00 Week: In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

1963 UK/1964 USA

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, and Berkeley Mather (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

Eon Productions' first James Bond film, 1962's Dr. No, had been a giant hit, and with great speed, they commissioned another, with a doubled budget and with the aim to get the film to theaters barely even one year after Dr. No's premiere; and, honestly, I don't think it would occur to you, if you weren't told, that the follow-up, From Russia With Love, was the most cursed-ass movie, marked by suffering and death, and made without ever really having what you'd describe as "a finished script."  The former troubles were, to be fair, mostly out of the filmmakers' control: though there is the matter of what must have been an unsafe explosives-based stunt, insofar as it injured three stuntmen (as well as an actor, a certain Walter Gotell, though that name will only be significant further down the line), I think you could hypothesize that From Russia With Love itself must've been under KGB* attack, with its director, Terence Young, and its female lead, Daniela Bianchi, each almost dying in completely separate vehicular accidents; another vehicle, a boat laden with cameras, sank in the Bosporus.  Meanwhile, one of its supporting players, Pedro Armendáriz, was diagnosed with cancer, worked as long as he could, and when the pain became too overwhelming, he killed himself.  And then it turned out to be the last film that John Kennedy ever watched prior to his assassination that November.  Coincidence?

The "not having a script" problem, of course, was of the production's own making, and it's strange to know this, when what we're looking at virtually is the book, I suspect the most faithful adaptation of any Bond novel, because it'd be a pretty faithful adaptation by any standard, basically just From Russia, With Love (Fleming's comma-laden title demonstrating the preposterous inadequacy of the major style guides' admonition to not capitalize prepositions, as you will typically find this title in the truly hideous form of "From Russia, with Love") which, for cinema's sake, has been subjected to serious streamlining and then actioned-up.  Thus, for instance, instead of a climax built out of a horribly-tense conversation on a train that concludes with Bond playing dead, having desperately gambled upon the resilience of a cigarette lighter and his would-be killer's braggadocious claims to marksmanship, it's a brutal grappling match, followed by three more action scenes (two of them entirely invented for the movie).  From this, we arrive upon one of the primary claims I'm going to be making about Russia With Love: its title is better without the comma.  Also that Russia, With Love is secretly unadaptable, or at least the film adaptation we got, faithful as it is, retains most of its source's weaknesses and loses most of its strengths, even if it does get by on strengths of its own.

Now, I've always been anxious about a Bond retrospective, because Russia With Love is held in the highest esteem by basically every Bond fan I've ever known, and I just don't like it that much; yet it comes so early in the series that it was always going to amount to a handy jumping-off point, and if everyone jumped off now, they'd never learn why Moonraker is great, actually.  So clearly I'm all mixed-up, but it's easy to see why the various screenwriters working to adapt Russia, With Love felt stymied, as it is a tremendously ungainly book, taking so many chapters for James Bond to even show up that I thought I'd stumbled into some early experiment in inverting the perspective in an IP entry—that is, I had cause to wonder if this wasn't a Bond novel, but a SMERSH novel, with nearly its entire first third dedicated to detailing Bond's small army of SMERSH antagonists (including bureaucrats who never even show back up!) and their insidious and frankly dubious anti-Bond honeypot scheme.  (Obliviously enough, somewhere in there Fleming pens the great line, "Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored"; and it's telling that a Bond movie that's faithful to the novel but cuts the novel down still has filler-feeling scenes and, at 115 minutes, shall remain the second-shortest Bond film after Dr. No for almost fifty years.)  It'll make more sense later, but I'm just going to throw it out here now, if you know that a decryption machine was intentionally allowed to slip into your grasp, then you should probably also realize that the decryption machine isn't going to do you any good.

Even once the plan is unveiled it's still another chapter or two of SMERSH logistics; then when Bond does agree to walk into his adversary's obvious trap, it's still largely dicking around, until the plot can actually start; the ultimate effect is a book that has a beginning and an end yet is kind of weirdly distended, and then has an outright freakish actual conclusion, insofar as I'm not sure you could be certain from the end of Russia, With Love that Bond didn't just, like, unceremoniously die, and whatever happened to its heroine is, unless I'm forgetting some throwaway line, anyone's guess forevermore.  (Though now I know why Bond needed a vacation in Dr. No—this being your reminder that the Bond films skip merrily around, forging their own chronology.)

So, what Russia With Love wound up with largely conforms to its source, with the exception that its SMERSH scenes are many fewer and, thanks to nervousness over having Soviet villains in this Cold War spy romp, they've been co-opted by SPECTRE, the shadowy independent organization behind the departed Dr. No; and it happens that one of SPECTRE's strategists, Kronsteen (Vladek Sheybal), has decided to dovetail some institutional revenge into a more routine op to secure for SPECTRE an example of the Soviets' "Lektor" decoding apparatus (a minor change from the novel, where it was, ahem, a Spektor).  SPECTRE's target is Bond, James Bond—Russia With Love being I believe the only film where that trademarked, ironic-for-a-spy-franchise declaration of its hero's identity does not make any appearance—and this is clear from the very opening, where otherwise we find the series formula firming up nicely, with a whole in medias res action scene playing out after the Maurice Binder gun barrel prelude and before we ever get to the credits.  This pre-credits sequence, however, actually is the first scene of this movie's narrative, wherein "Bond" moves carefully and surreptitiously through a hedgerow maze, pursuing—or pursued by—a man we will learn is named Grant (Robert Shaw), a hulking and for a long time silent killer.

