You Only Live Twice (1967)

Hello, my name is Simina Munteanu and this evening I'll be talking about

violence in the fifth movie of the James Bond franchise, called You Only Live

Twice, based loosely on the Ian Fleming's novel with the same name.

Directed by Gilbert Lewis, who's going to direct other two Bond movies

afterwards (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker), it has Sean Connery

playing for the fifth time James Bond, Tetsuro Tanba as Tiger Tanaka, Akiko

Wakabayashi and Mie Hama as the Bond girls, Aki and respectively Kissy

Suzuki, and Donald Pleasence as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE

and Bond's archenemy, who shows his face for the first time, at the 1 hour

and 38 minutes mark of the movie.

Up until 2008, You Only Live Twice was the deadliest James Bond movie,

meaning that it has the highest body count (196 kills from which 21 were

done by Bond himself), closely followed by The Spy Who Loved Me, shot by

the same director, Gilbert Lewis

The promise, the warning or better yet, the threat of violence in You Only

Live Twice, is found in the sequence at the very start of the movie, where

we see James Bond walking across the screen, filmed from an unknown
 assassin's perspective, through the barrel of a gun. Bond turns and shoots

at his attacker, making it seem like he shoots directly at his audience, killing

the perpetrator, causing blood to run down the screen

Even in the opening credits, violence is present because of the images of an

erupting volcano and the overuse of the color red

In this movie, James Bond's life is threatened several times. Once in the

scene before the opening credits, while he's in bed with a Chinese girl in a

hotel in Hong Kong, and he's shot at by a few men in uniform. We then

learn that he faked his own death to mislead his enemies.

The second time his life is threatened is after Mr. Henderson's death, who's

Bond's contact and who is stabbed in the back through the traditional

Japanese paper walls of his hotel room, while he is talking to Bond about

the mysterious spacecraft we will soon know that it's called Bird 1, which

hijacked the American spacecraft from orbit. Bond follows the attacker,

stabs him, dresses in his coat, hat and medical mask and pretending to be

hurt, lets the attacker's friend, the man waiting behind the wheel of a car

parked outside the hotel room, to take him to Osato's Chemicals and

Engineering building. He fights the driver there using at some point a couch

and kills him with a stone statue, found nearby. The use of environmental
 objects as defense and offense mechanisms is a recurrent trope in Bond

movies.

On the way out he's shot at by several men, he shoots back and kills one,

and escapes in Aki's car, while she's driving. Aki being the one who took

Bond to Mrs. Henderson and later on, to Tanaka.

Another threat to Bond's life is the second time he's on the way out of

Osato's headquarters, where he went pretending to be Mr. Fisher, a

businessman willing to buy in bulk fermentation chemicals from Osato.

Osato, who's Blofeld's henchman, orders his Caucasian assistant, Mrs.

Grant, also known as Number 11, to kill him. An intense and rather short

car chase ensues, Aki's small white Toyota convertible being followed by a

black car with three gunmen in it, plus the driver. They are saved by

Tanaka's helicopter which, with a big and powerful magnet, takes the black

car from the road and throws it in the ocean. (Car chases appear in all Bond

movies as does his famous and sometimes lame one liners, which he uses

immediately after defeating an enemy or when he is with a woman)

The fourth time his life is threatened is when him and Aki have to check the

Kobe docks, where a suspected ship, Ning-Po, carrying liquid oxygen, which

is used as rocket fuel, is set to sail to Shanghai. Bond sends Aki to tell
 Tanaka to follow the ship while he tries to escape Osato's men. He shots

several, on the roof he knocks out three with a stick, for in the end to be

captured by Osato and sent to Mrs. Grant's quarters.

He wakes up tied up to a chair (this is another recurrent trope), gets

slapped and threatened with a dermatome, a surgical knife used to slice off

skin. Without a plausible reason, she sets him free and he uses the

dermatome to cut her dress off.

The next time he finds himself in a dire situation is right in the very next

scene. Mrs. Grant manages to trap him in a malfunctioning small plane,

while she parachutes herself to safety. Bond breaks the wooden plank that

kept him captive, lands the broken plane and barely escapes as the plane

explodes.

He uses Little Nellie, a helicopter brought to him by Q, which when is

disassembled, can fit in 4 suitcases, to check out the volcano area and he's

soon followed by four helicopters shooting at him. He uses all the

helicopter's gimmicks and gadgets to take them down and save himself.

After his "Japanese" transformation, Bond trains in Karate at Tanaka's

school, and during a training session, he gets unarmed by the opponent,

 who shows that his training bamboo stick has a spear in it. It turns out he is

one of Osato's men, sent to kill 007. Bond kills him instead

At night, another man sent by Osato, sneaks into the attic of Aki and Bond's

room, while they're sleeping, and tries to poison him by dripping poison

down a string to James Bond's mouth. Aki moves in her sleep and the

poison gets into her mouth. Bond wakes up to Aki's dying gasps and shoots

and kills the invader

The last scenes, where Bond infiltrates in the Blofeld's volcano lair, and

helps Tanaka's men get in, are filled with violence and action. Bonds

manages to be taken prisoner by Blofeld, just as he was about to embark

Bird 1, which was supposed to capture the last American spacecraft sent

into space, and thus starting a 3d world war.

Blofeld has many opportunities to kill Bond, as his minions and the Ninjas

are fighting in the background, but he chooses instead to tell him his plans.

At one point he has the gun directed towards Bond but shoots Osato

instead.

After Blofeld escapes, Bond fights Hans for the key of the self destruct

mechanism found in Bird 1. Hans appears to be indestructible because he

 doesn't even flinch at Bond's blows. In the end, Hans miscalculates his

moves and falls to his death, into the pool full of piranhas.

In conclusion, although this is the most expensive Bond movie to make until

that date, the volcano lair alone costing as much as two Dr. No. movies

combined, the violence seems over the top, the villain cartoonish, the

plentitude of gadgets are not helping the plot get better and Bond is

ridiculously and unreasonably invincible in front of life threatening

circumstances, and permanently two dimensional.