One of the rules of this project is that I'm not allowed to start writing one review until I've finished the previous one. An exception to that is if I've written something but in the editing process decide it'd fit in better elsewhere. Kind of like Sylvia Trench showing up again at the start of this one.
She is an odd artifact of Dr. No, the last vestige of "we don't exactly know what a Bondfilm is yet" in the first film with Desmond Llewellyn and the last one before the Aston shows up. In their defense, Dr. No was insanely profitable (made back its meager budget more than 50 times over). As I hinted in the previous one, a couple of the key players had worked together before, but Bond isn't Yer Typical Action Movie (or at least, it shouldn't be... looking at you, Skyfall*).
*And Tomorrow Never Dies. And Licence to Kill. And...
There are times to take risks and times to play it safe, and bless 'em, most times the Bond people know what time is what. From Russia With Love isn't The White Album - you don't make an album like The White Album as your sophomore offering - it's With the Beatles. A worthy follow-up that doesn't muck too much with what works, but there are still a lot of covers.
Which is fine; there were only 12 Fleming novels* and the Bondfilm producers only had the rights to 9-10** of them, so if they kept rocking along as well and as fast as Dr. No had, the franchise would be over and done by 1972 and they could all move on to other things.
It very nearly was, and they very nearly did.
*Not counting the two short story anthologies.
**They explicitly didn't have the rights to Casino Royale (back then) or any part of The Spy Who Loved Me other than its title. (Didn't stop them including a henchman with metal teeth.) The rights to Thunderball are their own delightful can of worms we'll have to open in two months whenever I can be bothered to get there, this post is already three many months late.
Does this one need an introduction? Oh, come on, it's From Russia With Love, one of the best Bond films ever made/the best Bond film ever made (delete based on whether Connery is Your Guy. Oh, don't lie to yourself; this one's leagues better than Goldfinger). Tania wearing just a lace choker. The fight on the train. The poison-tipped shoe. The trivia bits everyone knows (or should know), like how they had to cut a scene of Bond giving a tail the slip because it turned out said tail had already been killed in an earlier scene, or how Pedro Armendariz (Kerim Bey) was dying of cancer and had to shoot all his scenes in two weeks, or how (my personal favorite) the script was re-written after the SPECTRE HQ set was already torn down, so they put Lotte Lenya* (Rosa Klebb) directly in front of a blown-up film still of herself in the SPECTRE office and had her say the new lines.
*Yes, the one who gets name-checked in most English-language versions of "Mack the Knife." Lenya, the composer's widow, was invited to attend Louis Armstrong's recording of the song in 1955, and he changed a line (a list of Macheath's victims) to include her name. Basically ever version after has used his lyrics.
In the interest of not bogging this one down with trivia, and lacking any better form of introduction, let's see what else I can get out of the way up front: there's only one shot in the train fight where they used stunt doubles. Martine Beswick (one of the fighting gypsy girls) will be back in Thunderball as the first "does she actually qualify as a Bond Girl" Bond Girl;* Nadja Regin (Bey's mistress) will be back in the pre-title sequence of Goldfinger (although Nikki van der Zyl only dubs her in the latter). Blofeld in this film is played by Anthony Dawson (Professor Dent in the previous one) and dubbed by Eric Pohlmann, who may or may not have also dubbed Blofeld in Thunderball (sources disagree; it sure doesn't sound like the same guy, but maybe he was a good vocal chameleon). Vladek Sheybal plays Kronsteen in this and has a role in Casino Royale 1967, making him the second actor after Ursula Andress to do both Bond and a Bond spoof (she's in the same movie, but appears first in both it and the Bond franchise). George Pastell (the train conductor) appeared in the Doctor Who serial "The Tomb of the Cybermen" with Roy Stewart (Quarrel Jr. in Live and Let Die) and George Roubicek (a Stromberg goon in The Spy Who Loved Me - he also had a bit part** in that cult sci-fi movie you've never heard of the same year). Connery lent both his likeness and his voice to the 2005 video game adaptation, adding another wrinkle to the question of whether he or Roger Moore played Bond more times.***
*The question is raised because she doesn't actually ever have an opportunity to sleep with Bond. We could all happily ignore the question of whether she still counts as a Bond Girl until Quantum of Solace came along (if you don't know, Bond never gets the chance to sleep with the female lead in that one).
**Something about battle station plans not being aboard a ship, and an escape pod being jettisoned.
***Connery did six EON films (1962-67, 1971) plus Never Say Never Again (1983) and the aforementioned video game. Moore did seven EON films (1973-85) and a 1964 TV spoof. (His tremendously amusing appearance as "not James Bond, but a tremendously rich layabout who thinks he's Roger Moore As James Bond" in The Cannonball Run doesn't count; for one thing, he drives an Aston Martin, something the EON Moore Bond doesn't do.)
Did I get everything out of my system? Oh, wait, no, the big one: this one was made next because the book landed on a list of President Kennedy's favorite books (as a reminder, the book is a rampagingly adolescent tale about a spy getting embroiled in a sex scandal, hrm) and, while the film wasn't released stateside until May 1964, Kennedy may or may not have screened an advance print at the White House shortly before his assassination.
Cheap trick, reducing the film down to a bunch of mindless trivia. A bit like Q's lab in Die Another Day.
From Russia With Love (1963)
If you thought that introduction was bad, be thankful I didn't kill off James Bond. Oh, no, wait, it was just a guy wearing a perfect latex mask, for... well, I'm sure he had a very good reason. Our first clue that this isn't Bond is that he's snooping around in a tux. Bond wears a tux to play cards and pick up ladies, not to snoop* (is Licence to Kill the first film to actually break this rule? Must check. Update: can't be bothered, but it feels right - and even then, he wears the tux because he happens to be wearing it when he gets an opportunity to snoop). The tux isn't a costume and Bond isn't a superhero;** he wears what's necessary for whatever job he's on at the moment. For example, Daniel Craig wears a pair of swim trunks in Casino Royale because his job is to get women to watch the film.
