9 / 10
Official trailer
The Spy Film Inside the Bond Series
From Russia with Love is the Bond film that feels most like a real spy story. It has gadgets and glamour, and underneath them it’s a patient, detailed Cold War thriller about deception, with a plot built like a chess game and a villain who spends most of the film simply watching and waiting. It’s the least fantastical Connery Bond, and for many fans, the best.
Terence Young directed it, returning after Dr. No, and it opened in October 1963.
It was a much bigger success than the first film and established the series as a phenomenon. Its source was the Fleming novel that President John F. Kennedy had reportedly named among his favorite books. That gave it a boost of publicity. My rating is a 9. It’s tense, elegant, beautifully paced and still gripping sixty years later.
This is the Bond film I’d keep if I could only keep one. It barely leans on gadgets and explosions. It tightens the screws scene after scene until the train fight lets everything go at once. Connery is at his coolest, Robert Shaw is terrifying without saying a word, and Istanbul looks like a city where anybody could be lying to you. The pace will test some people and Tatiana deserves more to do, and I forgive both without a second thought.
SPECTRE’s Plan
The plot is a trap. SPECTRE, the criminal organization Bond defeated in Dr. No, wants revenge and profit at the same time. Its chief planner, a chess grandmaster named Kronsteen, devises a scheme: lure Bond to Istanbul with the promise of a Lektor, a Soviet decoding machine, offered by a young Russian clerk who claims she has fallen in love with his photograph and wants to defect.
The plan is to let Bond steal the Lektor for SPECTRE, then kill him and the clerk in a scandal that will humiliate British intelligence. It’s a clever setup, because Bond, and the British, know it might be a trap and decide to take the bait anyway, gambling that they can grab the Lektor before the jaws close. The tension comes from waiting to see when and how the trap will close.
The chess imagery runs through the film. Kronsteen is introduced winning a championship game, and he approaches the plot the same way, planning every move in advance. The question is whether Bond can improvise faster than Kronsteen can predict, and the film keeps the answer in doubt until the final minutes.
For Writers
SPECTRE’s plan is a trap that Bond and the British suspect and walk into anyway. The tension comes from waiting for the trap to spring.
Suspense often works best when the reader knows more than the characters, or when the characters knowingly walk into danger. Knowing the threat is coming makes every scene tense.
Let your reader see the trap before your hero springs it, or let your hero walk into it knowingly. Then stretch the wait before it closes.
Rosa Klebb and Red Grant
The plan is carried out by Rosa Klebb, a former head of Soviet counterintelligence now secretly working for SPECTRE, played by the great Austrian singer and actress Lotte Lenya. Klebb is short, stocky, cold and sadistic, and I find her scarier than the bigger, louder villains the series later went in for, especially once that poisoned blade slides out of the toe of her shoe.
Her weapon is Donald Red Grant, a psychopathic assassin trained on SPECTRE Island, played by Robert Shaw. Grant is silent, blond, muscular and relentless, and for most of the film he simply follows Bond, watching from the shadows, protecting him so that the trap can work. He barely speaks until the final act, and his quiet presence is more frightening than any threat.
Shaw was a fine stage actor who later played Quint in Jaws, and he makes Grant the first of Bond’s great physical adversaries. He’s Bond’s equal in strength, cunning and skill, and the film makes the audience feel that Bond could lose. Few later henchmen ever matched that sense of danger.
Shaw is the reason I rate this film so high. He spends most of the running time as a blond shape at the edge of the frame, and every time I spot him my shoulders tighten. I’d put Grant above every henchman the series produced after him, and I don’t think it’s close.
For Writers
Red Grant barely speaks for most of the film. He simply follows Bond, watching and waiting, and his silence makes him more frightening than any threat.
Give your antagonist a long stretch of the story where they observe the hero without acting. Show them watching, and let the reader dread the moment they move.
A villain who watches and waits can be scarier than one who acts, because the reader imagines what they might do. Restraint builds menace.
Istanbul
Much of the story unfolds in Istanbul, and it’s among the most atmospheric settings of any Bond film. Young shoots the mosques, the Grand Bazaar, the vast cisterns beneath the city and the Bosphorus with an eye for mystery and romance, and the city feels ancient, crowded and full of secrets.
Bond’s ally there is Kerim Bey, the head of the British station, played by Pedro Armendáriz with enormous warmth and humor. Kerim is a charming, worldly man with a huge family, a network of informants and a rivalry with the Soviet agents in the city. I’d happily watch a whole film about him. Every scene he’s in gets lighter, and his friendship with Bond gives this cold, patient thriller the warmth it needs.
Armendáriz was seriously ill with cancer during the filming, and he died before the film was released. His performance is full of life, and knowing his circumstances makes it more moving. Kerim’s scenes are full of jokes about his family and his enemies, and Armendáriz plays them with the ease of a man enjoying every minute on screen.
Tatiana
Daniela Bianchi plays Tatiana Romanova, the young Soviet clerk who is told to seduce Bond and offer him the Lektor. She’s naive, sincere and drawn to him, and she doesn’t know that Klebb is working for SPECTRE. She believes she’s serving her country, and gradually she falls for Bond for real.
Bianchi was a former Miss Universe runner-up, and her performance is gentle and sweet. Her voice was dubbed, as was common in the early films with European actresses, and she’s more a romantic figure than an active heroine. That was typical of the period. Her relationship with Bond, starting as a deception and becoming something warmer, gives the second half of the film its emotional stakes.
The Orient Express
Bond, Tatiana and Kerim escape Istanbul with the Lektor aboard the Orient Express, and the long train sequence is the film’s centrepiece. As the train crosses the Balkans, the danger closes in: Soviet agents are aboard, Kerim is killed, and Grant boards the train posing as a British agent sent to help Bond.
