From Russia With Love 9781839024535, 9781839024566, 9781839024559

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BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics series introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles in the series, please visit https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/bfi-film-classics/

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For Dorothy ‘Dot’ Burton. From your granddaughter, with love

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From Russia With Love Llewella Chapman

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THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Llewella Chapman 2022 Llewella Chapman has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 6 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover artwork: © Joe Gough Series cover design: Louise Dugdale Series text design: Ketchup/SE14 Images from From Russia With Love (Terence Young, 1963), © Danjaq S.A.; Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953), © Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; Another Time, Another Place (Lewis Allen, 1958), © Kaydor Productions/Lanturn Productions; Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962), © Eon Productions; North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), © Loew’s Incorporated All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-8390-2453-5 ePDF: 978-1-8390-2455-9 ePUB: 978-1-8390-2454-2 Produced for Bloomsbury Publishing Plc by Sophie Contento

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Acknowledgments6 Introduction8 1 Contexts

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2 Production

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3 The Film

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4 Promotion and Reception

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Conclusion93 Notes97 Credits107 Bibliography111

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Acknowledgments As Rosa Klebb might suggest, this book has been ‘a real labour of love’ to research and write, and would not have been possible without the support and assistance of the following people, particularly in light of the coronavirus pandemic. First, I would like to thank Rebecca Barden, commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, for encouraging me to write a BFI Film Classic on a James Bond film. I would also like to thank Veidehi Hans and Sophie Contento for their assistance in the publication of this book, and Joe Gough for his beautiful cover design. I would like to thank the following archivists for going ‘above and beyond’ their call of duty during the pandemic to assist me in my research for this book: Storm Patterson and the librarians at the British Film Institute, David Thomas, Phil Wickham, Gil Toffell, Barbara Kruger, Nicholas J. Cull, who visited the Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California, on my behalf and returned with a ‘diplomatic pouch’ of goodies – ‘For Your Eyes Only’ – Lindsay Moen, Mary Huelsbeck, Kristina Krasny and Eon Productions. It was also during my research for this book that Colin Sullivan, the nephew of wardrobe mistress Eileen Sullivan, contacted me. It has been a privilege to discuss his aunt’s work in the film industry with Colin. Various academic friends have very kindly shared their thoughts with me for this book and have discussed fruitful areas for analysis, not least: Christine Geraghty, James Chapman, Andrew Spicer, Klaus Dodds, Ellen Cheshire, Paul Duncan, Lawrence Napper, Evren Eken, Claire Hines, Melanie Williams, Sheldon Hall, Tobias Hochscherf and Justin Smith. Similarly, ‘Bond fan’ friends have been invaluable in their assistance, not least Mark Ashby, Peter Lorenz, Gary J. Firuta and Susan Edwards, John Cork, Bill Koenig, David

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Lowbridge-Ellis, Mark O’Connell, Mark Edlitz, Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury. A huge thank you must go to Raja Swaminathan for saving the draft manuscript of this book early in the writing process after a certain ‘SPECTRE Operative’ (Number 9 perhaps?) proceeded to knock my laptop onto the floor causing a scene to rival that of the ending to You Only Live Twice. Last but very much not least, thank you to my family. Thanks to Mum and Dad for introducing me to James Bond, and to my brother Michael for behaving himself long enough for our parents to allow us to stay up past the 10 o’clock news on ITV to watch the end of the Bond films. Thank you must also go to Katie and Alex, who now manage to get Mike to behave beyond watching the Bond films. My husband, James Chapman, has greatly assisted me in researching and writing this book, not least for reading drafts and encouraging me throughout the whole process. Together, we have embarked on a (digital) journey through the archives for our respective Bond projects, and I look forward to more archive adventures with you. This book is dedicated, with all my love, to my late grandmother, Dorothy Burton. Nan, or Dot as she was known to her friends, encouraged my love of Sean Connery through her own enthusiasm and attraction for the Scot, leading to Mike and I regularly sending Valentine’s Day cards to her on behalf of the man himself, always signed ‘From Russia With Love’.

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Introduction ‘Bah-da-da-da-dah; Bah-da-da-da-dumb! Bah-da-da-da-dah; Bahda-da-da-dumb!’ So begins the trumpet solo heralding the start of the title credits, designed by Robert Brownjohn, assisted by Trevor Bond, complete with a gyrating ‘gypsy girl’. It follows a pre-title sequence in which James Bond (Sean Connery), assigned codenumber 007 of the British Secret Service, comes up against Donovan ‘Red’ Grant (Robert Shaw) during a SPECTRE training exercise and gets killed at the end, only for it to be revealed that it is not Bond, but a double. Thus begins the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love (1963). It promises to take audiences on a ride of suspense and intrigue through staccato boldness and lyrical love, as reflected in the orchestral score for the film composed by John Barry.1 It is the best Bond film of them all: if I were to recommend one Bond film to watch, it would be From Russia With Love. The first Bond film that I watched was Dr. No (1962) with my younger sibling, Michael, and our dad, on a recorded-off-air VHS tape. We enjoyed the film, so the following weekend Dad let us watch his off-air copy of From Russia With Love. What he didn’t tell us, though, was that there were more Bond films, and, in fact, that they were based on Ian Fleming’s novels. So there I was, watching Grant outwit and tell a Bond on his knees, ‘Not until you crawl over here and you kiss my foot!’, with all the blue-lighted and claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in a tiny Orient Express train carriage, thinking: ‘how does James Bond get out of this?!’ Bond did, of course, and it was after our viewing of From Russia With Love that Dad explained that the Bond series continued over the course of a further thirteen films (prior to the release of GoldenEye in 1995). Because of this, From Russia With Love continues to hold a particularly special place in my viewing of the Bond films.