*Yes, Bond's wearing a tux under the diving suit in the cold open of Goldfinger, but that isn't his outermost layer, now is it?
**On reflection, there's a case to be made that the tuxedo-clad "James Bond" is the alter ego of the superspy 007. I may develop this theory if I can be bothered to do so. Don't hold your breath: CraigSlop notwithstanding, Bond barely has enough characterization to fill out one character, let alone two.
But before we get to that, there are already some important changes. Gone are the wonky sci-fi sound effects; now the gunbarrel is just Bond Theme, as it will be forevermore (Licence to Kill's uh... reinterpretation notwithstanding). That's still Bob Simmons in there, because it's the same footage we saw in Dr. No - that won't change until they have to shoot a new one to accommodate Thunderball's huge aspect ratio - but the Saltzman and Broccoli credit isn't until the proper titles (the only other time it'll be in the gunbarrel is OHMSS, and that's so they can give Ian Fleming top billing when they get to the credits). Finally, and this is a subtle but important distinction, we have our first John Barry score, and with it comes our first John Barry rendition of the Bond Theme. It's not as unhinged as the one Monty Norman threw at us in Dr. No's title sequence, but it is almost frantic, like they've got a surprise hit on their hands and don't really know how to follow it up, which is probably exactly what they were feeling.
Norman versus Barry is a comparison that's hard to make, given that Norman only did the one film and Barry's basically synonymous with the hyper-cool music of Bondfilm, 1963-1987 (never mind that he sat out nearly half the Moorera - Marvin Hamlisch's "Bond 77" is cowbell-disco goodness and Bill Conti's "A Drive in the Country" is pleasantly jaunty, and the parts of Live and Let Die that George Martin bothered to score sound quite nice, but on the whole those scores don't reach the ominousness of "Capsule in Space" or the suspiciously-menacing cheeriness of "Dawn Raid on Fort Knox" or the mystery of "Search for the Vulcan" or the extremely 80s-ness of "Ice Chase"). I think Norman's limitations as a composer were delved into somewhat in the previous review - the reused cues, the incessant use of Bond Theme (although to be fair, using that as a criticism would damn both this film and Tomorrow Never Dies).
We're also not at the point where the gunbarrel opens up directly into the scene. Instead the dots recede and then we fade in on... gardens. Fake!Bond running across a bridge, stopping to examine some statuary. He's being stalked by a pair of legs. Hrm. Tania gets a legs-first introduction (for Bond, at least) via the pervy periscope, and Rosa Klebb famously tries to kick Bond with a poison-tipped shoe at the end. A shoe, you'll recall, was Bond's most helpful gadget in the previous film, and of course the plot of this one revolves around the badhats manufacturing a sex scandal. Basically we've now covered all the body parts below the waist. Lovely thematic continuity going on.
Fake!Bond runs away as the legs slowly ascend a staircase, Fake!Bond coming to a pause beside another statue. Not sure what to make of this, honestly. The pair of legs cross the bridge and now we see that they're attached to a heavily-shadowed Robert Shaw... who is practically mincing his way down the steps. And you thought the Pleasence Blofeld was the first Bond villain with a silly walk. He stops to pick of a branch, which he breaks a few hasty cuts later. Fake!Bond whips his head around, and he sure does look like Sean Connery. It's weird to me that the franchise has never done anything with SPECTRE's perfect latex mask tech. Although I suppose if the modern franchise did it, it'd be derided as a Mission: Impossible knockoff. Which is still a) better and b) far more entertaining than whatever Spectre thinks it's doing.
An ominous rendition of the Bond theme kicks in, we get a close-up of the faces, and then it's back to feet. Did Quentin Tarantino travel back in time to direct this?
Fake!Bond pops off a shot at Grant and misses - our second clue it's not him - and then creeps around the hedges in a sequence so bafflingly edited that for a moment it looks like he's stalking himself. A few seconds later, Grant pops out of the bushes and garrotes him. The lights pop on and Morzeny (Walter Gotell - he'll be back in the Moorera as General Gogol) tells Grant that it took him "exactly one minute, fifty-two seconds" to kill Fake!Bond, which almost works with what we see: the scene begins at 0:00:40 and Grant attacks Fake!Bond at 0:02:33 (one minute, fifty-three seconds later). Granted it takes him a few more seconds to finish the job, but I'll allow it. Still no drama-induced time dilation in the franchise. (I'm assuming that the shenanigans mentioned in the Dr. No review are down to scripting errors - there's no failure for time to flow at a rate of one second per second on screen, it's just that Bond has an extra day to do his job because the script made a boo-boo.)
Morzeny reaches down to a suddenly-much-paler Fake!Bond and pulls his mask off. I already made the point about the curious dearth of latex masks in subsequent instalments, so let's move directly into the titles.
It's an energetic blasting of the Bond theme, followed by an instrumental version of the title song, while a belly dancer undulates in front of a projector screen. This occasionally makes the credits frustratingly difficult to read (insert joke about the Star Wars title crawl here). Syd Cain is the art director this time because Ken Adam is off doing Dr. Strangelove. (Bond can't fight in the War Room, but there will still be a Big Board.) And Robert Brownjohn is doing the titles instead of Maurice Binder. John Barry has taken over the music duties. Aside from that, there's a great deal of continuity in behind-the-scenes crew.
