Three women in every James Bond film? Roald Dahl says so.
Several articles describe how it happened that famous children’s book author Roald Dahl came to write the screenplay for the fifth James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Many of these articles have a passage about a formula set forth by the producers, such as in this quote:
“Dahl wrote his adaptation according to a formula he was given by the producers: You include three women as love interests, kill off the first two, and end the movie with Bond in the arms of the third.” [emphasis mine]
But is that claim true? And what does such a formula mean? Let me tell you.
Hang on, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Part 1: The origin of You Only Live Twice
Now, I’ve never seen that formula associated with any of the other screenwriters after Dahl. Why is that? Was that even a formula that the producers had in mind as a standard for all the films, or just the one that Dahl was hired to write?
But let’s start before that. There are a few peculiarities with the way that You Only Live Twice was conceived and written.
The novel You Only Live Twice has a very different context than the film. It was published as the final part of the Blofeld trilogy: Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. As such it was intended to show how Bond was destroyed after the death of his wife, got his revenge, only to lose his memory and die.
On the other side, in the world of the James Bond films, there was no Blofeld trilogy with the same kind of continuity. For sure, Dr No, From Russia With Love and Thunderball all had SPECTRE in them, and the latter two films had Blofeld as the villain-behind-the-villain. But there was no real progression in the sense of the novels, where Bond first encounters the organisation, then meets Blofeld and loses his wife, and then is sent on an impossible mission to avenge her death. The film version of Dr No was the introduction to SPECTRE, in From Russia With Love, Bond meets the organisation, and in Thunderball, Bond again meets the organisation. There’s been no real step forward from From Russia With Love to Thunderball.