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Promotional shot of Grant getting the better of Bond in the Orient Express train cabin (courtesy BFI National Archive)

Critiquing the first sequel to the commercially successful Dr. No in the Monthly Film Bulletin, Penelope Houston acknowledged: ‘The success of Dr. No has no doubt given the James Bond team added confidence, if that was necessary, and From Russia With Love is made by people who clearly know they now have a giltedged formula to play with,’ and further explained: ‘With a superconfidence which one can only regard as justified, the film ends with an announcement of the next Bond adventure: Goldfinger.’2 Although Houston would not have known it at the time, From Russia With Love would later come to be viewed as exemplifying the bounds of difference from the Bond formula that was cemented by Goldfinger (1964), the latter film developing the megalomaniac villain, the ‘Bond girls’ and the modified sports car. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, From Russia With Love is often regarded as the ‘best James Bond film’ among critics and fans alike. In 2004, Total Film named From Russia With Love as the ‘ninth greatest British film of all time’, the only Bond film to appear on the list.3 The film is also recognised as Sean Connery’s best Bond film, as argued by Brogan Morris on the British Film Institute’s (BFI) website, and by Scott Mendelson:

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Terence Young nailed the happy medium between real-life espionage and larger-than-life action on this second instalment … Hell, it’s so damn good on its own that I’d argue it would still be held up as a classic and groundbreaking action thriller even if the Bond series didn’t extend beyond a few movies.4

Despite the film’s commercial success and critical placement within the Bond film franchise and British cinema more widely, neither From Russia With Love, nor any other Bond film, has previously been included in the BFI Film Classics series. Given the film’s political, social and cultural significance at the time of its release and its place within the genre of spy films and British cinema, a robust case can be made for its inclusion in the series. Furthermore, the Bond formula was developed over the course of the first three films, making From Russia With Love a foundational part of the longest-running continuous franchise in cinema history. Archival sources that I draw upon throughout this book include the film’s treatments and scripts, call sheets, salary costs that were submitted to the Board of Trade, interviews with practitioners, publicity materials such as press books and advertisements, ephemera, critical reception and box-office figures provided by the trade press where available. Archives that I accessed in order to review these materials include the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, the BFI, the British Library, the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC), the History of Advertising Trust, the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, the Margaret Herrick Library, the National Archives (TNA), the Richard Maibaum papers held at the University of Iowa Libraries, the John Cork papers held in the Cinematic Arts Library at the University of Southern California (USC) and the United Artists papers held by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (WCFTR). I also draw upon the personal papers of Eileen Sullivan that Colin Sullivan very generously shared with me for this project.

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1 Contexts From Casino Royale (1953), the first book in the series, Ian Lancaster Fleming would go on to write a further eleven James Bond novels and two volumes of short stories. Fleming’s last novel, The Man With the Golden Gun (1965), and his later short stories, collected under the title of Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966), were published posthumously. Fleming said of his work, ‘while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as “thrillers designed to be read as literature”’.5 As assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence during World War II, Fleming drew upon his own wartime experiences and his work as a journalist for Reuters during the 1930s as inspiration for his Bond novels. They generally centred on secret agent James Bond and his exploits on the missions he was assigned by ‘M’, head of the British Secret Service. As James Chapman has argued, Fleming can be understood as the ‘last of the “old school” thriller writers’, his novels published between those of ‘Sapper’ (H. C. McNeile) and John Buchan, ‘whose adventure thrillers were characterised by their upstanding patriotic heroes, fast-moving action-orientated plots and international villainy’, and the more realistic spy stories penned by John le Carré and Len Deighton.6 Fleming’s novels are effectively travelogues, with Bond visiting exotic locales and sampling a variety of cuisines, all the while attracting beautiful women and encountering foreign villains during the course of his missions. Kingsley Amis notes that the villains have an ‘identikit’ of blue or black eyes – which often include a ‘red blaze’ or ‘glint of red’ on encountering Bond – have red hair or are balding, and are usually of a ‘heavy’ physique.7 They possess distinctive personalities, and are typically assigned a physical deformity and/or sexual ‘dysfunction’ by Fleming.

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Jeremy Black divides the Bond novels and short stories into three publication phases according to villain, with SMERSH (an acronym of SMERt’ SHpionam, ‘Death to Spies’), the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, as Bond’s nemesis from Casino Royale to For Your Eyes Only (1960), excepting Diamonds Are Forever (1956). Black outlines how From Russia, With Love ‘was carried forward at a moment of rising tension in the Cold War and at the same time provided a sense of humour and relief from the real world. There was both a feeling of the moment and one of unreality.’8 This was followed by the ‘Blofeld trilogy’ of Thunderball (1961), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and You Only Live Twice (1964) after East–West relations had thawed, while the remaining books are ‘the later stories’.9 From Russia, With Love was inspired by Fleming’s visit to Istanbul in September 1955 on behalf of The Sunday Times, for which he had been invited to report on the 24th General Assembly of Interpol that was being hosted by Turkey, the country having recently joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and where he witnessed the Istanbul pogrom riots first hand. Fergus Fleming explains that Istanbul ‘fascinated [Fleming]. Apart from its antiquity and aura of romantic decrepitude, it had long been a mecca for spies.’10 Fleming began writing the novel in January 1956, and centred its plot on SMERSH’s attempt to assassinate Bond and humiliate the British Secret Service through luring 007 into a honeytrap using Tatiana Romanova and the Spektor decoding machine as bait, with head of SMERSH, Colonel General Grubozaboyschikov, ‘General G’, asking: ‘How can we help destroy the myth and thus strike at the very motive force of this organisation? Where does the myth reside?’, to which Colonel Nikitin of the Soviet Ministry of State Security (MGB) replies: ‘There is a man called Bond.’11 From Russia, With Love is arguably the most ‘filmic’ of Fleming’s novels, consciously making use of film-making apparatus and marketing material as part of the plot. This includes the use of a cine-camera by SMERSH operatives to film the sexual intercourse