Venice, the not-London city Bond will visit the most (correction! It's tied with Istanbul). You know it's Venice because there are gondolas. The filmmakers don't feel the need to give you a location title. This will not always be the case. (Actually watch how they establish different cities throughout the film; it's often rather clever.)
I've been occasionally finding amateur chess puzzles online - you know, "White mates in 2," the secret is almost always to sacrifice a piece putting the enemy king in check and forcing him to react in a certain way that lets you win on the next turn. So I'm looking at the big chess map here on the wall and my immediate thought is Knight to h6, which is almost certainly wrong but creates an entertaining split attack. I mean, that's solved by King to h8, and I don't know where you go from there not being a chess wizard.
The two judges appear to be Milton Friedman and Stanley Kubrick, so that's entertaining (no it's obviously not them but that's who they look like to me. If you don't like this sort of inanity don't read my descriptions of the other 00 agents in Thunderball when we get to that).
Oh wow, he has moved the knight, just not the way I expected him to. Knight to e5, a revealed check with the Bishop. I suspect this is the key to the scene. The Knight isn't directly threatening the King, but it's gotten out of the way of the Bishop. SPECTRE doesn't directly challenge the Brits or the Russians - at least, not until the end - it just... well, it doesn't so much get out of their way, as maneuver them into each other's way. Not a perfect metaphor, but certainly better than en passant or castling Queenside (I think that's Skyfall, anyway).
While his opponent ponders what to do - dashing the King into h8 seems to my amateur eye to be the only move that won't cost him a Queen in the near future (there's a much better move, I've missed it. Read on), although that probably sets up a checkmate I'm not immediately seeing - a butler shows up and gives Kronsteen a glass of water, his hand lingering in the frame too long. Kronsteen shoots him a look - you're in my shot, you peon, you extra, you understudy. Leave. Now. - But it turns out that there's a note slipped him under the glass. Seems like cheating, if you ask me. But the note just says he's required "at once." He doesn't get up and leave, though.
I take it back, his opponent looks far more like Milton Friedman than that judge does. I stand by my statement about the other one resembling Kubrick, though.
And he's done Kh7 - I know the in-film commentary says "Rook 2," but who uses that annotation? Next you're gonna tell me that there 20 shillings in a pound instead of something eminently sensible like 5,280 feet in a mile.
Silly Brits.
Kronsteen plops the Queen over to e4. Check again. But hold on! Immediately after the official moves the corresponding piece on the Big Board (I told you there was a Big Board), we get a wide shot - is that a ceiling or a matte painting? Something about it looks just a tad off to me, so I'm going with painting - and the move hasn't been replicated on the Big Board yet! The audience is gasping and shuffling around, but they're reacting to Friedman bungling his retreat, not Kronsteen taking advantage of it!
Friedman could drag the game out with Kh8 - probably what he should have done in the first place, given that Kronsteen's only method of safely attacking h8 is Ng6+, which blocks any follow-through attack on h7. doesn't have a safe way to attack h8; if he goes Ng6+, Friedman can respond with Nxg6. (Nf7+ is even worse because the obvious response, Qxf7, forks the Queen, the Bishop, and the Rook all the way down in the 1 row.) (Nope, I was right the first time, Ng6+ is the next move, see here.) But he's less of a stubborn old git than Bond will prove to be, so he concedes. He congratulates Kronsteen - "a brilliant coup." I'll take your word for it, Milton - to me, the genius of these sorts of chess puzzles is in the getting to that position, not the making of the most obvious moves once you're there. And we didn't get to see that part.
So I've tracked down where this game came from, and it turns out it's even worse. Instead of Kh7, Milton's move should have been Ne6, blocking Kronsteen's Bishop and possibly forcing a draw. It's a weird mistake on the filmmakers' part, because in the game this game was based on, White had two extra pawns that would scupper the Ne6 move I'd just mentioned. Again, read the article in the previous paragraph if you really care.
Kronsteen bolts without shaking any spectators' hands, so you know he's a bad 'un. Or he's got the flu and is practicing good hygiene. Unclear. Either way he goes to the SPECTRE boat.
And the first thing we see inside Blofeld's office is time being unwound again - the first shot, of Klebb walking around Blofeld's desk to stare at the "Siamese fighting fish," is played in reverse. Deep in the background it appears that Blofeld has a bar - I had always thought of the pre-OHMSS Blofeld as pretty sterile and vice-less, so go figure. We're told that SPECTRE is like the clever fish, the one who waits (behind a pane of glass) for his opponents to exhaust themselves. Blofeld - who has hair, scandal - tells the audience that Klebb defected from the Russians, and Klebb walks back to in front of Blofeld's desk. It's the same shot as before, just played in the right direction this time.
If you think that's clever use of their footage, just you wait. I'm pretty sure in the shot where Klebb says that Tania's "loyalty to the State is beyond question," that's Lenya in front of a blown-up still of herself. You can just see something's been airbrushed out behind her head, and she doesn't seem to be sitting in the chair.
Anyway, the point of this scene is for Kronsteen - SPECTRE head of exposition - to explain the plot of the film to us. SPECTRE is going to steal a Lektor decoder with the help of a Russian cryptography girl and the British Secret Service. Kronsteen says that MI6 will fall for the trap because it's obviously a trap and their curiosity will be piqued. Heh, yeah. And then continuity strikes! Doctor No gets name-dropped!
Blofeld tells Kronsteen to make Bond's death "particularly unpleasant and humiliating," but then SPECTRE goes on to set Bond up to have lots of sex with Daniela Bianchi (frankly one of the hottest Bond Girls ever), so I don't really consider that mission objective accomplished.
