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5. You Only Live Twice (1967)
When folks who haven’t actually gone back to watch the old Bond movies think of what Connery’s era looked like, You Only Live Twice is probably what they’re imagining: a bald, scarred supervillain with a Persian cat on his lap; a hollowed out volcano in which evil designs for world domination are hatched; a climax where the hero leads a team of ninjas in an assault against baddies with World War III on the line.
You Only Live Twice is ‘60s Bondmania at its cheesiest. It is also where director Lewis Gilbert set the table for 007 at his most epic, with future adventures about megalomaniacs in ludicrous secret lairs (with ludicrously amazing productions designs, courtesy of Ken Adam) all growing out of this wellspring. With that said, we wish YOLT had aged better than it now plays. But with its story of Bond “dying” his skin and getting a bowl haircut to look Japanese (he doesn’t) and its exoticized depiction of the “Far East,” particularly Japanese women who are stereotyped as subservient and eager to please a European man, the film is fairly uncomfortable to the modern gaze.
Worse still as a Bond movie, it’s also fairly dull until the ninja-climax, in no small part because this is the one where Connery began to look checked out. It’s no secret his relationship with Bond producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman was tumultuous, and after years of overexposure to screaming fans, Connery was looking for the exit. He’d retire (briefly) from the role following this film, but he already looks done onscreen. At least he gets to feed one of Blofeld’s henchmen to a pond of ravenous piranhas. “Bon appetit.”
4. Thunderball (1965)
After helping Connery establish the suave, yet rugged, persona of the cinematic James Bond—which should not be mistaken for Fleming’s own literary creation—director Terrence Young returned to the Bond franchise with Thunderball. However, in the interim between Young/Connery’s first two Bond movies and this one, the game had changed thanks to Guy Hamilton’s goofier Goldfinger (1964). As a result Thunderball, feels a bit awkward as it tries to tap into the larger-than-life, cartoonish aspects of Goldfinger while retaining Young’s general sensibility of cool (and bordering on cold-hearted) espionage.
Even so, Thunderball was the height of Bondmania. The character was arguably never bigger than this, with the movie defining the pop culture mood instead of responding to it. Connery is also in top-form as 007 at his most cynical. The pleasure on his face as he steals the villain’s girl out from under him, and in plain sight, is almost sinister. And after using the evil Luciana Paluzzi as a human shield for a silencer’s bullet at a Bahamian nightclub, Connery’s delivery of “Mind if my friend sits this one out, she’s just dead,” is so ruthless you don’t know whether to laugh or shudder.
The chauvinistic gender politics of Thunderball are incredibly problematic, and have fairly become the center of most discourses about the character’s more neolithic aspects, but the movie is one of the few in Connery’s day where the main “Bond Girl” (Claudine Auger) goes in with eyes wide open as to what kind of relationship Bond is looking for (read: none), and to date she is the only leading lady who’s saved Bond in the climax by killing the villain, her abusive lover Largo (Adolfo Celi). To this day, even the more progressive Craig era seemed to always reverse that.
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