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Promotional poster of Niagara (1953): Marilyn Monroe’s lips were lavishly described by Fleming in From Russia, With Love (courtesy BFI National Archive)

between an unknowing Bond and Tatiana, and a reference to the film poster of Niagara (1953), featuring a huge profile image of Marilyn Monroe’s face, her mouth (‘the great alluring curve of the lips’) concealing the window of Krilencu’s apartment.12 It was also inspired, in part, by Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), which Fleming affords Bond as reading material on the flight from London to Istanbul at the start of his mission. Chapman believes that From Russia, With Love is one of Fleming’s ‘strongest’ stories, ‘a richly detailed and tightly plotted narrative of intrigue and suspense’, and this, alongside the novel’s filmic qualities, make it a rich source text to adapt for the screen.13

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William Plomer, a novelist and reviewer for Jonathan Cape, read a draft of the manuscript in July 1956, reporting back to Fleming: I’ve greatly enjoyed it & all your verbal inventiveness. V.g. [very good] beginning, & Red Grant & Rosa Klebb are outstanding in your lengthening gallery of monsters … All the Istanbul part & return journey the greatest fun … Excellent use of the Orient Express & I particularly like the conclusion, with its to-be-continued-in-our-next air. A masterstroke to leave Bond not cock-a-hoop but wounded & unconscious & the reader in suspense … Klebb is in the basket & I hope Success is in the bag!14

Plomer also picked up on the novel’s cinematic qualities, namely ‘the mouth of Marilyn Monroe business’. Daniel George, a fellow reviewer for Jonathan Cape, congratulated Fleming: ‘I think this is your best book, the most tightly and ingeniously constructed … All your action & horror scenes are as good as anything I have ever read in this genre.’15 Fleming himself would later reflect: ‘Personally, I think From Russia, With Love was, in many respects, my best book.’16 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott explain that it was with the publication of From Russia, With Love that Bond transformed ‘from a character within a set of fictional texts into a household name’, owing to the novel’s serialisation in the Daily Express and a daily strip cartoon published later that year.17 According to Lietta Tornabuoni, it was the serialisation and its interpretation of From Russia, With Love’s ending, ‘affirming that James Bond was dead’, that led to ‘hundreds of irate telephone calls … and Fleming was so bombarded by protests from deluded readers that he was forced to sue the paper for damages’.18 Acknowledging his ‘waning enthusiasm for this cardboard booby’, Fleming had, however, wanted to kill off Bond in From Russia, With Love.19 Fleming had long recognised the potential of selling the film and television rights for his novels, believing: ‘You don’t make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth … but if you sell the serial rights and film rights, you do very well.’20 The first

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adaptation of Bond for the screen was the live studio dramatisation of Casino Royale, broadcast on the American CBS television network on 21 October 1954. Fleming and CBS were not the only ones to appreciate the adaptation possibilities for Bond. Two producers, Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, both separately realised the potential of adapting Bond for film, with Broccoli claiming: ‘From the very beginning I believed that 007 had enormous screen potential.’21 However, it was Saltzman who had purchased an option on the novels, with the exception of Casino Royale, which had been acquired by Gregory Ratoff. It has been well documented that when Broccoli attempted to approach Fleming to negotiate the film rights for the novels in the summer of 1958, his production partner at Warwick Films, Irving Allen, offended Fleming by telling him over a prearranged lunch at Les Ambassadeurs that the books were not good enough to be made into screen adaptations after Broccoli was unable to attend the meeting.22 Saltzman, who was the producer of the critically acclaimed Woodfall Films – Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) – was evidently more tactful, and purchased the initial option for the films around the end of 1960. This is somewhat ironic, as Saltzman was a producer renowned for his lack of tact, as Johanna Harwood, who worked as his assistant and would contribute to the writing of the scripts for Dr. No and From Russia With Love, put it: ‘He was always rubbing people up the wrong way because he was saying things, unkind things, but he wasn’t actually unkind. He [just] never thought this might upset this person.’23 The option was renewed in June 1961, which, as Chapman notes, is an example of Saltzman’s ‘opportunism and instinct for deal-making’.24 Saltzman’s timing was indeed fortuitous: on 17 March 1961, Life magazine published an article on the reading habits of President John F. Kennedy, in which he declared that Fleming was one of his favourite authors, and that From Russia, With Love was ‘one of the ten works that he would save from a possible atomic catastrophe’, projecting Fleming’s novels further into public awareness.25

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The pair thus had to negotiate their partnership with one another – Saltzman was in possession of the rights, and Broccoli had the relevant industry contacts through his company Warwick Films to negotiate a distribution contract – which was not without issue. According to Broccoli, Saltzman told him: ‘We’ll draw up a piece of paper now … You’ll have forty-nine per cent, I’ll have fifty-one per cent,’ to which Broccoli responded: ‘No, Mr Saltzman. If you want to make the deal with you having fifty-one per cent, forget it.’ Saltzman conceded: ‘All right, we’ll have it drawn up. Fifty-fifty.’26 David Picker, then vice president of United Artists, has summed up the key differences between Broccoli and Saltzman. The ‘easier of the two to understand’, Broccoli had worked hard to make friends and become ‘accepted’ in the film industry, whereas Saltzman, whom Picker described as ‘awkward’, was ‘a whole different story. He was an outsider to the business, and in meeting him it was hard to feel totally comfortable’.27 Together, Broccoli and Saltzman set up Eon Productions and its Swiss-registered parent company Danjaq S.A., the latter named after their wives, Dana (Broccoli) and Jacqueline (Saltzman). Broccoli and Saltzman approached United Artists after Columbia Pictures, who had distributed the Warwick films including The Red Beret (1953), Hell Below Zero (1954), Cockleshell Heroes (1955) and Safari (1956), refused first offer on the Bond films. This was because Columbia typically produced war and historical epics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, whereas the Bond novels were commonly understood by the film industry (not dissimilar to Allen’s view) to have only B-movie potential as lowbrow thrillers. Broccoli and Saltzman instead met with the United Artists executives Arthur Krim, Robert Benjamin, Arnold Picker and David Picker in mid-June 1961 at the distributor’s New York-based offices. Mike Medavoy has suggested that Krim was a close friend of Kennedy’s, and that the president had personally informed Krim that he was a fan of Fleming’s work, which is in part why United Artists agreed to offer a distribution contract to the producers.28 The main reasons,