Now we're on "SPECTRE Island," which I presume Blofeld bought through a shell corporation or something. Or maybe he just set up shop there and then told the local cartographer that it was inhabited by an uncontacted tribe that would eat the spleens of anyone who came calling. A girl comes to give Grant a massage, and just like in the last film, we're cheated out of some book-only nudity (Grant's; although I believe the girl was topless in the book. Like I said, rampagingly adolescent).
Walter Gotell will, of course, be back as General Gogol, the chummy commie putting a friendly face on the USSR - you know, Bond's entire raison d'etre, at least until he gets all flashy and filmable. SPECTRE came about in an abandoned screenplay that was eventually adapted into Thunderball (the novel), because after half a dozen books of "Bond foils the insidious commie plot," Fleming was convinced that this wasn't actually what the readers wanted, and would rather see Bond face off against some nebulous faceless multinational corporation. MGM/UA, perhaps. Anyway, it's fitting that the guy who will eventually award Bond the Order of Lenin makes his first appearance in the first film to demote the Russians from Chief Villain status.
Klebb and Morzeny walk through the training area, and if you look carefully they actually walk through it twice via the magic of avant-garde editing to make the facility look bigger.
Rosa Klebb's idea of testing Grant's suitability for the mission involves punching him in the stomach with a pair of brass knuckles. The SPECTRE job application process must be very weird.
"Oh, hello, Mr. Killerman?"
"Keeler-Mann."
"Of course. And your qualifications are?"
"I have a physique that suggests that I will be able to go toe-to-toe with Bond, but it won't be too surprising when he beats me. Also, my hair is significantly lighter than his, to make it easier to identify us in the long shots, especially if one or both of us are using stuntmen."
"I see, very good. I will of course have to fire you when we cast Roger Moore and/or Daniel Craig, because of the hair."
"Naturally."
"Now just hold still while I wallop you on the head. If you're still conscious, you pass."
Next, we're taken to the Russian embassy in Istanbul, where Tania speaks her only Russian lines in the film (while her face is turned away from the camera and completely obscured by her hair, probably so that an actual Russian-speaker can more easily dub her lines). Weird to call the story "From Russia With Love" when the story starts in Istanbul and never gets any closer to Russia than that, but I'm not The Wildly Successful Author Ian Fleming, so I must defer to his storytelling genius. Grant shadows Tania because that what he does. It's impressive that he manages to be such an iconic villain without having a single line before the third act.
Scratch that. No it's not. Bond villains are often less interesting the more they're given to say. Case in point, the titular Man With the Golden Gun, who manages to get duller and duller with every line despite being played by Christopher Freaking Lee. But enough talk about a film where Bond and his shadowy dark-side-of-Bond clone chase each other around a Cold War frontier in his actor's second outing while the ostensible plot about a girl and a device get cast aside for want of interest. Wait...
Klebb's office is pretty sparse compared to Blofeld's and - is that a painting of a camel on the wall? Wow. Foreshadowing The Spy Who Loved Me already?
I am, perhaps, unnecessarily cruel to the acting talents of Ms. Bianchi. In her defense, of the four* men who directed fifteen of the first sixteen Bond films, only Lewis Gilbert managed to get consistently good performances out of his female leads (and even then, neither Barbara Bach nor Lois Chiles were ever going to win any awards for their work). Of the other three, it's probably a toss-up between Terence Young and John Glen** for Worst Average Female Performance (telling that Glen's best Bond by a country mile has only got one Bond Girl in it). Early Bond, and particularly Terence Young-directed Early Bond, doesn't seem to concern itself with the performance of its female cast so much as how they look in skimpy outfits. (Luciana Paluzzi in Thunderball, while still looking positively smashing in a towel, is the obvious exception to this rule, and it's telling that she was cast in spite of the fact that her casting would necessitate a last-minute rewrite of her character's originally-Irish heritage.) All well and good when Ursula Undress doesn't show up until the last act of Dr. No and isn't required to do much more than look good in a bikini. This is a different beast.
*I'm excluding Peter Hunt, because his only female lead was Diana Rigg, so that wasn't going to be a fair competition in the first place.
**Guy Hamilton had Honor Blackman, Jane Seymour, and Gloria Hendry more than balancing out Britt Ekland, so again this is probably an unfair comparison. Oh well. Having said that, remind me when we get to Golden Gun and Octopussy to see whether Hamilton or Glen got a better performance out of Maud Adams.
I think my ambivalence towards Daniela Bianchi's acting is based entirely on a later scene (more on this later, but it isn't even her fault, and one thing this exercise has let me do is realize that), because she does what she needs to do here. Uncertain, uncomfortable, Tania thinks that Klebb still works for the Soviet Union - never called such, it's just "the Russians." Tania trained for the ballet but grew too tall, and had three lovers. The talk becomes disturbingly intimate - funny that the first case of workplace harassment in the series is instigated by an evil lesbian rather than by Bond - and Tania is basically told to be a honeypot for Bond, which she ultimately doesn't seem too bothered by because let's face it, he's Sean Connery in 1963. She's a lot more disturbed by Klebb coming on to her. (This adds a, let's say "curious" subtext to the film's final scene, dunnit?)
The first time the series has the theme appear diagetically (q.v. Octopussy and compare OHMSS) heralds, at last, the (re)introduction of James Bond and Sylvia Trench. In swimwear, yum.* Very interesting to compare Connery's beach bod with Craig's in Casino Royale. (I could promise to lay off the fat jokes in Sean's final two EON films, but that would be a lie.) Likewise, Sylvia, while by no means unattractive - she's the first girl to appear in two films, after all - has a bit more fat on her than you'd see these days. Almost like she's allowed to eat or something. Unthinkable. Next they'll be letting her vote, one imagines. The Empire shall never recover.
