So anyway, Dr. No got us off to a flying start, what with the derring-do and Ursula Andress and whatnot. Today, we go further into the breach with the second Sean Connery Bond flick, 1963’s From Russia With Love.
From Russia With Love (1963)
The second 007 adventure is a much better flick than the first in just about every way. It’s also the first to feature a bunch of Bond tropes that made their way into most future entries. It’s got the series’ first cold open, and a pretty wack one at that, with blonde uber-assassin Robert Shaw tracking and apparantly killing Bond. Whoops, it was just some SPECTRE doofus wearing an insanely good Sean Connery mask! Fooled me! Pretty lame start to what is really a pretty damn good movie.
After another groovy opening sequence, the main story kicks in. I must say that for a film based on a novel, this plot really doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s one thing for Michael Bay’s roomful of chained monkeys to churn out a non-sensical Transformers sequel. It’s quite another for a film based on famous and popular novel to have a plot that hangs together quite this loosely.
It seems that SPECTRE’s mad at Bond for his semi-effortless dispatching of bauxite mogul Dr. No. So they concoct a ludicrously complex plan to lure him to Istanbul, have him help steal a Russian code machine, then kill him and make off with the machine once he’s smuggled it onto a train out of Eastern Europe. Surely there’s no way that Britain’s top secret agent would fall for something this half-baked! If only he had a weakness, something that caused him to lose all sense of reason, logic or critical thinking…
Enter Tatiana Romanova. This luscious, leggy blonde claims she’s a Russian who wants to defect and take a code machine with her. In fact, she’s just a dupe who doesn’t even know she’s being set up by SPECTRE, too. It doesn’t really matter who she’s working for, though, because from the moment she shows up unannounced in his hotel suite bed, Bond’s pretty much going to play along. Bond lets himself get strung along, even though he sort of knows he’s not getting the whole story. For the second straight film, Bond’s lust for every hot woman he meets just about gets him (and her) killed. On multiple occasions.
From Russia With Love plays like the first really mature James Bond flick, with a sort of swaggering confidence in itself that Dr. No lacked. The action scenes are much better than in the first film, highlighted by a frenetic stateroom brawl between Bond and Robert Shaw’s assassin. Connery seems much more at home in the role this time out. The film features the first scene of Bond getting the low-down on Q’s new spy gadgets. This time, he gets a slick new briefcase with such amenities as a pull-out dagger and built-in tear gas jets. From Russia With Love also kicks off the Bond tradition of spectacular location shooting, with some incredible views of Istanbul, including a murder they were somehow allowed to stage inside the Hagia Sophia.
Overall, I was quite impressed with the second Bond adventure. It corrects most of the mistakes of the first flick and does a nice job expanding the story to encompass the far-flung locale. Robert Shaw makes a great, menacing villain. Tatiana is a knockout Bond girl. It even features what today they’d call Marvel Universe-style world-building, with the shadowy head of SPECTRE remaining unseen and unbeaten–ready to wreck havoc in a future installment, no doubt. Good stuff.
From Russia With Love Tally Sheet
Women Slept With: 4
- card player/stalker Sylvia Trench
- 2 unnamed Gypsy prostitutes
- Russian lunatic Tatiana Romanova
Gadgets: 1 – tricked-out attache case
Villain Defeated By: Gassing, stabbing & garrotting on a train.
Total Men Killed: 1
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