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however, were twofold: firstly, David Picker had read the Bond novels and had previously attempted unsuccessfully to acquire the rights from Fleming. Secondly, United Artists was the key player in the ‘Hollywood England’ trend of the early 1960s, which led to significant US investment in the British film industry throughout the decade, owing to the favourable conditions of lower labour costs and that the Hollywood studios could take advantage of the Eady Levy subsidies provided they employed predominantly British cast and crew members. While Harwood, and later Richard Maibaum and Wolf Mankowitz, were tasked with drafting the treatments and script for Dr. No, the producers hired Terence Young, the director of several Warwick pictures including The Red Beret, Safari and No Time to Die (1958), to direct the first Bond picture, developing the ‘family feel’ of the production unit that would become synonymous with the later Bond films. Attention then turned to one of the most important pre-production decisions to be made: who to cast in the role of Bond. Various actors were briefly considered by Broccoli, Saltzman and Young before being discarded for different reasons, including Patrick McGoohan, James Fox, Michael Redgrave, David Niven and Trevor Howard. One actor to have been under consideration was Robert Shaw, who was later cast as Grant in From Russia With Love. A letter from George H. ‘Bud’ Ornstein, head of United Artists’ London office, to David Picker dated 18 September 1961 reveals that United Artists had arranged for Broccoli and Saltzman to view The Valiant (1961) to assess Shaw for the role.29 Shaw ‘did not impress any of us as being James Bond’, but Ornstein acknowledged that this might have been due to Shaw wearing a military costume, and so the producers were directed to view other films he had starred in before forming a definitive opinion. They evidently remained unconvinced, and it was following this that Broccoli remembered Sean Connery, to whom he had been introduced by Lana Turner during the production of Another Time, Another Place (1958). Broccoli and Saltzman both believed that Connery would be the perfect choice for their

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Sean Connery as Mark Trevor in Another Time, Another Place (1958)

interpretation of the character following his audition at their offices at 3 Audley Square, London. As Broccoli put it: [Connery] was a handsome, personable guy, projecting a kind of animal virility. He was tall, with a strong physical presence … Physically, and in his general persona, he was too much of a rough-cut to be a replica of Fleming’s upper-class [sic] agent. This suited us fine, because we were looking to give our 007 a much broader box-office appeal.30

Produced at Pinewood Studios and on location in Jamaica over the course of twelve weeks with a final cost of £392,022 2s. 3d., Dr. No was released in the UK on 5 October 1962.31 Including stunning and ingeniously designed sets by Ken Adam, and a cast consisting of the beautiful Ursula Andress as Honey Rider, and Joseph Wiseman as Dr Julius No alongside Connery’s suave, if at times tentative, portrayal of Bond, the film was an instant success with cinemagoers, with the distributor’s receipts recorded as $2,138,906.62 (£891,211) by 29 February 1964.32 And so work began on the next Bond film: From Russia With Love.

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2 Production It was during the post-production stages of Dr. No that Saltzman tasked Harwood with writing a treatment of From Russia With Love.33 The writer completed her 126-page treatment on 22 August 1962, explaining: what happened when we started on From Russia With Love was quite another matter. They were all terrified that the second one wasn’t going to be the same. It suddenly became a problem because they didn’t know why Dr. No was such a success. It was so different, but it was so different by mistake. The first draft of From Russia With Love was done by this time and it was just torn to pieces. It was panic stations.34

Paul Duncan has viewed Harwood’s treatment, and recounts how it begins with Bond ‘smashing a dope/diamond/white slavery ring in Hong Kong and picking up a girlfriend, then segues into SPECTRE’s plot to assassinate Bond and to discredit MI6’.35 The opening involved a gunfight in Hong Kong harbour between Bond and the smugglers, with Bond subsequently rescuing a ‘beautiful’ nightclub singer from the white slave trade.36 Harwood also had Tatiana sacrificing herself to save Bond’s life, with the character dying in his arms at the end of the treatment.37 The inclusion of the elements that depart from Fleming’s novel is one of Harwood’s signatures, clearly based on inspiration from contemporaneous news sources, though very much written in the style of Fleming. For example, Harwood is credited for including the humorous reference to the missing Francisco Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington, reported as stolen on 21 August 1961, in Dr. No. Regarding Harwood’s opening for From Russia With Love, Fleming himself reported on the increase in drug trafficking from Arab countries and gold smuggling from Hong

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Kong for The Sunday Times in September 1955 after attending the Interpol meeting that would subsequently inspire From Russia, With Love. Furthermore, in July 1962 various British newspapers were reporting that three Chinese crew members of HMS Belfast had been accused of smuggling opium, morphine and heroin from Hong Kong around the time that Harwood was drafting her treatment.38 In order to ensure accuracy, Harwood’s treatment included a contemporary layout and timetable for the Orient Express, so that ‘events can unfold in real space and time’.39 Harwood said of her treatment: ‘I thought it was slightly better than Dr. No – it’s more believable in a way’, but owing to the alleged ‘panic’ of the producers, who wanted to build on the first film’s success but were unsure how to do so, they were keen to develop scenes in the original treatment that included ‘unexpected humour’: ‘I can recall one moment when Harry Saltzman said, “Now what we need here is a scene like that scene in the Marx brothers when they are all trapped in a lift”.’40 Up until 11 October 1962, the trade press reported that Harwood remained in her role as the film’s scriptwriter.41 However, not long after, Len Deighton was invited to pick up Harwood’s pen by Saltzman, and Harwood explained that her reason for leaving during the early pre-production stages was, in part, due to Saltzman asking her to rewrite the script with Young: I thought ‘this is going to be agony’ … we had one afternoon together where we took the script and I watched Terence Young running his pencil through it, re-writing the scenes and saying: ‘There, that’s much better isn’t it?’ I had to bite my tongue because I was thinking ‘It’s far worse. And he’s not going to listen if I tell him.’ So I went off and found Harry Saltzman and I said ‘I’m leaving. There’s no good me sitting there watching Terence Young wreck it even further, you’re just paying two people instead of one.’42