*I could (and in fact shall) make the case that Terence Young was the franchise's horniest director, and that said horniness cuts both ways. Q.v. Thunderball and the miniscule amount of screentime Connery spends wearing actual pants.
For whatever reason Bond is chilling his wine in the river. I assume he had a better purpose for the ice in the ice bucket. But before any hanky-panky can occur, Bond's pager goes off. He'd been called to the office. Sylvia is assertive to the point of bitchiness - probably why she doesn't return after this. Bond likes his women softer. Won't stop him giving her a goodbye plowing before going to the office, though.
Wait. Does Bond like his women softer? Take, as we often do, the actor's third film as definitive.
- Goldfinger: wrestling as foreplay with Pussy Galore. Probably would have gone the same route with Tilly Masterson had she not been killed off so quickly
- The Spy Who Loved Me: he pops, if you know what I mean, when Anya holds him at gunpoint
- The World is Not Enough: Christmas Jones has some spunk, but the winner here is Elektra King, who legit has a line about how asphyxiating him will give him a boner, I'm not making this up
- Skyfall: While the only thing aggressive about Berenice Marlohe is her overacting, there's also "Eve," whom he (probably) sleeps with after she, uh, shoots him
That would seem to disprove my hastily-constructed theory. Moving on.
Bond wanders into M's office and lobs his headgear onto Moneypenny's rack. Rawr. M glares at him and hauls him into his office. Moneypenny tells the yet-to-be-named Q that it'll be a miracle if Bond can explain where he's been all day. I'd think that's obvious. "M, Shir, you know that I'm a shecshpesht, and I wash bushy having shecsh before you shent me on my necsht mission."
As it happens, the next mission is all about having sex. "Suppose when she meets me in the flesh, I don't come up to her expectations," Bond says. "Just see that you do," M says, and then calls Q in. Not to give Bond Viagra, which you might expect from the exchange of dialogue they've just concluded, but to give him an attache case full of spy-friendly goodies. It's a long sequence but it's a lot more believable a spy gadget than a remote-controlled car or a laser/grappling hook watch or basically anything Brosnan gets, while also not being as obnoxiously self-aware as the Craig/Q scenes are.
Also, two more observations. One, M doesn't have his bookshelf yet. The set dressers still have to save their money for hotel rooms and evil lairs, you see. Two, it takes Bond about a minute to go from "it's some sort of trap" to "the whole thing's so fantastic it could just be true." And this is before he looks at the picture of Tania.
The payoff to a joke about Bond not looking at other women is M telling Moneypenny to make Bond leave the photograph of Tania. Which is kind of stupid. Unless he thinks he's going to be stopped by security or something.
Wow does the Istanbul airport look, from the inside, suspiciously like the one in Jamaica. Bond has actually arranged transport this time, with a call-and-response code phrase and everything. It's almost like we're doing proper spycraft here. But then it turns out that he's being tailed and the driver knows it and that's just part and parcel of doing spy business in Istanbul, which doesn't seem very conducive to the concept of covert activity.
Bond wanders through a building that's probably twice as old as the British Empire before meeting his contact, Kerim Bey, then man who will set the standard for charming scoundrel allies. All of Kerim's key employees are his sons, and he appears to have been busy in bed. (Come to think of it, it's surprising it took Bond 25 films to knock a girl up.) Kerim suggests that Bond spend a few pleasant days in Istanbul and then go home, which is convenient because it gives Bond an excuse to play tourist while the plot grinds to a halt. Seriously nothing between here and the hotel room rendezvous with Tania - the gypsy camp, the sniper scene, etc. - is necessary. But that's okay. The film is allowed to breathe. Thus we get Bond wandering through his hotel room checking for bugs while the James Bond theme blares in the background. Imagine Daniel Craig doing this - you can't, and not just because he hasn't been born yet. Wait, sorry, you lost me at "proudly blaring the Bond theme anywhere in a Craig film."
Because the room is bugged, Bond asks to be reassigned and is given the bridal suite. Turns out the hotel is in on the scheme. How'd SPECTRE get MI6 to check Bond into a hotel that has a Perv Booth in the bridal suite? (Same way Grant knows what train Bond is planning to escape on, I guess.)
Meanwhile Grant has murdered one of the Bulgarians who was tailing Bond. The Bulgarians retaliate by trying to blow up Kerim Bey with a purple light and a smoke machine, which the production team tries to convince us is a limpet mine. Adorable. That's Nadja Regin as Kerim's mistress, who distracts him just in time to get him away from his desk before it's blown to smithereens. "I no longer please you?" she asks. "Be still," he replies, with all the patience of a man dying of cancer, which he was. She'll be back in Goldfinger, where Bond will spot a badhat reflected in her eye.
Bond and Kerim descend into the sewer and take a boat across to underneath the Russian embassy, where they've installed a periscope. They installed it while Public Works was inspecting the place. Given Kerim's character, I would assume they had to install it twice, having "accidentally" stuck it in the girls' bathroom the first time. And none of the Russians notice the periscope on the floor. (The cleaning lady is on vacation in Venice, you see.)
Tania's legs enter the room (what is it with this film and legs? Answer: it's Terence Young. Again, q.v. Thunderball). Her last name's "Romanova," by the way, which is extremely unlikely in post-Tsarist Soviet Russia (Marvel makes the same mistake with Black Widow's last name, but they don't even bother to feminize it).
One of the other participants in the meeting is Krilencu, a man who "kills for pleasure." I'm sure we'll never have another one of those in this series.
