My favourite film aged 12You Only Live TwiceThe fifth Bond had enough ninjas, piranhas and flamethrowers to blow one boy viewer’s head off – but its casual racism and sexism don’t look so smart post-Austin Powers
Now it’s a Wetherspoon, but back in the day it was a temple to the seventh art. They called it Sedgley Clifton. Why? I don’t know, but I like to think they named it after Clifton Webb. It was there, in the heart of the Black Country in 1967, that my dad took me deeper into the black.
There were aspidistras in the circle bar. The cinema’s red velour seats smelled of smoke and other ancient emissions. “Please don’t make infantile slurping noises,” said the announcement as I sucked on my Kia-Ora straw-cup. The floor was sticky. Then the lights went down for the last time. Perhaps my dad passed me some Maltesers. It was my first time. Hello darkness, my new friend.
I was five and my dad 36 when we went to see You Only Live Twice. In memory, the action took place entirely in a submarine lair painted gunmetal grey. Everything was grey – Bond’s suits, the spacecraft, the polystyrene walls. I was being prepared for the grey adult world. The grey palette spread from the screen across walls and floor towards us, like blood rushing across the hotel corridor in The Shining. I’d never before felt so enveloped by a visual world, nor been asked to sit still for quite so long. The Pye television in the living room wasn’t big, and The Magic Roundabout only lasted 10 minutes.
On screen, men were doing manly things – brawling, carrying clipboards, plotting the end of the world, talking about the correct way to serve vodka cocktails, whatever those were. I honoured these patriarchal mysteries in the same way I brought tea to my dad as he worked under the car’s bonnet before rushing indoors to get warm.
The men were, I realise now, striving to foil a plot by an off-the-peg sociopath to hold both the USSR and the USA to ransom. Sure, there were women, three paces behind the action, in bikinis and unsuitable footwear. They clearly didn’t matter when the tough got going. The baddie, Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld, with his strange melted face, was notionally a man, but he stroked a white cat which meant a) he hadn’t got the memo about the colour scheme and b) was insufficiently butch, ultimately, to triumph over the good guys all of whom, Bond included, were making their assault on his lair in grey turtlenecks with matching hoods. Unlike the balaclava I wore to school, these hoods probably weren’t knitted by the ninjas’ mothers.
In one repeated scene, a spaceship’s nose cone opened to consume a smaller spaceship, typifying how Blofeld could consume even the most advanced weapons with which the superpowers fought the cold war through proxies in space. At the time, I knew nothing of special effects budgets, but even I knew that Val Singleton on Blue Peter could have shown viewers how to recreate this scene with toilet roll tubes and metallic spray paint.
Clearly, I understood next to nothing of the substance of the film then, but it made a powerful multimedia impression on me at a pre-verbal level. Not just the cinematography but the music – the sexy guitar gunfire of the theme tune, the sweeping strings and French horn harmonies ingeniously distracted from the manifold fatuities of the title song’s lyrics poor old Nancy Sinatra was obliged to sing.
More importantly, seeing a Bond film so young gave me cultural cachet enough to strut the playground like Sean Connery in short trousers. Just as he could tell his Japanese hosts the correct temperature to serve sake (98.4F), so for a few months at Alder Coppice Infants I had peers hanging on my grasp of Bond minutiae – weaponry, clobber, balletic fisticuffs. Everything except the sex stuff, which was then beyond me.
Watching the film 53 years later, its lethal cocktail of racism and misogyny leaves me shaken and stirred. Lewis Gilbert’s film was released a year before Wolverhampton MP Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech at Birmingham town hall. At Alder Coppice, boys and girls would march round that playground chanting: “Enoch, Enoch, Enoch Powell.” We didn’t know what or why we were chanting, but in retrospect the message was clear: the Black Country should be white and the rest of Britain, too.