Saltzman attempted to persuade Harwood to remain, reasoning that they had worked together for a long time, but she assured the producer that she was ‘perfectly sure’ she wanted to leave the

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production.43 Harwood was paid a fee of £675 for her treatment, although admitted that her agent had to ‘fight’ for her to receive a screen credit in the film.44 Following Harwood’s abrupt departure, Saltzman asked Deighton to draft a treatment for From Russia With Love. Saltzman was keen to adapt Deighton’s spy novel The IPCRESS File (1962) into a film, so the author was already on his mind. They met for lunch at Pinewood Studios three days prior to the release of Dr. No to discuss screen rights. Deighton affirms: It was at one of our subsequent meetings that Harry asked me if I would write a screenplay of From Russia With Love. I wasn’t keen to write any kind of screenplay, but Harry was planning a recce in Istanbul with Terence Young and Syd Cain … It was winter and a trip to Turkey with all expenses paid, clever companions and a fee as well, promised to be a fabulous experience, and so it was.45

Deighton was unaware of Harwood’s previous involvement in drafting a treatment: ‘There were only four of us on the recce and Harry’s conversations with the art director [Cain] gave me the impression that we were starting from scratch’, and nor was the previous treatment mentioned during the writer’s discussions with Saltzman at breakfast every morning while they were in Turkey.46 Deighton recalls that when in discussion with Saltzman over script ideas, the producer was particularly concerned about making SPECTRE the villains while retaining ‘Russia’ in the film’s title: ‘The problem was not solved.’47 So, too, were United Artists. A cable sent by David Picker to Saltzman and Broccoli stated that the ‘unanimous feeling is [villain] should be SPECTRE or some similar third force and not Russians as in book’.48 On returning to the UK following the recce, Deighton completed his draft treatment of From Russia With Love: ‘How many of my ideas reached the screen I don’t know. I didn’t keep a copy of the script and I never got around to watching the final film. It wasn’t a disappointment; everyone knows that

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screenplays are not written; they are rewritten.’49 Although there is no evidence to suggest that Deighton’s draft treatment survives, the writer remembers that he and Saltzman had the idea that Rosa Klebb’s character would knock Bond unconscious in one of the Orient Express carriages.50 Deighton was paid a fee of £1,500 for his work.51 Based on the recollections of both Harwood and Deighton, it is evident that Saltzman was very much the driving force behind the scripting of From Russia With Love, with Broccoli absent from the process. With the producers concerned that Deighton’s treatment was not ‘progressing in the right direction’, Maibaum was employed to write another version.52 In conversation with Pat McGilligan, Maibaum expressed his belief that Deighton had been the first writer to work on From Russia With Love: ‘[Deighton] did about thirtyfive pages; but it wasn’t going anywhere so they brought me in’.53 Although dismissive of Harwood, believing that she did not deserve the adaptation credit afforded to her in the film and referring to her as ‘a girl playwright’, Maibaum admitted that she ‘made several good suggestions’, though has not confirmed which of Harwood’s specific ideas made it into his script.54 Under the impression that Harwood had little to no involvement in the writing process of From Russia With Love, Maibaum asterisked and underlined his name twice in ink on copies of promotional materials he owned, with two arrows pointing towards his name to emphasise who he believed had written the screen adaptation.55 Discussing what Maibaum took from her treatment, Harwood believes: ‘Anything that is vaguely like the book was mine. Maibaum did the nitty gritty on that one. I didn’t invent the character of Q [Boothroyd]. Someone else must have put him in.’56 In view of Maibaum’s opinion, he appears to have suffered similar frustrations to those that Harwood experienced with Young: ‘Terence Young is a writer too, but I groaned each time he threw in his favourite cliché, “Easy come, easy go”.’57 Maibaum believed that one of his strengths as a collaborator was having ‘a tolerance of other people’s ideas’ and being ‘able to select the good ones and fight like

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hell against those I think are bad. I am able to take an idea someone else has thought of and go beyond it.’ Maibaum had drafted two treatments of From Russia With Love by 28 January 1963, and both departed significantly from Harwood’s opening, electing instead to begin in the Renaissance Garden on SPECTRE Island with ‘Bond’ and Grant tracking each other before Grant garrottes ‘Bond’ with a wire embedded in his watch as part of a training exercise. Maibaum also included a cameo role for Ursula Andress as a ‘dame’ with whom Bond ‘conducts research’.58 Other ideas included in Maibaum’s first treatment involve helicopter and boat chase action sequences between Bond and SPECTRE operatives, both set at night.59 Rather than have Tatiana sacrifice herself to save Bond’s life as Harwood originally envisaged, Maibaum wrote the final scenes between Klebb, Bond and Tatiana differently, with Bond forcing Klebb to stab herself with the poisoned flick knife in the tip of her shoe. Maibaum originally set these scenes in Martucci’s apartment (the character being a British Secret Service operative based in Venice), which Bond and Tatiana visit to deliver the Lektor machine and where Klebb masquerades as Martucci’s aristocratic sister.60 In the second treatment, the key differences include the omission of the helicopter sequence and, in the scene in which Ernst Stavro Blofeld arranges for Morzeny to shoot Kronsteen for failing to provide a successful plan, a change of location from Blofeld’s yacht to a room in Venice, with Kronsteen killed by a poisoned gas pellet in an elevator.61 In both treatments and the script, Maibaum includes an ironic reference to Call Me Bwana (1963), produced by Eon Productions in between Dr. No and From Russia With Love, in the scene when Krilencu is assassinated: 155. EXT. SCHEDAZI MOSQUE. BOND. KERIM. An enormous POSTER covers almost the entire surface: an advertisement for CALL ME BWANA in Turkish lettering, with HOPE’s profile along left side and the rest the head and shoulders of ANITA EKBERG, whose ecstatically open mouth is centered at the level of the third floor. The poster is shadowy, hardly visible.62

