From Russia with Love (1963)

Director: Terrence Young

Starring: Sean Connery, Robert Shaw

More Info: IMDB

Tagline: The world's masters of murder pull out all the stops to destroy Agent 007!

Plot: 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.



My Rating: 9.5/10

Would I watch it again? Yep

FRWL is definitely an improvement over DOCTOR NO and is a very serious solid spy film. It also adheres to the novel very closely which is rare. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE is the only other Bond film that comes closer to the novel. The rest are shadows at best of their literary counterparts.

Q shows up for the first time, wonderfully played by Desmond Llewelyn who would go on to play that character in 17 films - a cinema record. Here's a neat bit of trivia. His total screen time for those 17 films totals a little more than 30 minutes. Connery is even more comfortable with the Bond role here and turns out an outstanding performance. Once thing I like most about this one is how this one feels like it could really happen unlike so many of the later pictures with they over-the-top villains and their giant lairs and armies of thugs.

"REAL men have hair on their chests. Tom Cruise does not. Nuff said."

Robert Shaw make a great villain (though not the main one - here he's just used as a blunt instrument) and provides lots of fun. It's also cool that his boss, Rosa Kleb, is played by Lotte Lenya. If that name doesn't sound familiar then listen to the song Mack the Knife sometime. She was married to composer Kurt Weil. Neat. Seeing her in this movie, though, Weil probably met her a loooooong time ago. Ugh.

"There's so much testosterone in this rail cabin it will soon spontaneously combust."

John Barry is the Bond composer from now on. Yeaaaaaahhhhh. And he turns out a great score, too. Great song (though not heard over the opening credits but briefly on the radio after the credits and later as the final credits roll) sung by Matt Monro. We're getting closer to the Bond formula that would be used for so many pictures to come. That's not necessarily a good thing.

Scorethefilm will return with his thoughts on...

GOLDFINGER (1965)