My Year of Bonds, Vol. 2: From Russia With Love

January 27, 2009

From Russia With Love was apparently quite popular over at Netflix; once I finished Dr. No, I found that Russia was listed as "short wait."  This continued for some time, at which point I was out of the country for three weeks.  When I got back, the film was finally available, so here we go: entry #2 in the series.

A big deal was made this past year about Quantum of Solace being the first true Bond sequel, but From Russia With Love is set six months after the end of Dr. No, and features SPECTRE's plot to kill Bond as revenge for the dispatching of Dr. No.  That plot is actually somewhat incidental; SPECTRE's true plan is to play British and Russian intelligences against each other, with the end result being that MI-6 will deliver a code-breaking machine right into SPECTRE's hands.  The expectation is that Bond will be the agent sent, which is simply icing on the cake for SPECTRE.  As in Ian Fleming's novel, SPECTRE sets this trap, and as in the novel, Bond walks into it rather wittingly.  There is a scene early on in which he and M discuss the sheer ridiculousness of the situation - Tatiana, a Russian agent (doing SPECTRE's bidding, although she thinks she's doing it for Russia) has just decided to defect, and given as her reasoning that she's fallen in love with James Bond via dossier photo and wants him in Istanbul right away so she can give the Lektor code-breaking device to the British.  M and Bond agree this is almost certainly nonsense, but the Lektor is so valuable that they have to risk it anyway.  (Bond takes one look at a picture of Tatiana and decides that's worth a shot, as well.)

Based on Keith Phipps' description of the novel's plot, it's clear that parts of the movie follow it quite closely, although the backstory is lost - and so is the ending, in which Bond apparently dies via poison.  Russia was Fleming's fifth Bond novel and was evidently intended to be his last, though he ended up resurrecting Bond the following year anyway (for Dr. No, in a slight irony).  As Phipps notes, the relative stupidity of Bond in this plot makes more sense in what was intended to be his last adventure.  In the film version, it's a bit harder to explain away, especially since Russia became the first film tagged with the now-famous "James Bond will return in..." promise.  The film's Bond doesn't stay in an obviously bugged room, rather demanding to be moved to the bridal suite, supposedly the only room left.  (Even this, however, is a SPECTRE ploy; they trick Bond into moving by making their bugs obvious, then film him in flagrante delicto with Tatiana from behind a trick wall, planning to use the footage later to humiliate Bond in death.  The details of the humiliation are much more clearly explained in the book.)  But the film's Bond does do a number of fairly stupid things, including going to Istanbul at all, and a scene near the climax where he rather easily lets his guard down around SPECTRE's hired killer Red Grant (Robert Shaw), who is impersonating an MI-6 operative with mixed success.

Even at their best, the plans in this film seem off.  The big plan that Bond and his Turkish pal Kerim Bey devise for stealing the Lektor from the Russian consulate involves Bond walking in the front door and asking for a visa, and then the Turks blowing the holy hell out of the building, at which point Bond snatches the Lektor during the chaos.  Subtlety isn't exactly a fine point here.  At another time, Kerim is out to kill his Russian counterpart, so he has his two sons knock on the man's door, at which point the man tries to climb out a secret exit - right in the middle of a giant movie billboard.  Kerim kills him rather easily.  Tatiana's compliance with the plan is also a bit suspect - she didn't ever think to wonder why Russia wants her for a top-secret mission that involves giving their code-breaking device to the British?  (To be fair, she is threatened with death if she doesn't comply, but this seems not to occur to her at any point, not even when she is under Bond's protection late in the film.)  SPECTRE's plan makes the most sense out of any of them, and even then it's strange - the plan's failure, due pretty much solely to Bond's ability to best Grant in a fistfight and not its construction, is blamed not on the icy Rosa Klebb, who hand-picked Grant for the mission, but on Kronsteen, the plan's architect.  Of course, supervillains can be irrationally vindictive.