Kerim decides to kill some time go dark for a bit, so they drive off to a gypsy camp. Despite taking some precautions involving a decoy car, he's failed to shake the Bulgarians, who set up to attack the camp while everyone's distracted watching first a belly dancer and then two gypsy girls fighting. So to recap, thus far the purpose of women in this film has been to do workplace harassment (Klebb), receive workplace harassment (Tania), answer the phone (Tania and Moneypenny), and distract men for one reason or another (Kerim's mistress, the gypsies). Tania's role for the rest of the film (barring, critically, the penultimate scene) will be to have sex with Bond (her role in SPECTRE's plan) and, er, have sex with Bond (because that's what the audience expects). Just an observation; I've got to type something while this sequence plays out. I mean, it is very pretty to look at, but it doesn't advance the plot at all. Quite like large swathes of Skyfall, then. The plot of the girlfight is that both girls are in love with the same man. That's a problem that could be solved with a liberal reinterpretation of the family unit, but I guess we're not ready for that conversation. Probably still aren't, given how sexless some of the Craigs are (that was a cheap shot).
Anyway the girlfight is broken up by a proper fight (there's not another girl-on-girl fight in Bond Films until... off the top of my head, Die Another Day. That may not be correct, but the sudden mental image of Rosamund Pike in a sports bra has completely hampered my recall, so it is the answer I shall give). John Barry's "007" theme blares throughout - or rather, the first four bars do. (This was written in case the Monty Norman-penned "James Bond Theme" became unavailable for rights reasons. It wasn't, so "007" was quietly dropped. Over a waterfall. Q.v. Moonraker.)
Anyway, Grant saves Bond by shooting a Bulgarian off him, the Bulgarians retreat, Kerim expresses a desire to inflict violence upon Krilencu, and Bond gets a threesome with the gypsy girls. Whether he actually resolves the issue of who gets to marry the prince, I have no idea. I suspect he was so good they both forgot about the prince, but we're not allowed to outright say that in 1963.
Betcha the prince was right miffed about it, though. I mean, here he is, gazing longfully at the gypsy throne, two women ready to fight to the death over him, and then in comes this rando Scot who sweeps them both off their feet. If they made this movie today, he'd be the secondary villain. If they made it in the Moorera, he'd exist to pull funny faces in a culturally-insensitive way while Bond drives off with both his girls.
Kerim and Bond go to kill Krilencu, who's trying to escape out the mouth of a poster of the only Broccoli-Saltzman films that isn't a Bond. Guess they used it because they had the rights to it. After some back and forth, Kerim, who is wounded in the arm, takes the shot. Again, this entire sequence just exists to kill time. Krilencu's not the main villain and the main Bond Girl has yet to interact with Bond- wait, this just in, Bond and the main Bond Girl are about to interact.
You may have noticed a significant slip in the schedule here, which is partly my fault and partly due to the series leaving Amazon. The upshot of this is that I'm not watching this on my tiny laptop screen this time, and I can assure you, observing in full HD blown up on a big screen: she nekkid. Still not quite going to award this film First Bare* Nipple - I will continue to believe that's The Spy Who Loved Me until presented with compelling evidence to the contrary.** She's glimpsed through some gauzy curtain getting into bed, from Bond's perspective, but when he comes (ahem) through the door there's a full shot (ahem!) of the room and there's no interposing curtain in sight.
*Have to put the qualifier in because, in case you missed the last one, Ursula Andress definitely won a wet t-shirt contest.
**As I do not own and have no intention of purchasing The Man With the Golden Gun in a better-than-DVD format, you will have to do the heavy lifting. I suppose the other candidate would be the strangled-with-her-own-bikini-top girl in the Diamonds are Forever pre-title - another film I have no interest in buying again.
"I think my mouth is too big"/"No, it's the right size. For me, that is." That's such a dumb exchange. Somehow Bond makes it work. Random diversion, bear with me. I tend to think of Lazenby, Dalton, and Craig as the more serious ones (certain creative decisions in Skyfall and Spectre notwithstanding), Moore and Brosnan as the fundamentally un-serious ones, and Connery as either, on a film-by-film basis, with From Russia falling in the "serious" camp.* Yet Connery, Moore, and Brosnan are the ones who could make that exchange work. Anyway, this scene is The Go-To Audition Scene for new Bond actors, and I figure the reason for that is if they can make this dialogue work, they can make any dialogue work.
*Which camp Goldfinger falls into is a matter of opinion (although the correct answer is un-serious), but that's so obviously the dividing line: the subsequent Connery films are very un-serious.
Bond wants to mix business with pleasure, talking about the Lektor and asking Tania for a plan of the Russian consulate. Despite what she told Klebb about only being able to perform if it was the right kind of man, she's super eager for sex. (No, silly, Bond's the right kind of man.)
Oh, and Klebb and Grant(?) are in the Perv Booth, filming them. Again, this was the work of Terence Young, whom I've decided is the franchise's horniest director.
Next day, the Hagia Sophia is used as an establishing shot of one of the Bulgarians stalking Tania around another building. Then she's suddenly inside the Hagia Sophia. Go figure. The tour guide is rambling about towers that were stolen and brought from Egypt. Didn't steal the weird lightshow, though. Connery is wearing sunglasses inside, because nobody would expect a man wearing sunglasses inside to be up to no good. Despite having visual on Tania, he looks away for a moment so that the Bulgarian can get killed by Grant. This is just terrible spy-work from Bond all around. Jimmy, you have no way of knowing if somebody else swapped the plans Tania dropped before you got to them, because you took your eye off the ball.
Bond tells Kerim that Tania will do anything he says (can't make this film today, especially given Kerim's reaction). Bond says all he wants is the Lektor. Kerim prompts him to have a chuckle about wanting more sex with Tania. Again, can't make this today. It's one of many, many reasons why I'm not bothered about the notion of Barb and Mike just hanging up the shoulder holster and calling it a day.
