You Only Live Twice
Dir: Lewis Gilbert
Prod: Albert R. Broccoli, Harry Saltzman; Stanley Sopel
(uncr)
Scr: Roald Dahl; Harold J. Bloom (uncr)
Phot: Freddie Young
Wadsworth Drive-In
5050 Wadsworth Blvd.
Arvada, Colorado
June 13, 1967
When I was six years old, we moved west from our farmland
home in Iowa. At the end of the road was a new home, and a completely new
phenomenon for me – the drive-in movie.
This was back in the days when you would spend your entire
career at the same company. Being a loyal credit sales supervisor for the
hardware chain Gambles-Skogmo, Inc., my father was subject to a regional
reposting to the Denver area – and when they told you to go, you went. The
movers came, we got in the car, mom and dad in front, myself and my infant
sister rolling around loose on the back seat (seat belts were not legally
mandated until a year later).
Surprisingly as it may seem now, the Jefferson County public
schools west of Denver were highly rated (they are now mired in controversy and
protest for suppressing negative U.S. historical information from their
advanced-placement curriculum). This spurred my parents to settle down in the
bedroom community of Arvada, Colorado – it turns out that we were only 12 miles
downwind from a nuclear weapons plant, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
My primary impression of that ride was straining to see the
mountains loom in the distance. That shut me up for about an hour after we
crossed the Colorado border; they finally sprang into view near Keenesburg. In
the midday sun they lacked all depth and definition and looked to me like
painted stage flats.
We didn’t take possession of the house that night. Instead,
we put up at a motel, staying on the second floor. After eating and getting
ready for bed, I was told by my father to look outside.
Out there in the evening was a huge ribbon of movie floating
in the darkness. A distant roar and rustle of echoing soundtrack trailed the
images on a slight delay. A man was flipped up into a wall inside a Murphy bed
and riddled with machine-gun bullets. I had just walked into the opening of the
fifth Sean Connery James Bond film, “You Only Live Twice.”
I was flabbergasted. I was absorbed by Maurice Binder’s patented
stylized title sequence. I saw them bury Bond at sea. His bandage-swathed
corpse sank to the bottom. But wait! Here came some scuba divers!
Of course, my parents continued their long tradition of
showing me something fascinating and then telling me to go to bed. They had to
pry my clutching fingers from the balcony railing and drag me inside, whining.
It took about five years until I could actually see the
whole film and finally satisfy my curiosity. (Spoiler alert: Bond doesn’t die .
. . I had worried.) The exuberance of Roald Dahl’s extremely free adaptation of
Ian Fleming’s source novel is grandly scaled, full of plot holes and non sequiturs.
The film opens with kidnapping and murder in outer space, then kills Bond and
resurrects him. THEN shoots him out of a torpedo tube.
This film sports the best incarnation of Bond villain
Blofeld as well, the inimitable Donald Pleasence. With his blank stare and
quietly creepy sense of menace, it’s a performance that seems now to be
predestined for parody (Mike Meyers’ Dr. Evil). It’s not often you get to write
or recite lines such as, “The firing power inside my crater is enough to
annihilate a small army,” and the mishmash of enormous filming stage,
miniatures, and just-flat-bad rocket animations pushes “You Only Live Twice”
into the state of fever dream.
The male fantasies of power find their perfect distillation
in Connery’s Bond, a great, hairy Scotsman who happens to be a genius at
killing people and destroying things. Charming without being pleasant, his Bond
is a superman sans cape, he beds everything he meets with a reflexive
carnivorousness. And his associates keep herds of women around – even good-guy “Tiger”
Tanaka grandly states, “I will share all my possessions with you,” as a
cross-fade brings up a serving line of bikinied Japanese women at his home,
ready to service whoever their boss brings home, evidently.
We were being indoctrinated, but it didn’t quite take. The
American New Wave was a year from arriving, and the cascade of changes in film,
and the social revolutions of the ‘60s and ‘70s, would shatter the suppositions
that came before . . . to a degree. Bond films still make money, and Bond’s
descendants populate almost every action movie made.
In retrospect, “You Only Live Twice” is for me the last unambiguously
self-assured Bond film -- the last before Connery’s hiatus of discontent, and
the imposition of a wife on the next Bond, George Lazenby, in “On Her Majesty’s
Secret Service.” When Connery returned in “Diamonds Are Forever,” the fun
seemed gone, the sexist platitudes stale and anachronistic. The series began to
comment on itself, a gamy, joking self-awareness that would expand during Roger
Moore’s tenure as Bond. Only after much struggle during the Timothy Dalton and
Pierce Brosnan years would the Daniel Craig reboot restore a thuggish complexity
to Bond’s character.
Meanwhile, the drive-in wouldn’t become a focal point of my
film-watching career again until we got driver’s licenses and used them as
places of refuge for forbidden behavior. We’ll get to that in a few more
chapters.
No comments:
Post a Comment