This is one of the best of the Sean Connery Bond films, despite the actor's desire to quit the franchise. Here, 007 is sent to Japan where, having faked his own death, he goes native, "marries" a local girl and, in his quest to discover why spaceships are disappearing, finds a volcano with a false crater. It also has one of the all-time great screen villains in Donald Pleasence's scarred, cat-stroking Blofeld, even though he's unseen for much of the film. Director Lewis Gilbert keeps the pace up, and the script (co-written by Roald Dahl) is suitably arch. But it is surely production designer Ken Adam's triumph: the secret base, where the film's explosive climax unfolds, remains definitive and much parodied.

A mysterious spacecraft captures Russian and American space capsules and brings the two superpowers to the brink of war. James Bond investigates the case in Japan and comes face to face with his archenemy Blofeld.