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This was directly adapted by Maibaum from Fleming’s novel, and develops From Russia, With Love’s cinematic qualities to reflect the self-referential elements of the film that relate to Eon Productions and United Artists. Maibaum delivered the screenplay on 18 March 1963, and was paid a fee of £6,875.63 The script begins with the trope taken from Dr. No that would become the blueprint for the opening ‘gun barrel’ formula included in future Bond films: 1. EFFECT SHOT (AS IN DR. NO). CAMERA SHOOTS FROM INSIDE RIFLED GUN BARREL. JAMES BOND appears in b.g. as the ‘target’. He wheels sharply, fires at CAMERA. BLOOD seeps from top of SCREEN, gradually covering scene.64

Following these scenes, Maibaum has Klebb visiting SPECTRE Island in order to assess Grant’s physical fitness for the task of assassinating Bond. As with Fleming’s novel, Maibaum’s script includes a description of Grant being massaged at the side of a pool by a young woman. This is followed by Tatiana’s meeting with Klebb, who under the guise of still working for SMERSH assigns Tatiana the mission of seducing Bond and providing the British Secret Service with false information. Tatiana agrees, not realising that Klebb has defected to SPECTRE. In Maibaum’s version, the chess scenes between Kronsteen and MacAdams follow, before Kronsteen is summoned to Blofeld’s yacht and the plot of the film is revealed to the audience: namely, that the SPECTRE organisation intends to use Tatiana and the promise of a Lektor cypher machine to lure Bond into a deadly trap in revenge for Dr. No’s death in Jamaica, which in turn would lead to heightened tensions between Britain and Soviet Russia.65 On his script and what would become the Bond formula for the subsequent films, Maibaum felt: ‘I think we kind of crystallised the kind of thing that Bond movies should be. That film was the one in which we set the style. In fact, I wrote that script in just six weeks. It still remains my favourite.’66

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Maibaum subsequently dropped his idea of featuring Andress in a cameo role in the script, opting to include the character of ‘Jennifer’ instead: 56. INT. BENTLEY. BOND. JENNIFER. BOND

(into phone) Just reviewing an old case –

JENNIFER Oh, I am, am I? That’s a woman’s voice! BOND

(covering mouthpiece) My boss’ secretary –

JENNIFER (snatching phone, talking into it) Who is this? BOND

(retrieving phone) Jenny, behave yourself.

(into phone) Be there in an hour –67

One of the other amendments Maibaum made was at the direction of the Turkish authorities, who provided Eon Productions with a list of changes they deemed necessary in order to permit the unit to film in Istanbul. This included omitting the sentence ‘The conductor should be notified that the stop of this train at a small station called Iglu is of utmost importance for the security of Turkey’ from his treatment.68 Filming of From Russia With Love commenced at Pinewood Studios on 1 April 1963, and, after Maibaum was set to work on a first treatment of Goldfinger, John Evan ‘Jasper’ Weston Davies, writing under the pseudonym of ‘Berkely Mather’, was employed to rewrite and polish scenes. Mather, who had also been employed to polish Dr. No, was paid £1,500 for his work.69 According to Duncan, Mather ‘delivered rewrites that fundamentally changed the tone of the movie, making it more of a suspense thriller’. Whereas in Maibaum’s version, Grant is introduced in the script’s opening scenes and then reappears in the Orient Express sequences to fight Bond, Mather’s rewrite includes Grant killing Russian and Bulgarian agents in different Istanbul scenes, ‘making Grant a hovering menace throughout the movie’.70 In Maibaum’s two treatments this ‘haunting menace’ is implied in the scene where Grant discovers the British Secret Service code (‘Can I borrow a match?’, ‘I use a lighter’, ‘Better still’, ‘Until they go wrong’) while listening in to Bond’s and

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Stefan Tempo’s conversation in Bond’s Orient Express cabin via a ‘stethoscope-like hearing device’. In a later change to the script, this scene is replaced by one in which Grant tracks Bond along the platform at Sofia station.71 This is evocative of the suspense thriller, and in keeping with Mather’s intended tone for the film. The writer also changed the character of Jennifer to Sylvia Trench, which allowed Eunice Gayson to reprise her role from Dr. No, likely owing to her friendship with Young, but also to offer further continuity between the two films. In addition, Mather revised the scene between Bond and Tatiana in the bridal suite of the Kristal Palas Hotel (the yellow pages of the script dated 19 June 1963), including Grant in the group who voyeuristically spy on the couple through the two-way mirror: ‘Optional – Camera angle widens to include face of Grant, watching. Glimpsed behind him, the face of Rosa Klebb.’72 According to the script’s revision dates, Mather also polished dialogue in the scenes between Blofeld and the SPECTRE operatives. During the ongoing scriptwriting process, Saltzman, Broccoli and Young worked on hiring the cast and crew for the film. Many crew members were rehired from Dr. No; however, there were some new additions, including Jocelyn Rickards as the film’s costume designer. Rickards recalls how Saltzman hired her, which also illuminates the influence exerted by power and money when it came to hiring the specific crew members the producers wanted: Harry Saltzman rang me one day and said ‘I’m doing an Ian Fleming film.’ He’d done Dr. No, which I’d seen and liked, and he said, ‘I want you to do the costumes.’ And I said, ‘Harry, I haven’t got a union ticket, they’ll all go mad’ … And he said, ‘Leave that to me, you get on with the costumes and I’ll get you a ticket as soon as there’s no one on the books’ … And he got me a ticket very quickly, he just rang every day. I’d been trying before, to no avail. But within weeks I had a ticket.73

Finding a woman to play Tatiana who resembled Fleming’s description of ‘a young Greta Garbo’ was an arduous task for the