Our hero does not meet Grant's challenge, and within a minute or two "Bond" is dead—or the man in the Mission: Impossible Bond mask is, presumably some poor prisoner used to whet Grant's appetite for murder.  This is all to say, the entire sequence exists solely for us, which is the same as saying this is where Russia With Love feels entirely like a James Bond movie despite, at this stage, and with this source material, we also have the James Bond movie that most feels mired in merely being (or, if you prefer, "lives up to the promise of being") an actual halfway-realistic spy thriller.  This sensation persists throughout the SPECTRE prologue, though after the dizzy spectacle of watching Bond die, we move hard upon the opening credits, which were not designed by Binder this time, but would inform pretty much every subsequent Bond credits sequence he did design, because so far, so good, Robert Brownjohn's credits sequence marking the advent of that other Bond thing, a bunch of nude or semi-nude silhouetted or semi-silhouetted women, cavorting through a bunch of psychedelic [p]op art.  It is genuinely pretty great, starting out as a crasser example of its form—the numbers "00" in "007" are cast over a set of shaking tits, and the theme is belly-dancing, which will be glancingly relevant to this Turkish-set film and dutifully showcased with a non-silhouetted woman later—but by the end it's just this abstraction, concerned more with how a curved surface, that here happens to be a woman's skin, interacts with projected light, that here happens to spell out people's names, and I was more dedicated to trying to determine which credits were actually projected and which were "faked" via animation being contact-printed (or some sort of out-of-camera process, anyway, that process being very rigorously applied and very neat, whatever it was), instead of trying to Where's Waldo as many nipples and vulvas as possible, which is what I typically do during these sequences despite having this pornography machine right next to me.

This brings us to Blofeld, or at least the unnamed SPECTRE chief portrayed in tightly-framed mystery shots by a lap occupied by a white cat (the lap belongs to Anthony Dawson, the voice belongs to Eric Pohlmann, and I'm sure the cat belonged to somebody), who briefs Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) on the scheme whilst using three fighting fish in an aquarium as an allegory for their organization's grand strategy against the superpowers; so here, it still feels right properly "James Bond."  (As for other series elements, we'll get "Boothroyd" again, the armorer named after the fan who kibbitzed Fleming's choice of firearm for Bond, but now he's played by Desmond Llewelyn, and he gives Bond a wacky briefcase, so he's practically Q; there will be a fun mid-film breath-catching joke scene with M (Bernard Lee) and Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), though we're not really catching our breath from that much.)

Well, the scheme is this: Klebb, in her guise as the head of SMERSH, shall tap a highy reliable and highly desirable Soviet female operative, whom word shall go out through MI6's Istanbul station has fallen in love with Bond based on his dashing reputation, and who, wishing to defect into his embrace, is willing to offer as "dowry" that decryption machine, which she'll help Bond steal from the Soviet consulate in Istanbul; with this accomplished, they will die at Grant's hands.  Klebb selects Tanya Romanova (Bianchi, dubbed by Barbara Jefford) to be pimped out for what Tanya believes is the motherland, and, back in London, Bond smirkingly agrees it's a trap, but that it'll be a lark.  Welcomed to Turkey by the gregarious Ali Kerim Bey, Bond enjoys a brazenly exoticized tourist experience and gets into Warsaw Pact-affiliated scrapes, increasingly aware that somebody is acting as his "guardian angel"—that somebody is Grant, ensuring that SPECTRE's plan comes to fruition—but not really doing anything about it or having it inflect his decisionmaking.  He meets Tanya, discovering that she is indeed reliable and desirable, just sex kittening all over, and they steal the machine, absconding upon the Orient Express bound ultimately for Britain, with their adventure seemingly over—until Grant finds them.

Grant's salience is about the only real plot difference between this and the book before the appended, post-Grant action scenes kick in; and, for what it's worth, that addition (possibly made as late as post-production!) does address one of the book's problems, helping a middle stretch comprised of killing Bulgarians and watching Roma girls catfight actually feel like it relates to anything.  But there's just something kind of "off" about Russia With Love: I've made my objections to Fleming's novel, but it does more-or-less work, perhaps just through putting enough words down on paper representing characters' thoughts for you to accept it's persuasive.  For the novel is basically all interiors, starting, in fact, with "Red Grant," who gets an amazing hook in the novel—an Irish serial killer, tantamount to a werewolf, who defected to the Soviets to always have a supply of victims!—which obviously informs the hell out of Shaw's best-in-show performance (he even gets the "eyes like a drowned man" and "furnace door [briefly] ajar" parts, as regards Grant's low-masking sociopathy), but that's it.  Bianchi doesn't even have a chance: she's not bad (it'd be nice if she'd spoken English, but she's miles ahead of Ursula Andress), but the book is a romance as much as it is anything else, and Tanya's character—to no small degree Bond's character—depend crucially on our access to their respective calculations regarding the other's motivations that, unsurprisingly, is not something this Bond screenplay permits, so if they invent for her a new denouement that supposes there was always a battle in Tanya's heart, that's good, but it's not actually retroactive; plus it unpleasantly relies on Bond failing to mention so much as offhand that her SMERSH boss is actually a SPECTRE traitor.  (It is also the case that 64 year old Lenya, while second best-in-show, with her cruel and lecherous spymaster, also isn't entirely up to the action-based demands of Klebb, the stout killer.)

