Does YOLT take place in 1966?
sinlum
Posts: 380MI6 Agent
Just watching YOLT and I noticed this:
If you notice the date of the newspaper, Bond's staged "murder" in Hong Kong took place in 1966 and not 1967.
Could there possibly be a time jump of about one year after the PTS to the funeral scene?
Comments
Good spot, @sinlum. The tendency is for us to accept that a Bond film takes place in the year of release, with the exception of QoS and (possibly) DAD and (arguably) NTTD. Often there is internal evidence to back this up (eg the dates on the photos in TB or the cheque in AVTAK) but not always. I think you've brought to light an indication that the film takes place in the year before release rather than there being a time jump of at most a few days.
Good spot. It could still make YOLT set in 1967 if we felt that Bond went off grid for a few months after his death, but of course once he's straight on the submarine he's being briefed for his new mission - and anyway of course the capsule event occurred before that anyway. So it runs according to a tight schedule. Is that the month of July I see on the newspaper?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
It's a good question. I can't think of any other instances in this movie that show or mention dates, other than a bottle of wine dated to '59. There's certainly nothing in the dialogue that mentions 1966 or 1967, just that the film proper (post PTS) takes place over about three weeks.
On a less fun note, it could just be that the production crew grabbed the first newspaper they could find before gluing the article on, as filming began around that date (July 1966). I can't imagine the duration between the public announcement of Bond's 'death' and funeral being any more than a couple of weeks. So, the funeral would also be set in July 1966, with the rest of the film's events set in July-August. (We corpses have no sense of timing)
I watched the pre-titles scene again to be absolutely sure. In the opening scene at the conference, where the Americans and Soviets have a verbal exchange, the American diplomat announces that the Americans intend to launch another shuttle in 20 days time. The British guy then says that their man is currently working on the case in Hong Kong and then it cuts to Bond with the Chinese girl wanting to give very best duck😅
My own three explanations are:
1) The film takes place in 1966 over the space of 3 weeks.
2) The newspaper has the wrong year printed on it and the film does instead take place in 1967 (this could be an oversight on the part of the film makers or was it actually a reference to the year that Connery announced he would be resigning from the role of Bond?)
3) The pre-titles take place in 1966. After the titles, a passage of time of approximately one year takes place. Bond goes into hiding for one year possibly escaping Hong Kong on Little Nelly (he is already familiar with the contraption in the film so he must have flown it before we see the thing in the film). If the pre-title sequence happens in 1966 and the rest one year later, the Americans therefore delay their shuttle launch by one year and Bond is spurred into action beginning with the staged burial scene.