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First and second page of Jocelyn Rickards’ Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) union membership application dated 26 March 1963 (courtesy ‘Women’s Work’, BUFVC)74

producers according to Broccoli: ‘Harry and I interviewed a couple of hundred girls of several nationalities’, including Magda Konopka and Sylvia Koscina.75 On 5 February 1963, screen tests were held for the part, with Young interviewing 200 women and Anthony Dawson standing in as Bond. The auditions proved unsuccessful, with the Los Angeles Times reporting, ‘Wanted: A Young Greta Garbo’, on 22 February, and the Citizen News quoting Broccoli on 1 March:

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‘We want this girl to look like Garbo facially but be a great deal more voluptuous in other departments.’76 On 4 and 5 March, make-up, wardrobe tests and readings were conducted by Young ‘with a few select girls’ before the director flew to Istanbul for a production recce. On 21 and 22 March, more women were tested for the role, with Daniela Bianchi hired ‘just a few days before shooting began’ on 1 April.77 Broccoli believed that Bianchi, a runner-up in the 1960 ‘Miss Universe’ contest, ‘had fine features and a touch of class, which brought her closer than anyone else to the Fleming prototype’.78 Rickards recalls that Bianchi ‘was as pretty as a flower. She was so shy, she had such pudeur, that she couldn’t even bear to strip for a fitting.’79 Other cast members proved easier to hire, with Saltzman recommending Lotte Lenya as the villainous Klebb, and Broccoli suggesting Pedro Armendáriz as the head of Section T and Bond’s ally in Istanbul, Ali Kerim Bey. On Robert Shaw, cast as Grant, Broccoli believed that the actor gave the role ‘terrific value’.80 Table 1 reveals what certain crew and cast members were paid, and Table 2 demonstrates the gendered nature of particular roles, as well as salaries and percentage of pay per cost breakdown.81 Name

Role

Gender

Salary (£)

Len Deighton

Script

M

1,500

J. E. W. Davies

Script

M

1,500

Johanna Harwood

Script

F

675

Richard Maibaum

Script

M

6,875

Albert R. Broccoli

Producer

M

23,057

Harry Saltzman

Producer

M

23,057

Terence Young

Director

M

21,600

Stanley Sopel

Associate Producer

M

3,230

Bill Hill

Production Manager

M

3,142

Marguerite Green

Production Assistant

F

1,059

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Gender

Salary (£)

Location Manager

M

1,538

David Anderson

Assistant Director

M

1,447

Kay Mander

Script Girl (Continuity)

F

1,343

Terence Churcher

Second Assistant Director

M

647

Christopher Lambert

Second Assistant Director

M

1,623

Name

Role

Frank Ernst

Ann Korda

Dialogue Coach

F

1,235

Ted Moore

Director of Photography

M

4,529

Johnny Winbolt

Camera Operator

M

1,609

John Shinerock

Focus Puller

M

1,307

Simon Ransley

Clapper/Loader

M

725

Gerry Anstiss

Focus Puller

M

608

Robert Kindred

Lighting Cameraman

M

1,041

Anthony B. Richmond Clapper/Loader

M

736

John W. Mitchell

Sound Mixer

M

1,599

Derek Kavanagh

Boom Operator

M

617

Charles Van der Goor

Sound Maintenance

M

934

Peter Hunt

Editor

M

3,190

Ben Rayner

Assistant Editor

M

901

Stephen Warwick

Assistant Editor

M

793

Norman Wanstall

Assistant Editor

M

1,195

Peter Pennell

Assistant Dubbing Editor

M

740

Jocelyn Rickards

Costume Designer

F

1,120

Eileen Sullivan

Wardrobe Mistress

F

1,298

Ernie Farrer

Wardrobe Master

M

1,358

Basil Newall

Make Up Artist

M

1,361

Paul Rabiger

Make Up Artist

M

1,135

Eileen Warwick

Hairdresser

F

1,037

Barrie Davis

Production Accountant

M

1,142

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Gender

Salary (£)

Assistant Production Accountant

F

1,364

Wally F. Eggleden

Assistant Production Accountant

M

1,135

Syd Cain

Art Director

M

3,108

Michael White

Assistant Art Director

M

1,403

Alan Tomkins

Draughtsman

M

1,155

Alec Gray

Draughtsman

M

1,040

Roger Cain

Draughtsman

M

719

Freda Pearson

Set Dresser

F

858

John Biggs

Prop Buyer

M

1,283

John Stears

Special Effects Technician

M

1,595

Ilham Filmer

Production Manager

M

2,570

Bill Surridge

Construction Manager

M

812

John Barry

Composer

M

1,000

Sean Connery

Actor

M

24,325

Bernard Lee

Actor

M

700

Neville Jason

Actor

M

700

Walter Gotell

Actor

M

2,300

Robert Shaw

Actor

M

6,438

Lotte Lenya

Actress

F

6,557

Daniela Bianchi

Actress

F

5,949

Pedro Armendáriz

Actor

M

10,151

Francis de Wolff

Actor

M

713

Peter Perkins

Stuntman

M

1,710

Fred Haggerty

Stuntman

M

742

Peter Brayham

Stuntman

M

1,071

Name

Role

Maureen Newman

Total

201,901

Table 1: List of unit personnel salaries of those paid over £600 for From Russia With Love (Source: The National Archives, BT 64/5262)

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Men

Salary %

Women

Combined Salaries (£) (W)

A. Story and Script

1

3

675

9,875

10,550

6

94

B. Producer and Director Fees

0

3

0

67,714

67,714

0

100

C1. Production Management and Secretaries

1

1

1,059

3,142

4,201

25

75

C2. Assistant Directors and Continuity

2

3

2,578

3,717

6,295

41

59

C3. Technical Advisors

0

1

0

1,538

1,538

0

100

Category

(M)

Salary Total

(W)

(M)

