Review of From Russia with Love (1963) by Sujay B — 07 Jul 2010

The second in the James Bond series of films is better than the first outing. If it hadn't been, the series would have died after two films. Unlike the rest of the Bond films this is a true spy story.

There are no sci-fi gadgets and no megalomaniac super-criminals. The book is one of the best of the James Bond books. It was written at the height of the Cold War. The enemy was the real life KGB sub-group SMERSH.

Ian Fleming spent a little less than half the book describing the inter-workings of this Russian hit squad. In 1956 when this book was written Fleming still had contacts in the British Secret Service where he had worked during World War II and he knew what he was taking about.

In the story the Russians want to get revenge against James Bond and the British Secret Service by setting him up in a sex scandal and killing him. Today this may seem improbable but in 1956 the Communist in Russia still held these prudish attitudes and assumed that British and Americans did too.

One of their strategies for recruiting foreign spies was to trap them into a sex scandal. By the mid 1960's when the movie was made SMERSH was history and the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had been through the Cubin Missile Crisis and the first negotiations for peaceful coexistence had begun.

It was more politically correct to change the bad guys to SPECTRE, the terrorist organization that Fleming invented with a couple of screen writers for a movie script that became the book and movie "Thunderball".

The chief bad guy is Grant played by Robert Shaw. In the book he is a half German half Irish psycho-killer recruited by the Russians as a hit man. In the movie he is a member of SPECTRE. The rest of the movie is close to the book.

There is a good fight scene between two women at a Gypsy camp followed by a gun fight between the Gypsies and a group of Bulgarian spies. The climax to the film is the fight on a passenger train between Grant and Bond.

Guess who wins.