Next, Bond and Tania meet on a ferry, where Bond is supposed to be playing a bored tourist, a role Connery does more convincingly throughout the entirety of You Only Live Twice. Tania is worried about being caught for maybe thirty seconds before she gets all doe-eyed over Bond again. Tania is offended that Bond is more interested in the Lektor than in her - I'm worried that this review is just going to end up being "they can't make films like this anymore" repeated ad nauseam.
By the way, Bond is basically offering Tania sex in exchange for information, right? So, one: got a reverse Mata Hari going on. And two: is this the only time that happens in the series? The Living Daylights, maybe, is the only other example I can think of.
Now, in defense of Tania basically begging Bond for sex right then and there, the technical details of the Lektor are, frankly, boring as hell. But props to Bond for keeping (mostly) on topic. He is a bit quick to disclose details of a trip he took with M to Tokyo, though. But hang on! Later, in You Only Live Twice, he says he's never been to Japan before. It's not a continuity error! He was just making up a story for Tania's benefit!
I also do like how the film just transitions from Bond and Tania recording the tape to M and a lot of stuffy higher-ups listening to it in his office. Also love the looks Moneypenny starts pulling when the Tokyo anecdote comes up. And the fact that she can just listen in on her boss's private conversations. Seems like a major potential security breach.
Another fun transition as M dictates a letter to Bond, fading to Bond reading it. Kerim asks if they're going to run their operation on the 13th, Bond says they'll tell Tania the 14th. The film doesn't really make clear that Bond gets out of the car in the next shot on the 13th - obviously they're misleading Tania a tad just to make sure she's not actually a counterintelligence plot, but they're also misleading the audience, and that's no good.
There's a brief scene in the Russian consulate here, and while the set is better than Gogol's office in The Spy Who Loved Me, it's not quite as good as the Soviet Supervillain Lair in Octopussy. Still, the fact that they could make it look this good on this budget says rather good things about the people making this film, and less-than-kind things about people making later films (yes, this is a snipe at Spectre).
"Russian clocks are always correct." Boom. Quite possibly the second-best gag in the series. (The first is in Thunderball, we'll get there soon.) Tania's confused about the date and so am I (not gonna let that go). A single bomb set off a truly impressive amount of smoke for the apparent lack of damage to the building. (We should talk about the lackluster explosions in this film, between this, the limpet mine in Kerim's office, and the helicopter crash yet to come. There, I've talked about it.) Meanwhile John Barry lobs the now-forgotten "007" theme at us, and while I quite like it, let's be honest, it was only ever going to work in the Connery era. Say what you will about Dr. No's score on the whole (and what I'll say is that From Russia's score is definitely superior), Monty Norman wrote the theme that stood the test of time.
Inside the sewers they encounter a massive swarm of rats - gosh, not the last time Connery's in a film where the hero spelunks in a Mediterranean* sewer and gets accosted by a bunch of rats, (and where the female lead memorably betrays her boss at the last minute). Wonder if Spielberg did that deliberately. Kerim is able to lead them to another exit. I remember reading somewhere that director Terence Young doubled for Kerim in some of these shots, because Pedro Armendariz was so ill, but it looks to me like his (Pedro's) face is visible in every shot except the one of them climbing the staircase. Just lobbing that out in case there's any truth to it. He does look like he's lost some weight between what I presume is a studio scene in the sewer and the location shots at the train station, but I could be seeing things. Also, presumably, dying of cancer will do that to you.
*"James, technically Constantinople is on the Bosphorus and Venice is on the Adriatic" shut up shut up shut up.
Tania notices Benz, the Russian security man at the station, and she stops and stares long enough to be sure he noticed her. I'm being unfair, but seriously, lady, at this point in the operation it's absolutely imperative that you keep moving. In her defense, she is a) just a clerk and b) the Bond Girl in a Connery film, so she can't be expected to be all that competent at spywork.
Bond's first alias, trivia fans, is "David Somerset." I'm about to criticize Daniela Bianchi's acting, so I should say I like the business she does, mouthing "Caroline Somerset" to herself while Bond and Kerim talk. Bond and Kerim, meanwhile, are discussing their plan, which means that said plan will inevitably fail. Back in the carriage, Bond informs Tania that they'll have a "honeymoon" in England. She complains that she has nothing to wear, and Bond produces her trousseau. I like the implication that that's all she'll be wearing, and apparently so does she.
Ah, the 60s.
In any event, Bond then produces a bevy of lingerie for her to wear. I like the implication that that's all she'll be etc. etc.
Benz tries to snoop on Bond (learning vital information like which piece of lingerie Tania intends to wear in Piccadilly) before Kerim Bey comes by. (Bey, Bond, Benz - this is getting ridiculous.) Bond and Kerim trick Benz into opening the door by pretending to be ticket agents (not the last time Connery's in a film with that stunt, I wonder if Spielberg etc. etc.) Unfortunately, Robert Shaw noticed, and he'll be murdering Kerim and Benz offscreen while Daniela models another lovely skimpy piece of nightwear, and I once again wonder how much attention the censors were paying. Not sure whether the fabric is quite opaque enough for the film's rating, but it certainly leaves an impression (ahem). By God she was an attractive woman and everyone involved in making this scene, down to the costumer, knew it. (At 21, she's still the youngest leading lady in a Bond film.)
Having said that, she had to do a photoshoot in that outfit. So for her sake, I hope it was a bit more opaque than it appears to be on my DVD.
 |
| From the same censors who signed off on "Pussy Galore" |
Presumably coitus ensues, because they're lying in bed smoking after it. This might be the only time a Bond Girl smokes? Must check, even though Honor Blackman's voice is a dead giveaway. (I also have a recollection of Tiffany Case putting out a cig in an ashtray on Bond's chest. Maybe I'll edit this paragraph after I get to Diamonds.)