The fight between Bond and Grant in a cramped sleeping compartment is the best fight in the series and a landmark of screen fighting. It’s brutal, close and chaotic, with the two men smashing each other against the walls and the windows, fighting with fists, knives and a garrotte hidden in Grant’s watch. It was filmed with minimal music, and every blow lands with a thud the audience can feel.
Before the fight, there’s a memorable scene in which Grant, having got the drop on Bond, sits calmly and explains the whole SPECTRE plot, enjoying his victory. The tension of that conversation, with Bond waiting for his chance, is as gripping as the fight itself. Connery plays Bond’s fear and calculation with rare subtlety.
That conversation is my favorite scene in the film. Shaw finally talks, smug and chatty and completely in control, while Connery sits there working out his odds. When the fight breaks loose it’s so ugly and cramped that I flinch at every blow, and no Bond fight since has come close for me.
For Writers
Grant calmly explains SPECTRE’s plan to a helpless Bond before the fight. The conversation is as tense as the violence that follows.
A confrontation doesn’t have to begin with action. A scene where the villain has the upper hand and talks can build unbearable tension before the first blow.
Before your big confrontation, write a scene where the antagonist holds all the power and speaks. Let the hero listen, calculate and wait for an opening.
The Gypsy Camp
Earlier, Bond and Kerim hide out at a gypsy camp, where they witness a fight between two women over the same man and then find themselves caught in a gun battle with Soviet-backed attackers. The sequence is colorful and exciting, and it’s the film’s most traditional action set piece, closer to a western than a spy film.
The women’s fight, staged as spectacle for the camp, is a dated piece of sixties exoticism, and it plays very differently today. It’s the one sequence modern audiences tend to find uncomfortable. The gun battle that follows is energetic and well staged, and it’s the first time Grant saves Bond’s life, from the shadows, to keep the trap intact. Bond never knows how close he came.
The women’s fight makes me wince, and I’d have trimmed it hard. The gun battle after it is great fun, though, and I like that Grant saves Bond’s life without Bond ever finding out.
The Chase
After the train, Bond and Tatiana escape across country.
In a famous sequence, Bond is pursued across open ground by a helicopter dropping grenades, in an obvious homage to the crop-duster scene in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Bond brings the helicopter down with a well-aimed shot. The homage is affectionate and obvious, and it works.
A boat chase follows, with SPECTRE speedboats pursuing Bond across the water until he dumps his fuel drums overboard and sets the sea ablaze with a flare, engulfing his pursuers. These sequences are exciting, and they point toward the bigger action finales of later films. The final confrontation, with Klebb disguised as a hotel maid and her poisoned shoe, is a tense, satisfying end, settled in a Venice hotel room by Tatiana’s last-second choice.
Q and the Attaché Case
Q arrived in From Russia with Love, played by Desmond Llewelyn, who would appear in seventeen Bond films. Here, he’s simply the armorer from Q Branch, and he gives Bond a black leather attaché case fitted with a throwing knife, gold sovereigns, a folding rifle and a tear-gas cartridge that explodes if the case is opened the wrong way.
The case is modest by later standards, and every item in it ends up being used, most importantly in the fight with Grant. It’s the model for the series’ gadget tradition at its best: practical, clever and paid off in the plot, with nothing wasted. Later films would turn gadgets into toys. This one keeps them as tools, and each one saves Bond’s life at the moment he needs it.
Barry’s First Full Score
John Barry composed his first full Bond score for the film, and it established the sound of the series. His driving 007 theme, written as a second action motif alongside the James Bond Theme, appears for the first time here and would be used in several later films, including Thunderball and You Only Live Twice.
The title song, sung by Matt Monro, is heard over the end credits, and an instrumental version plays over the opening titles. It’s a lush, romantic ballad, very different from the brassy themes that followed, and it suits the film’s elegant, old-fashioned mood. Later Bond themes would be bolder, and few would be as graceful.
The Case for the Best
Many fans call From Russia with Love the best Bond film because it balances every element perfectly: character, suspense, action, romance, humor and style. It’s grounded enough to feel real and glamorous enough to be fun, and its villains set the standard for the series. Its influence on later Bond films, and on spy films in general, is enormous.
It isn’t perfect. The pace is slow for modern audiences, Tatiana is passive, and some elements have dated. It gets a 9. Watch it for Robert Shaw, the train fight, Istanbul and a Connery at the height of his powers, and see where the series found its style. Everything the franchise became starts here.
It’s also the film Daniel Craig’s era looked back to when it rebuilt Bond. Casino Royale’s grounded spycraft, its brutal close-quarters fights and its focus on character over gadgets all echo From Russia with Love. More than sixty years on, it remains the benchmark every serious Bond film is measured against.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Its story plays out like a chess game, with SPECTRE planning every move and Bond improvising against it. The pleasure lies in watching the trap tighten and the hero find the one move the planner missed.
A plot built around a villain’s detailed plan gives the story a strong spine and lets the reader enjoy the moment the plan goes wrong.
Write out your villain’s plan step by step before you start, then build your story around the one step your hero disrupts. Let the reader see both sides.
The Verdict on From Russia with Love
It’s a 9, and it’s the Bond film I’d hand to anyone who thinks the series is all gadgets and quips. Shaw’s silent menace, Istanbul, the train fight and Connery at his sharpest take it most of the way to a 10. What keeps it from getting there is a pace that drags in places and a heroine the script leaves with too little to do, and those are real flaws, even if they’re easy to forgive.