This makes the film’s perspective on race bracing, to put it mildly. At the outset, Bond peels himself off his latest dalliance in a Hong Kong bedroom and asks her: “Why do Chinese girls taste so different from the others?” His love interest (Ling) replies: “You think we better, huh?” Bond: “No, just different. Like Peking duck is different from Russian caviar. But I love them both.” Ling: “Darling, I give you very best duck.” The world, when you think about it in Bond’s eyes, is a buffet of women. And other races, too, are merely exotically consumable commodities. The double entendres passed me by aged five; even now, they scarcely make a lick of sense.
Incredibly, Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay and, let’s just say, sexist bants were not his forte. In another scene, for instance, Bond is the guest of the head of Japanese secret services and invited to join the latter in some strange domestic approximation of a Center Parcs water feature. “Now you take your first civilised bath,” says his genial host. “Really?” says Connery’s 007, leering at the scantily clad women bathing assistants who press their attentions on him, before adding gamely: “Well, I like the plumbing.” Nope, I haven’t a clue what he’s on about, either.
Later, Bond must pass himself off as Japanese to become a ninja. Expert surgeons (more Japanese women in bras and knickers, possibly ironically foreshadowing hospital shortages in gowns, masks and globes during the Covid-19 crisis) operate. They shave his chest, brush his hair forward and install plastic prostheses around his eyes to make the former Edinburgh milkman look sufficiently oriental. What the fudge sundae? It’s a variation on the blackface I got used to while watching The Black and White Minstrel Show.
Near the end, Bond and his fourth Asian dalliance of the movie have climbed a volcano to investigate Blofeld’s lair. She’s called Kissy, making her sister in British orientalising ridicule to The Mikado’s Pitti-Sing, Peep-Bo and Yum-Yum. While Bond wears stout shoes for the ascent, Kissy climbs in a bikini and the kind of fast-fashion flats that wouldn’t last five minutes on the pavements of the Shinjuku, much less ascending volcanic rubble. When the pair realise they’re outnumbered by Blofeld’s goons, Bond tells Kissy peremptorily to head back to get assistance. And so she does, descending the mountain in those shoes, swimming back to the mainland while strafed by helicopter gunfire and then returning with the aforementioned turtleneck-wearing ninjas. Say what you like about Bond women, but my God they uncomplainingly served the patriarchy.
If there’s anything to take from this film to get us through lockdown, it’s Bond’s sang-froid in the face of apocalypse. He met whatever Johnny Foreigner could throw at him with stiff upper lip and stiffer crease in his trousers, buoyed no doubt by the prospect of a multicultural legover during the final credits. In the epilogue, mutually assured destruction averted, he puts the moves on Kissy in their inflatable raft, though you’d have thought both of them, and her in particular, wouldn’t have been too puffed for nautical how’s your father.
In between 1967 and now a veil of irony has descended between the film and me. I could scarcely see it without thinking of how Austin Powers’ Dr Evil mocked Blofeld’s business model. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Dr Evil tells his guests. “Welcome to my submarine lair. It’s long, hard and full of seamen! [Silence] No? Nothing? Not even a titter? Tough sub …” Or I thought of how Homer Simpson unwittingly became party to diabolical sociopath Hank Scorpio in his submarine military industrial complex. “Homer – what’s your least favourite country, Italy or France?” asks Scorpio, wondering which of the two should be fried with his nukes. “France,” replies Homer without a beat. “Nobody ever says Italy,” chuckles Scorpio before pushing the relevant button.
I’m still trying to remember what the film was like before the veil descended, and its unspeakable sexual and racial politics turned You Only Live Twice into a no-go zone for me. What I can recall is that as me and my dad walked home down Ettymore Road, dusk was falling. I skipped from streetlight to streetlight, narrating my favourite scenes. And, to be fair, they’re still pretty impressive. The moment the piranhas that strip Helga Brandt’s flesh in five seconds. The helicopter-wielded super-magnet that lifted the baddies’ pursuing car and dropped it in the ocean. Bond chop-sockying incoming stuntmen without getting so much as a wrinkle in his Savile Row suit. That sequence in which 007 totalled choppers with flamethrowers dispatched from M’s latest gizmo, a flimsy self-assembly flying tricycle. What a guy. My dad and I would never measure up.
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