You Only Live Twice (film)

You Only Live Twice (film)

You Only Live Twice (1967) is the fifth spy film in the James Bond series, and the fifth to star Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. The film's screenplay was written by Roald Dahl, and loosely based on Ian Fleming's 1964 novel of the same name. It is the first James Bond film to discard most of 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 manned spacecraft disappear mysteriously in orbit. With each nation blaming the other amidst the Cold War, Bond travels secretly to a remote Japanese island in order to find the perpetrators and comes face to face with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE. The film reveals the appearance of Blofeld who was previously a partially unseen character. SPECTRE is extorting the government of an unnamed Asian power, implied to be the People's Republic of China, in order to provoke war between the superpowers.

It was announced during the Japanese location filming that Sean Connery would retire from the role of Bond; but Connery returned, after a hiatus, in Diamonds Are Forever and the non-Eon Bond film Never Say Never Again. You Only Live Twice is the first Bond film to be directed by Lewis Gilbert, who later directed the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me and the 1979 film Moonraker, both starring Roger Moore. These three Bond films are notable for being epic in scale.

The first Bond film to be released in the northern hemisphere summertime, the film was a great success, with positive reviews and over $111 million in worldwide box office and has subsequently been parodied, most prominently by the Austin Powers series and its scar-faced, Nehru suit-wearing Dr. Evil.