You Only Live Twice (film) manned spacecraft disappear mysteriously in orbit. With each nation blaming the other amidst the Cold War, Bond travels secretly to a remote Japanese island 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 working for the government of an unnamed Asian power, implied to be the People's Republic of China, to provoke war between the superpowers. During the filming in Japan, it was announced that Sean Connery would retire from the role of Bond, but after
You Only Live Twice (novel) way through the middle-brow masses, a relaxation to the great, a stimulus to the humble, the only common denominator between Kennedy and Oswald". The critic for "The Times" was largely unimpressed with "You Only Live Twice", complaining that "as a moderate to middling travelogue what follows will just about do ... the plot with its concomitant sadism does not really get going until more than half way through". In contrast to the previous novels, "The Times" continued, "though Mr. Fleming's macabre imagination is as interesting as ever, some of the old snap seems to have gone". Dealing with the cliffhanger