From Russia With Love!

I write these Bond reviews with the expectation that everyone has seen all the movies, if not read the all the books. So, tread as carefully as it seems prudent. 

From Russia with Love from 1957 is easily the best of the Bond novels, despite the fact Bond himself doesn't show up until the last half. Red Grant is a worthy opponent and in fact in this head-to-head with SMERSH, Bond is battling his main foe and not quibbling with mere hoods. Money ain't the motivation in this one, humiliating Britain's hero spy is the goal, and the plan is a whopper. Kerim Bey is a fantastic helper for Bond, a character worthy of a few stories all his own. The ending is an absolute hoot, and it caught me looking.

This is one in which the book and the movie align quite closely, with mostly cosmetic changes made for the film. The book's great strength is its structure. We get two parts, titled the "The Plan" and "The Execution". The former focuses exclusively on the enemies of Bond, devoting whole chapters to their backstories. This scheme is a deft one, with actual levels of subtlety. Fleming's powers of description are top-notch again, as the setting for this one is the exotic Istanbul and later the equally romantic Orient Express. 

As has become a regular thing in these novels, Bond's strongest relationship in book is again with a man, specifically Kerin Bey, a sly pirate who runs the British operations with wit and savvy. There is a strong sexual attraction to Titiana for certain, but once again it's a sexual one almost exclusively with a dash of parental concern. Bond saves his feelings for his few male friends as is evidenced in the beginning of the second section when we learn that his relationship with Tiffany Case has broken up and he seems rather unconcerned. And the previous novels had featured a game of some kind at the core of the story or at least strongly featured in the background. In this outing the entire adventure is a chess match, embedding the motif into the plot. 

From Russia With Love the movie is to my thinking the absolute best of the Bonds as a pure spy thriller. It doesn't have the super-spy vibe in any serious way but rather gives us a relatively low-key (by Bond standards) Cold War yarn which puts our hero within reach of the clutches of those vile Russkies and more deadly yet, his enemies in SPECTRE.

Pedro Armendariz as Ali Kerim Bey supplies the movie with a ton of old-fashioned charm and his demise toward the climax of the movie is genuinely sad. The back and forth of the spies in the ancient streets of Istanbul are fun to watch as the exotic locales add lovely character to scenes which are mostly mundane.  Daniela Bianchi is gorgeous and a proper lure for the always randy Bond, though his dismissive treatment of this girl who truly loves him is sometimes difficult to understand.

At heart of this one though are the delightful villains. Kleb and Kronsteen are a duo from hell, a Russian man-hating crone and a cold-fish chess master are the ideal opponents for the virile Bond even though he never meets the latter personally. At the top of the heap though is Grant played by Robert Shaw. Grant doesn't speak through nearly the entire movie, but with his shocking white hair and deadly demeanor offers up a strange counter-image of Bond himself. As Bond stumbles through the story, Grant always seems in control. When they do finally face off, it's simple greed which proves the villains undoing.

James Bond Returns in Dr. No. 

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