You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice (1967) takes Bond to Japan. Spacecraft are disappearing from orbit, the Americans and the Soviets are blaming each other, and SPECTRE is behind it. Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay. He disliked the book, calling it Fleming's worst, saying there was no plot in it that could make a film and that it read like a travelogue. He kept four or five ideas from the original and built the rest from scratch. Ken Adam's volcano base at Pinewood became the film's signature. It stood 148 feet high, was visible from three miles away, and cost a million dollars on its own, roughly the entire budget of Dr. No. Little Nellie, the one man autogyro, entered the film because Ken Adam heard its inventor Ken Wallis talking about it on the radio. Wallis flew the aircraft himself during filming. During the Japanese shoot the producers announced Connery would leave the role, worn down by what Bond demanded of him. He came back for Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 anyway. It grossed 111.6 million dollars worldwide but was the series' first decline, blamed on a glut of spy films and the parody Casino Royale released the same year. It runs 117 minutes. Good for: sixties Bond, Ken Adam's production design, and large scale finales. Less good for: the sequence in which Bond is disguised as Japanese is indefensible today. The plot is loose and Blofeld's scheme is thin; the women are purely functional.