Anyway, Bond gets away from Istanbul with Tatiana and the Lektor, but Grant tails him on the train.  After killing Kerim to prevent Bond from escaping through Greece, Grant poses as a Captain Nash, the agent Bond arranges with M to meet him in Zagreb.  Bond suspects Grant after he drugs Tatiana, but when Grant claims that the escape route he's planned for Bond is for one person only and that he assumed getting the Lektor out would be Bond's primary concern, Bond lets his guard down to the extent that he kneels down next to Grant to look closely at a map, at which point, of course, he gets clubbed over the head.  The film reaches its climax at this point and it is, it must be said, rather thrilling given that not a lot of consequence has happened previously.  After Bond confirms the details of SPECTRE's plan with a suddenly quite forthcoming Grant, he offers fifty gold sovereigns from his trick briefcase for a cigarette.  Grant, no fool, insists Bond open the case, but then gets greedy and wants to check the case of the agent he'd intercepted, which apparently has the exact same canister of tear gas booby-trapping it.  And even though he's just seen Bond open his case (the gas can only be deactivated by opening the latches a certain way), he opens it the normal way and gets a face full of gas.  Everyone in this film is dumb.

On the bright side, it leads to a relatively intense fight, though the cuts get a bit awkward right as Bond gets the best of Grant and stabs him to death.  The film loads up its action sequences in the final 20 minutes, as Bond escapes from the train only to be buzzed by a helicopter which he eventually blows up, then hops on a boat which is chased by SPECTRE operatives; Bond makes his escape by rolling leaking fuel barrels into the sea behind him, then setting them off with a flare gun, sending the SPECTRE boats up in flames.  Both of these sequences are pretty invigorating and fresh, which makes it a little disappointing that Russia crams them so late in the film, especially when so little else had happened.  Aside from the bomb at the Russian consulate, the only real action sequence takes place at a Gypsy camp, where two girls are going to fight to the death for the right to marry the chief's son.  A cheesecake-heavy catfight ensues, but it's interrupted by the attack of the Russians, who are after Kerim; during the battle, Bond saves the life of the Gypsy chief, who shows his gratitude by letting Bond sleep with both of his son's prospective wives (???).

In many ways From Russia With Love is a product of its time.  The source of conflict between the British and Russians is barely even mentioned in the film aside from one or two uses of "Cold War" - it seems like the idea of Russians as Western antagonists was expected by the filmmakers to be a given for the audience.  And perhaps it was; the film was released in October 1963, almost exactly one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Cold War was still at its hottest point.  It's easy to take for granted the idea that a movie set in a historical time period should explain its surroundings - after all, it wasn't history when the film was made.  A movie released now would hardly be expected to lay out the causes of the Iraq war in detail.  It was simply the milieu of Bond in the 60s.  If anything, the Cold War made the film go easy on the Russians - in Fleming's book, they're the bad guys, whereas here they're mostly window dressing, a foe back-burnered by a more pressing threat.  Even as Bond thinks it's all the Russians' doing, the film allows its audience to know better, rather than attempting a red herring.

From Russia With Love also gets the Bond series really firing on all cylinders.  It has the first true Bond title sequence, the first Bond theme song (although it appears at the end of the film), and the first action sequences that, for all their clunky cuts and awkward rear-projection, really look like modern Bond action sequences.  It also features the first appearance of Desmond Llewelyn as Q, though he merely presents Bond with his gadgets here, rather than working in any of the jokes that became staples in later years (or at least in the Brosnan films made prior to Llewelyn's death, the only ones I've seen yet, you'll remember).  I have distinct issues with some of the plot points - it's one thing for plans to be kind of goofy, and quite another for characters to actually behave in stupid ways, especially when Bond is significantly more clever in Dr. No.  Again, though, this seems just to be a holdover from the novel; if nothing else it demonstrates the problem with running your adaptations out of order.  Either way, Russia is a fairly engaging film; most of the Bond trademarks are here, and of course it wouldn't have been much of a film if he'd just seen right through the plot against him.  At least Russia, unlike Dr. No before it, drops us right into the plot; Dr. No spends a lot of time before showing us the real bad guy, whereas Russia has no such interest in giving us the runaround.  Bond isn't exactly turned loose yet, but he's getting closer.

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