You Only Live Twice (1967) We know that we've already wished this film its Happy 50th Anniversary in our post of 6/9/17......but as part of our Autumn Bond-Fire series, we're taking a more historical retrospective look at the Bond filmography......(and prepping ourselves for the upcoming "No Time To Die".....
It occurred to us that Sean Connery after 5 Bonds and Daniel Craig, after 4, had both reached their fed-up-I'm-outta here points.....but for far different reasons.
Connery, never one to suffer fools and moguls lightly, bristled under the constant spotlight of playing the world's most iconic film character while simmering over producers Saltzman and Broccoli denying him full profit participation as a third co-producer.
(And for an actor who yearned to break out of Bond, this film's tagline 'Sean Connery IS James Bond!, to differentiate it from the ridiculous all star 1967 'Casino Royale', only aggravated him further.)
Craig, on the other hand, grew weary of the physically punishing toll that his series of 21st century Bond films took on him, especially fights and stunts that left him injured.
(In the new, more gritty Bonds ,for example, you wouldn't see a shot like one in "You Only Live Twice", where an obvious stuntman doubling Connery takes a high swan dive into a mattress, followed by the real Connery popping up from underneath it.....)
And it may have been just as well that Connery renounced the role (for a time, anyway), since he wanders through his 5th Bond film like a distracted, bemused tourist. And more than ever, to his clearly visible disdain, he's dwarfed by the sheer physical spectacle of the film.
Audiences initially flocked to the films to cheer and chuckle over Connery's charismatic performances.....but now the Bonds with their increasingly lavish budgets had become three-ring circuses, offering outer space hijackings of astronauts and a Ken Adam volcano lair set large enough to house the population of a Third World country.
And as everyone's attention span went elsewhere, that white-hot obsession with Bond World which reached a pinnacle with "Thunderball", had cooled down somewhat.......to slightly above room temperature.
Since Bond and Bond films had now become a permanent fixture in the world popular culture, the global feeding frenzy for all things Bondian went down to an every day manageable level. (Not to mention the tidal wave of imitation Bond movies and TV shows that flooded the worldwide markets...)
"You Only Live Twice" still remains a 4 star (****) treat for us always, but in many ways, we think the best was yet to come in the 6th film in the series.....a film that served as summing-up and a final end to what we think of asthe Golden Years of the Eon Productions Bond films.......
Stay tuned to BQ for our next post on our personal favorite of the entire series, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service".....
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