching pad and assist Bond in happily blasting this Spectral installation to smithereens.
This noisy and wildly violent picture, which opened yesterday at the Astor, the Victoria, the Baronet and Loew’s Orpheum, is evidently pegged to the notion that nothing succeeds like excess. And because it is shamelessly excessive, it is about a half-hour too long.
Probably its profligate producers. Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, figured they had spent so much on it—on that fantastic launching pad set, which could be put down at Expo 67 and be a hit pavilion; on a sparkling color production and some beautiful location shooting in Japan—that they wanted Lewis Gilbert, the director, to keep it going as long as he could.
As a consequence, there is a lengthy build-up of tooling around Tokyo with Bond, buzzing through a wrestling arena, stealing secrets from a chemical company’s safe, firming a Japanese contact and trifling casually here and there with a few girls, before it gets to an even lengthier playout of the discovery and raid on the launching pad.
Through it all, Mr. Connery paces with his elegant nonchalance a little more non than usual (he is evidently getting slightly bored), but altogether able in the clinches and in tossing off the gags of Roald Dahl. Able as conspirators and scenery are several lovely Japanese girls whose names are so superfluous and difficult there is no point in spelling them out. A fellow named Tetsuro Tamba is dandy as a Japanese partner-spy, and Donald Pleasence is grandly grotesque as the evil genius who would rule the world.
It is notable that only Bond, the title and the location of an Ian Fleming book have been used by Mr. Dahl in writing his screenplay. The rest, with, just a Dahl touch here and there, is blueprint Bond stuff cum science-fiction. The sex is minimal. But, then, Bond is getting old. And so, I would guess, is anybody who can’t get a few giggles from this film.