As for Connery, it's somehow either a small regression from where he already was in Dr. No, or else a slightly distinct interpretation, but he's just more chipper on Bond's behalf this time—which I suppose he might well be, but there's a sort of airiness to it that's discomfiting, except during the train climax and lead-up to the train climax, when the story's consequentiality pulls Connery's thuggishness back in.  (They are also testbedding Bondian quips in this screenplay, and the majority of them are so wan you might not notice it's trying to be funny.  On the other hand, I love the snobbish contempt Connery puts to the sassback Bond gives Grant after the latter has revealed his hand, informing him that he already knew Grant was an asshole when he had red wine with fish.)

The movie, as a movie, is pretty alright, however; my main problem there is that it so obviously peaks with the train brawl that I don't know what the boat chase was even for, except to spend the $2 million budget.  (The other impressive setpiece is a North By Northwesty chase involving a helicopter that appears to be attempting to literally strike the stuntman, and I just told you why it's justified.  There's also the group-number dust-up at the Roma camp that's pretty desultory; the hard-nosed League of Gentlemen-esque thrills of the consulate heist, on the other hand, probably make it my second-favorite setpiece.)  But anyway, there's a nice amount of color to this Bond movie, in a way that Dr. No didn't quite satisfy: the one part of the SPECTRE prologue I didn't mention was this whole lateral dolly across SPECTRE's diorama-like training grounds which is slightly idiotic, but fun; there's a solid slice of Istanbul travelogue, above all a four-way spy game in the actual Hagia Sophia built almost entirely out of tense 90 degree angles; relatedly, it's a bummer that production designer Ken Adam couldn't return (Dr. No's art director Syd Cain filled in), and the only goofball set is Kronsteen's chess arena, but maybe this halfway-realist movie wouldn't have benefited from Adam's fancifulness anyway; in subterranean Istanbul, we learn from whence Dr. Henry Jones Sr. acquired his phobia, or at least which Connery film Steven Spielberg was referencing (you can absolutely tell they wanted to do more, but controlling a tunnel in Spain filled with wild rats, where this shit was still legal, was beyond their resources); and Young is, I'd say, directing this better than he did Dr. No, even if we have editor (and future director) Peter Hunt to thank at least as much.

There's a surfeit of nice shots, but it's weird how almost everything great in Russia With Love comes back to Shaw, especially a beauty of a tracking shot in a train station in Belgrade where Bond walks through the crowd unaware that he's being observed from the train above, Shaw ending up a phantasm reflected off glass inside the train, but until then popping into and out of existence in one of the windows, each time announced by a sting from John Barry's score (also solidifying several Bond traditions, including almost putting an original song in the credits sequence, plus one of the least-likeable Bond "traditions" of all, in a rampant overuse of "The James Bond Theme"—THRILL as James Bond inspects his fucking hotel room).

Grant does productively overshadow the whole film; then he annoys Bond with a parody of Englishness; then he beats the crap out of him, stricken down only by English gadgetry and his own hubris, in Hunt's little masterclass of fight editing on the train, rendered moodier by being lit only by the stabs of passing lamps and one woozy purple nightlight, the main light's destruction communicated in an insert shot that's already telling you that, despite its obscurity and its burly kineticism, every moment of this fight will be analyzed and communicated to you with intense clarity.  There's a lot of swell editing on the same model—the pre-credits hunt, or Bond and Tanya's first clutch, that's doing more than the script or the actor to communicate Tanya's already-complicated loyalties, ending with a pretty audacious pull-out (not that kind) from Young into the bridal suite's secret surveillance room—but this is definitely the signature sequence here.

And then it goes on for, like, another half hour, inaugurating that Bond tradition, too.  I am becoming open to the possibility that reading the Bond novels is negatively impacting my appreciation of the Bond films, but with From Russia With Love it's only clarified what's always dissatisfied me about it—the novel is also basically (sometimes obnoxiously) "wouldn't it be awesome to be so alpha that women betray their countries to fuck you?", but it's still a story that puts a soul into that, whereas the Bond movie formula doesn't always accommodate that well.  Fortunately, the struggle to find the exact right kind of superficial coolness continued.

Score: 6/10

*Fleming is curiously insistent, I imagine less as a result of Soviet opacity during the Cold War than because he correctly ascertained it sounded metal, that the Soviet counter-intelligence organization SMERSH ("Smert' shpionam," or "death to spies") still existed under that name in 1957; following his lead, From Russia With Love is insistent that it still existed in 1963.  She might as well have been sent by "the Cheka."