Monthly Archives: November 2020

Film, TV, and Theatre

Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice (1967)

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Who is your favourite James Bond? My for­ma­tive years coin­cid­ed with the Roger Moore era so I tend to regard him as my favourite Bond, with Live And Let Die my favourite Bond movie. How­ev­er, the defin­i­tive Bond, the one with the cor­rect mea­sure of rogu­ish charm and cool sophis­ti­ca­tion, rugged mas­culin­i­ty and sex appeal, but also gift­ed by the styl­is­tic ele­ments of the Six­ties (was there a cool­er car than the 1964 Aston Mar­tin DB5 dri­ven by Bond in Goldfin­ger?), has to be the recent­ly-deceased Sean Con­nery.

Con­nery made sev­en Bond movies begin­ning with 1962’s Dr No but today I’m look­ing at the fifth in the series, 1967’s You Only Live Twice, which par­tic­u­lar­ly thrilled me as a kid (despite con­nois­seurs gen­er­al­ly com­par­ing it less favourably to its pre­de­ces­sors). With screen­play by one Roald Dahl, it is the first James Bond film to dis­card most of Ian Flem­ing’s plot, using only a few char­ac­ters and loca­tions from the book as the back­ground for an entire­ly new sto­ry. In the film, Bond is dis­patched to Japan after Amer­i­can and Sovi­et crewed space­craft dis­ap­pear mys­te­ri­ous­ly in orbit, each nation blam­ing the oth­er. The Secret Ser­vice sus­pects a third par­ty, how­ev­er, and Bond trav­els secret­ly to a remote Japan­ese island to find the per­pe­tra­tors. He comes face-to-face with Blofeld (Don­ald Pleasence), the head of SPECTRE, which is work­ing for the gov­ern­ment of an unnamed Asian pow­er to pro­voke war between the super­pow­ers.

Direc­tor Lewis Gilbert, pro­duc­ers Cub­by Broc­coli and Har­ry Saltz­man, pro­duc­tion design­er Ken Adam, and direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Fred­die Young spent three weeks in Japan search­ing for loca­tions, with SPEC­TRE’s extinct vol­cano head­quar­ters being a par­tic­u­lar­ly good find. The group was due to return to the UK on a BOAC Boe­ing 707 flight on 5th March 1966, but can­celled at the last minute after being told they had a chance to watch a nin­ja demon­stra­tion. That flight crashed 25 min­utes after take-off, killing all on board: such a lucky deci­sion for the par­ty and their fam­i­lies, and also for the entire future Bond fran­chise.

John Bar­ry pro­duced the score, and (as is typ­i­cal with John Bar­ry) the result was sen­sa­tion­al: the inci­den­tal theme music, and Nan­cy Sinatra’s stun­ning main theme song, knit the ele­ments togeth­er so well. Those ele­ments include all the usu­al tropes: car chas­es, fights, assas­si­na­tion attempts, love action and glam­orous Bond girls (notably the beau­ti­ful Kissy Suzu­ki, played by Mie Hama), gad­gets and gis­mos (includ­ing bul­let-fir­ing cig­a­rettes and a heav­i­ly-armed gyro­copter), and wit­ty one-lin­ers. How­ev­er, the movie is also hav­ing an obvi­ous love affair with Japan, and so as well as a whole lot of nin­ja action, we get some sump­tu­ous Japan­ese land­scapes and cer­e­monies.

The whole thing is of course majes­ti­cal­ly absurd but stonk­ing­ly good fun. Here is a nice mon­tage of clips from the movie along­side Nan­cy Sinatra’s win­ning theme song.

Bond, Tiger Tana­ka, and Kissy Suzu­ki
Poetry

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798)

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Although I am a con­firmed land-lub­ber, the sea holds a fas­ci­na­tion for me. There’s some­thing quite hor­ri­fy­ing about being in the mid­dle of the ocean, with no land vis­i­ble in any direc­tion and untold depths below, and being in a ves­sel whose for­tune is dic­tat­ed by the forces and whims of Nature. Of course, my own expe­ri­ences of being in the mid­dle of the sea have been lim­it­ed to very safe, reli­able and gen­er­al­ly nature-defy­ing cruise ships, so I’m not claim­ing any real expe­ri­ence of the above. I’m real­ly think­ing about those incred­i­ble sea adven­tur­ers of yore, like Cook or Mag­el­lan, or those gnarly men who would go to sea for years on end in pur­suit of whales (see my blog about Moby Dick here). Or the man depict­ed in Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Coleridge’s epic poem was pub­lished in 1798 in Lyri­cal Bal­lads, the poet­ry col­lec­tion in which he col­lab­o­rat­ed with William Wordsworth (and which marked the begin­ning of British Roman­tic lit­er­a­ture). For a vol­ume that rep­re­sent­ed a new mod­ern approach to poet­ry, it is iron­ic that this par­tic­u­lar poem seems pre-mod­ern in its goth­ic set­ting, archa­ic spelling and super­nat­ur­al mood; per­haps he thought it was just too good not to be includ­ed.

The nar­ra­tor is accost­ed at a wed­ding cer­e­mo­ny by a grey-beard­ed old sailor who tells him a sto­ry of a voy­age he took long ago. The wed­ding guest is at first reluc­tant to lis­ten, as the cer­e­mo­ny is about to begin, but the mariner’s glit­ter­ing eye cap­ti­vates him, and he sim­ply has to lis­ten. The mariner’s tale begins with his ship depart­ing on its jour­ney. Despite ini­tial good for­tune, the ship is dri­ven south by a storm and even­tu­al­ly reach­es the icy waters of the Antarc­tic. An alba­tross appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam in which it was get­ting stuck, but even as the alba­tross is fed and praised by the ship’s crew, the mariner shoots the bird with his cross­bow.

Oh dear: bad luck! The crew is angry with the mariner, believ­ing the crime would arouse the wrath of the spir­its, and indeed their ship is even­tu­al­ly blown into unchart­ed waters near the equa­tor, where it is becalmed.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a paint­ed ship
Upon a paint­ed ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The sailors blame the mariner for the tor­ment of their thirst and force the mariner to wear the dead alba­tross about his neck.

Fron­tispiece by William Strang, 1903

The mariner endures a fate worse than death as pun­ish­ment for his killing of the alba­tross: one by one, all of the crew mem­bers die, but the mariner lives on, see­ing for sev­en days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew’s corpses, whose last expres­sions remain upon their faces.

Even­tu­al­ly, this stage of the mariner’s curse is lift­ed and he begins to pray. As he does so, the alba­tross falls from his neck and his guilt is par­tial­ly expi­at­ed. It begins to rain and his own thirst is slaked. The bod­ies of the crew, now pos­sessed by good spir­its, rise up and help steer the ship home, floun­der­ing just off the coast of the mariner’s home town. The mariner is res­cued but as penance, and dri­ven by the agony of his guilt, he is now forced to wan­der the earth, telling his sto­ry over and over. His cur­rent rapt lis­ten­er, the wed­ding guest, is just one in a long line…

If you have a spare half an hour, and you haven’t yet heard the full Ancient Mariner sto­ry, you could do worse than lis­ten to Ian McK­ellen recite the entire thing here!