From Russia With Love
(1963)
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Secret agent James Bond battles the all-enveloping tentacles of an international crime syndicate called SPECTRE. The organization's mad plan for world supremacy unfolds with the icy efficiency of a chessmaster's complex strategy, and if they succeed, the antagonism of the cold war will be pushed from deep-freeze to the supernova of atomic oblivion. But our man Bond dispatches sultry spies, madmen, and double agents with the same coolness he displays while downing martinis and making love to beautiful blondes. In this, the second of the series, Bond travels to Turkey to meet a mysterious Russian woman who claims to have fallen in love with his photograph. She offers him a secret translating device if he will join her, although he does not know that she has been put up to the task by Rosa Klebb, formerly of the KGB, who has gone to work for SPECTRE. It's Bond's assignment to get the girl and the machine back to England--and to do it, of course, in style. |
Ian Fleming received a useful boost to his sales when President Kennedy listed From Russia with Love as one of his ten favourite books. It is also one of the most popular Bond movies and a terrific thriller in its own right, owing much to Hitchcock and Carol Reed's The Third Man in its marvellous atmosphere of foreign intrigue. Superbly shot on location in a pre-touristy Istanbul, and closely following Fleming's original story, the film has Sean Connery duped into smuggling a top secret communist decoding machine, plus blonde Russian diplomat Daniela Bianchi, from Turkey to the west via the Orient Express. Lotte Lenya is unforgettable as lesbian villain Rosa Klebb, and Robert Shaw is an impressive hit man who commits a terrible faux pas in front of 007 by ordering red wine with fish.
Halliwell's Film Guide
The second Bond adventure and possibly the best, with Istanbul and Venice for backdrops and climaxes involving a speeding train and a helicopter. Arrant nonsense with tongue in cheek, on a big budget.