Book vs Film: YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (Part 1)

This is intended to be a comparison of the novel and film of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE. At this stage I’m not sure whether it will get much above the level of “omg in teh bbok blofelds has a castel but in teh movie he hav a volcanoes wtf?????” but it should, at some point, contain a screencap of Sean Connery in his Japanese 'disguise' which makes the whole endeavour worthwhile. I shouldn’t need to warn you that this contains major spoilers for both.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE was Ian Fleming’s tenth James Bond novel and the second to last in the series. Published in 1964, it was the last one Fleming completed before his death. The film adaptation was released in 1967, the fifth in the increasingly popular series of movies. Both the novel and film are set primarily in Japan. The alien – to Western audiences – nature of Japanese culture and society is played upon heavily in both, with the strange rituals and customs serving to dislocate the character of Bond as well as the audience. This is apparent from the first pages of the novel, with the immense importance that is attached to a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Bond spends most of the rest of the novel struggling to get his head around the complexities of Japanese culture, while encountering a series of peculiar sights: Tiger’s office in an abandoned subway station, people climbing walls and walking on water, a cow being fed beer and massaged with gin, food that gets up and walks off his plate.

The film works in a similar way, especially in the sequence where Bond first arrives in Japan. After escaping his own funeral he is fired out of a torpedo tube and washes up on the shore. He wanders the streets of Tokyo and witnesses the bizarre ceremony of a sumo match, before getting into a series of fights – including probably one of the few cinematic fight scenes in which a sofa is used as a weapon – and, after chasing the mysterious Aki around, falls through a trapdoor in the floor (in a sequence borrowed from the book’s finale) which deposits him in Tiger’s office. He is then bathed by four bikini-clad Japanese women and has sex with Aki. Not a bad evening’s work.

The result of all this, especially in the novel, is that Bond is somewhat out of his depth. At the beginning of the book he is still recovering from Tracy’s death at the end of ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE. He is distracted and melancholy, spending most of his working hours sitting in a park contemplating the flowers and insects rather than in his office (if someone were to ever make a list of the 007 most emo moments of the novels, this would surely feature). This changes once he gets to Japan, however, and his character as presented here is probably the most entertaining of all the novels, as he reacts to his unfamiliar surroundings by frequently launching into profanity-laden tirades about Japanese culture, English society, and the state of the world in general. He is belligerent and reckless, drinks excessively, goes to a whore-house and is constantly attempting to unsettle Tiger with his boorish attitude in response to what he sees as the insufferable ‘bowing and hissing,’ dainty politeness of the Japanese. It is possible the more humorous nature of the book is a reaction to the films, which are more overtly funny than the novels. Fleming would have seen at least DR. NO, and possibly FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, as he was writing YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, and though he reportedly disliked the films they could have influenced his style (I vaguely remember reading that he gave Bond Scottish ancestry in response to Connery getting the role but can’t confirm this anywhere).

The character in the film is presented quite differently. Over the previous four films, particularly GOLDFINGER and THUNDERBALL, the suave, unflappable, pun-dispensing Bond persona had been well established. This combined with the fact he did not have Tracy’s death to deal with (not that that made any difference in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER) and Connery’s lazy, uninterested performance – which he had decided would be his last in the role – mean that the character in the film operates very differently, and does not have the depth or complexity as in the novel. This hardly matters for what the film is trying to achieve, however, and is more than made up for by Roald Dahl’s screenplay and the excellent production values. The surreal, dreamlike quality of the film, achieved in particular through Lewis Gilbert’s direction, Freddie Young’s cinematography, Ken Adam’s sets and John Barry’s score as well as sequences such as the one described above, makes it a unique entry in the series. The best shot in the film – possibly my favourite single shot in any Bond film – is during the fight on the Kobe docks, where the camera pulls back to show Bond running across the rooftop, beating the shit out of anyone in his path and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. It’s an unusual way to shoot a fight scene and I think encapsulates the tone of the entire film.

Stay tuned for the second and (mercifully) final instalment, which will be assaulting your computer screens whenever I get around to formatting it.