Unfortunately here's George Pastell to ruin Bond's day. No, it's not that the Cybermen are waking up (me noting the bit players who had roles in Doctor Who will be a recurring theme, sorry), it's that Kerim is dead, Jim. Bond wants it kept quiet - not entirely sure why. Maybe just standard operating procedure.
Wonderful little shot of Kerim's son watching the train go by in disbelief. And then we get the uncomfortable interrogation scene between Bond and Tania. I've given Daniela crap in the past for this scene in particular, but it's not really her fault - the script isn't phenomenal here, and on top of that, she's dubbed, so it's unfair to blame her for the dull line reading of "I love you. I love you, I love you, it's true." It's over quickly enough.
Not really sure what Bond gets up to between here and the Indiana Jones style map shot telling us we've gotten to Belgrade, where Bond has to tell one of Kerim's many, many sons that his father is dead. This is done in a pair of long tracking shots, with Robert Shaw lurking in the background, and may be some of Terence Young's finest work as a director. The most obvious competitor would be the next bit in Zagreb, where Grant murders the real MI6 contact and meets Bond with zero dialogue. It's just the "match/lighter" exchange twice, so we know what we're missing, but all we get is the hiss of the train engine and some incomprehensible PA announcements. Wonderful bit of tension-building, which again is something that seems to have permanently exited the series post-The Living Daylights.
Now, the only other thing I've seen Robert Shaw in is Jaws, and this is actually the first time in the film that he speaks, and hearing a snide British accent come out of him is still so jarring. Not at all clear to me how he knew Bond would be taking the train out, but we'd be robbed these wonderful scenes if the script made total sense, so I'll allow it.
Bond isn't entirely trusting of "Nash," but doesn't act on his suspicions, whatever they are. "Nash" has an attaché case like Bond's, which of course Grant didn't have time to open. At the dining car, "Nash" orders red wine with fish - COME ON BOND THAT'S ALMOST AS MUCH A GIVEAWAY AS HAVING AND ACCENT AND CHEATING AT GOLF - and then spikes Tania's drink, which Bond, curiously, lets him do.
Now this next part in the book relies on Bond having a bulletproof cigarette case and Grant happening to shoot him in it, so it's probably for the best that the only major alteration to the story (subbing in SPECTRE for the KGB notwithstanding) is this. Grant reveals the entire plot once he's got Bond held at gunpoint - despite being incredibly stupid, he's still held up as one of the best baddies in the franchise, which I chalk up to Shaw's performance. But to be fair, every "we're not so different you and I" Dark Side Of Bond Baddie comes up short in some way.
As a reminder, a) the plot is to embroil Bond in a sleazy sex scandal, and b) the book ended up on JFK's Top Ten. No further comment.
No, really. I have nothing of significance to add to The Train Fight Scene. All these years later, it's still the two minutes of action in a Bond film, resulting from a confluence of talent the franchise will literally never see again. If I ever get around to doing this for Spectre I'll compare that scene to this one. Clear winner: this one.
Bond and Tania are able to escape when Grant's unnamed ally blocks the train tracks with a supposedly broken-down car, which Bond then promptly hijacks. And yes, the shadows are surprisingly well-defined again. (They shot it during the day with a heavy filter.) Get used to this.
Bond Theme blares at us as Bond drives off into the countryside. Must remember to take note of when John Barry stops spamming it at us, like John Williams vis a vis the Imperial March in The Empire Strikes Back, or, well, David Arnold vis a vis the Bond theme in Bonds XVIII-XX.
There is one problem with The Train Fight Scene, and that problem is this: the film has three additional climaxes after it, and none of them are as memorable. Bond gets cropdusted, then not-Gogol gets Blackwatered (this has been in drafts so long, are Game of Thrones references still valid?), then Rosa Klebb gets her kicks. It's weird, and it frankly doesn't flow well. If you're trying to up the spectacle, the final battle should presumably have the biggest boom, yeah? (It's kinda telling that every other Connery film barring Diamonds Are Forever ends with the bad guy's lair/private vehicle going kablooey; One Final Fight Occurs After The Main Threat Has Been Defeated is really more a Roger Moore thing, and even then it only happens in three of his seven films.)
Oh, also, this film's Terence Young Dated Reference - the film One of Our Aircraft is Missing.
The final confrontation with Klebb doesn't really work, honestly (wait a tick, lackluster punch-up with a homosexual after the film's essentially over? This really is a proto-Diamonds Are Forever, isn't it?) Tania's already made the decision to save Bond when she knocks the gun out of Klebb's hand. But it takes her five seconds of waving the gun back and forth to decide which of these people (who both want to have sex with her) to shoot. Woman, you are only attracted to one of them! ("It couldn't be made this way today," etc. etc.)
The film ends with Bond riding through a rear-projection of Venice, checking out his own sex tape, and then dumping it in a canal in front of a couple of onlookers. Operational security? Whazzat?
Overall Thoughts
In the previous one, I asked what From Russia actually does to improve on the formula. The answer is "gadgets, and a killer henchman fight." This one knocks the latter out of the park so dramatically that everything else - both the rest of the film and every other henchman fight, particularly henchmen fights on trains - is an afterthought.
Perhaps in homage to the film that takes too long to conclude, I'm cutting this short and hitting "publish" on it. Post-Craig Reviews will return in Goldfinger.
Overall ranking, so far:
11. Doctor No
Most Ridiculous Foreign Title(s)
007 Averted the Spy Plot (China), 007 in Istanbul (Finland - honestly a more accurate title), Hearty Kisses From Russia (France)
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