From Russia with Love (1963)

| Action,Adventure,Thriller
UK / English
"The world's masters of murder pull out all the stops to destroy Agent 007! " James Bond willingly falls into an assassination ploy involving a naive Russian beauty in order to retrieve a Soviet encryption device that was stolen by SPECTRE.
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Best of the Bonds?
The first three Bonds (Dr. No, FRWL, Goldfinger) are without question
the best in the series, though From Russia with Love may well be the
best of the best. It has all things we look for in a great Bond film -
exotic locales, sinister villains, beautiful women - but it was made
before Goldfinger established the
ingenious-yet-demented-supervillain-plus-indestructible-henchman
formula as canonical, so its plot line may surprise viewers reared on
the later Bond films. For one thing, there's little or nothing in the
way of gadgetry (though Q does provide our hero with a pretty nifty
briefcase). Beyond a brief encounter with the faceless Number One,
there's no arch-villain looming over the action, and the henchmen are
at once less invulnerable and more interesting than most of their
successors in the series. Particularly memorable, of course, are Lotte
Lenya as the hatchet-faced Colonel ("She's had her kicks") Kleb and
Robert Shaw as the brutish Donald "Red" Grant. Kleb's edgy menace is
neatly offset by her terror at the prospect of failure (an option which
Number One refuses to countenance); her subtle come-on to Tatiana
Romanova was positively daring by 1963 standards, and she manages to do
for footwear what Goldfinger's Odd Job went on to do for head gear.
Grant is no superman, but a vicious, small-time thug, recruited by
SPECTRE and transformed into a fearsome enforcer; his bitter encounter
with Bond on the train speaks volumes about the class tensions that
still underlay British society in the post-war era.
Connery, for his part, gets to build on the character he first fleshed
out in Dr. No. His Bond really emerges here as a complex man,
formidable but flawed. He's genteel and sophisticated, but he doesn't
always keep his cool; unlike the too-often unflappable Roger Moore,
Connery's Bond betrays both anger and fear when the circumstances seem
to warrant it. He intervenes chivalrously to stop a fight between two
Gypsy women, but he's not above slugging a woman in the service of his
mission. I've always enjoyed the humanizing chemistry between Connery
and Pedro Armendariz's larger-than-life Kerim ("I've led a fascinating
life") Bey, the most charming of Bond sidekicks; their friendship comes
across as genuine and multi-dimensional. Today's viewers (especially
women) will likely find Daniela Bianchi's Tanya ("I LOVE you, James")
Romanova an uncomfortably passive damsel-in-distress, but, hey: she's
drop-dead gorgeous and has some nice scenes with Connery. The Turkish
and Balkan settings are spectacular and the train sequence at the end
is both exciting and suspenseful. Cold War scenario notwithstanding,
this one has aged very well. Shake yourself a pitcher of vodka martinis
and spend a Friday night watching Dr. No, From Russia with Love and
Goldfinger.
PersonalSeen it: | Nej |
Nr of disks/tapes: | 1 |
Storage device: | Divx 4 |
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