| And TWICE Is The Only Way To Live! YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE |
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| Director: Lewis Gilbert Producers: Albert R. Broccoli & Harry Saltzman Screenplay: Roald Dahl |
| Obviously tired of his minions making cocking up his plans for world-domination, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasance) decides to take centre-stage himself. His plan: to steal American and Russian space-craft, so that each side will blame the other and destroy each other in a nuclear war. A decent evil scheme that will destroy the world. To this end he has spared absolutely no expense in constructing a great secret base inside an inactive volcano from whence to launch his shuttle-swallowing rocket. This quasi-futuristic abode boasts an impressively large private army, monorail system, Blofeld has a piranah pool in his living room, and, best of all, a big self-destruct lever. Blofeld himself would never be played so well again as he is here by Pleasance. By playing the part so quietly, he imbues Blofeld with much more sinister menace than the some of the other bellowing, meglomaniacal, garrulous villains would. He is the only actor to do the part any justice, and his "Goodbye, Mr. Bond" is the defining delivery of the phrase He must have thought he would get away with it too, with James Bond apparently dead. Shot in bed after shagging a pretty Chinese girl, 007 is given a burial at sea. As his 'corpse' floats to the seabed, though, some divers intercept it and bring it aboard a submarine. M sends Bond to Japan to investigate the 'Big One.' Amid recriminations and threats between the Yanks and the Soviets, only the British are keeping a clear head and investigating a possibe landing site in Japan. To counter such an impressive foe he teams up with some cool Japanese Secret Service Ninja troops, complete with Q-style gadgets. To go undercover 007 has a fake marriage with a loal honey, and is given a somewhat unconvincing Japanese fisherman disguise. It's difficult to believe he needs any more training, even from double-gard ninjas. The movie climaxes with a superb battle, as the ninjas abseil down into the volcano, surpassing even the denouement of Thunderball. Parodied so well in The Simpsons' episode You Only Move Twice, just as Mike Myers has squeezed three movies worth of material from his pastiche of this films incarnation of Blofeld, clearly this one of the more seminal Bond pictures. Packed full of memorable moments, and another classic, bravura performance from Connery. |
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