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When an American space capsule is intercepted in orbit and vanishes after landing somewhere in Japan, the Russians are blamed and an international incident seems likely. The real culprit is SPECTRE, and after an elaborate charade designed to make the enemy think he is dead, James Bond swims ashore in Japan to investigate. His contact in Tokyo, Henderson, is promptly murdered. Bond kills the assailant, takes his place in the getaway car, and is driven to the Osato Chemical Engineering Company. Surviving an attempt to kill him as he cracks the safe, he escapes with the aid of Aki, secretary to Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service. Returning to the Osato warehouses, Bond finds a ship being loaded with liquid nitrogen, is captured, and left trapped in a pilotless aircraft by Osato's sadistic aide, Helga Brandt. He survives. Meanwhile, Tanaka has traced the ship to a remote part of the Japanese coastline. Reconnoitring in a miniature helicopter, Bond places the centre of operations in the vicinity of an extinct volcano. Disguised as a Japanese fisherman and provided with a "wife", Kissy Suzuki, Bond moves into the area, while Tanaka holds his Ninja Commandos in readiness. Gaining entrance to the well-armoured volcano, Bond finds SPECTRE arch-villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld - who has just fed Helga to his piranha fish - preparing to follow up his success with a Russian capsule by seizing another American one. Bond is captured, but with the aid of Tanaka and his Ninjas manages to foil Blofeld just in time and blow up his entire HQ.

Really no better and no worse than its predecessors, the fifth James Bond is rather less enjoyable mainly because the formula has become so completely mechanical (and Bond himself so predictably indestructible) without any compensation in other directions. Gorgeously amorous girls, fiendish devices and expendable opponents duly make their appearance at carefully regulated intervals; all are handled with the same expressionless competence by Bond; and one really couldn't care less. It would be different if You Only Live Twice revealed some of the elegance and imagination in direction which gives such a lift to films like Le Tigre Aime la Chair Fraiche and Modesty Blaise; but in this series, money flows like water to ensure a glossy, well-oiled operation where no touch of individuality is allowed to upset the applecart, and where mise en scene would be as out of place as Dietrich in a Doris Day film. Still, whatever else one can say about the Bond films, their mechanical gimmicks run rings round anything offered by most of the other spy and secret agent films. You Only Live Twice has its generous share, including a helicopter fitted with electro-magnet for removing unwanted pursuing cars from the highway, a desk with built-in X-ray machine for seeing if your client is carrying a gun, and a do-it-yourself miniature helicopter kit complete with supply of machine-guns, missiles and aerial mines. The dialogue also has its moments, mainly blue-ish ("I think I will enjoy very much serving under you", a wide-eyed damsel coos to Bond), but it is perhaps symptomatic of the film that the machines don't give the humans a look in. Even Donald Pleasence, scar-faced, sneering, and fondling a supercilious cat as the chief villain, seems diminished.

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