C4. Camera Crew

0

7

0

10,555

10,555

0

100

C5. Recording Crew

0

3

0

3,150

3,150

0

100 100

C6. Editing Staff

0

5

0

6,819

6,819

0

C8. Wardrobe Staff

2

1

2,418

1,358

3,776

64

36

C9. Make-up Staff

0

2

0

2,496

2,496

0

100

C10. Hairdressers

1

0

1,037

0

1,037

100

0

C12. Production Accountancy

2

2

1,364

5,507

6,871

20

80

C15. Foreign Unit Technicians

0

1

0

2,570

2,570

0

100

D. Set Designing

1

8

858

11,115

11,973

7

93

E1. Artistes

2

7

12,506

45,327

57,833

22

78

E2. Stand-ins

0

3

0

3,523

3,523

0

100

F. Orchestra and Composer

0

1

0

1,000

1,000

0

100

12

51

22,495

179,406

201,901

11

89

Total

31

Table 2: Gender difference between unit roles and salaries (Source: The National Archives, BT 64/5262)

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As can be understood from Table 2, men were predominantly employed in the categories for ‘Story and Script’, ‘Producer and Director Fees’, ‘Camera Crew’, ‘Recording Crew’, ‘Editing Staff’ and ‘Set Designing’, whereas ‘Wardrobe Staff’ and ‘Hairdressers’ were the domain of women, which was typical of film-making practices then as now. In relation to the labour of unheard and unseen women working on From Russia With Love, Kay Mander explained that her continuity role meant she ‘was really the only one on a film set who knew what was going on. We had to work two hours later than everybody else, typing up notes.’82 Mander elucidated that her role was ‘more than a “floor secretary” … and “one of the only three people on the set who are expected to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the script” alongside the director and his assistant’. However, she admitted that it’s very difficult to say what a continuity girl’s job is anyway, because it varies from picture to picture, but basically you want to know that it’ll cut together, and that it’s going to look right. And to tell the editor what you’ve shot and what he’s got to do with it.83

Mander was hired for From Russia With Love owing to her previous experience as the ‘continuity girl’ on Serious Charge (1959) and Too Hot to Handle (1960), both directed by Young.84 Eileen Sullivan, who worked as wardrobe mistress on both Dr. No and From Russia With Love, wrote a letter to a relative, Maureen Doyle, dated 2 May 1964, in which she outlined the nature of her job: it’s a very artificial world with a great deal of insincerity but I like it for the variety and the travel it offers, but it takes up nearly all my life which isn’t good. I get home dead beat very often, we put in long hours and often do long spells of working all night + also weekends & though I mostly work with all men strangely enough one never gets a chance of romance … Locations are rather tricky in this respect [forming romantic relationships] so I often lead a lonely existence on location which doesn’t upset me because I am an avid sight-seer.85

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Eileen Sullivan ‘avidly sight-seeing’ on location in Istanbul (courtesy Colin Sullivan)

Sullivan’s walk-on appearance in From Russia With Love

Sullivan’s passport photograph (courtesy Colin Sullivan)

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As with many crew members and their families, Sullivan received a walk-on part in From Russia With Love, telling Doyle, ‘look out for me, I’m in it. I’m walking behind Sean Connery in a scene in the Turkish Bazaar in Istanbul. I’m wearing a brown suede jacket + coral coloured skirt walking rather flat-footed (it’s hard on the feet being a Wardrobe Mistress)’, offering a ‘hidden-in-plain-sight’ view of the woman who has hitherto remained voiceless in previous production histories of the Bond films. Notably, Sullivan is wearing the same clothes that she wore when touring Istanbul, with the blue cardigan unfastened for her walk-on part. Most of the salaries demonstrate the difference in pay between men and women during this period, especially on comparing the individual salaries in Table 1 against the categories for Table 2. Eileen Sullivan’s handwritten ledger outlining the pay she received for From Russia With Love (courtesy Colin Sullivan)

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For example, wardrobe master Ernie Farrer was paid more than Rickards and Sullivan. However, there is one anomaly: Maureen Newman, the assistant production accountant, was paid £222 more than Barrie Davis, the production accountant.86 Sullivan kept records of her pay in a tax return ledger, which shows that on 4 and 5 March she was paid a daily rate of £7 to work on the wardrobe and makeup tests for the casting of Tatiana.87 Sullivan was employed full-time on production from 11 March until 23 August, and was paid a weekly rate of £24 10s. 42½d., with ‘time-and-a-half’ for overtime and ‘double time’ for weekends.88 The highest-paid man was Sean Connery (£24,325), and Lotte Lenya (£6,557) was the highest-paid woman (these figures would likely include any expenses). As Lenya was cast in a secondary role, it is worth comparing her earnings with those of Armendáriz (£10,151), who was paid 55 per cent more than Lenya. Lenya was, however, paid slightly more than Shaw (£6,438). Bianchi, paid £5,949, earned nearly as much as the fee Connery received for Dr. No (£6,000).89 According to Diane Cilento, Connery’s first wife, there was ‘a long and legal wrangle’ over the actor’s salary for From Russia With Love ‘which entailed lawyers, agents, flaring tempers, shouting and lots of aggravation … [with] Richard Hatton [Connery’s agent] bargaining from a position of impregnable strength so it was only a matter of time before a compromise was reached and equilibrium restored’.90 It has been mistakenly reported that Connery received a ‘bonus’ of $100,000 (£35,714) for the film. However, the United Artists papers reveal that Hatton actually negotiated this ‘bonus’ for Goldfinger, along with a salary of £22,500, the same figure that Connery was budgeted to receive for From Russia With Love, and 5 per cent of Goldfinger’s net profits.91 This improved offer was likely achieved by Hatton due to the leverage obtained by Connery from starring in Marnie (1964): a £30,000 picture fee, £100 per week for expenses and 5 per cent of the distributor’s gross.92 In United Artists correspondence regarding the film’s original budget, Ornstein wrote to Picker on 31 January 1963 that Saltzman

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was ‘not in a position to give a very accurate budget’, but felt that From Russia With Love ‘would cost roughly around £400,000’, just over the final cost of Dr. No.93 Of the final budget, reported by the trade press to be around £700,000, around £327,415 went towards labour (47 per cent), and £372,585 went on production (53 per cent).94 Compared with Dr. No – with labour costs totalling around £153,234 (39 per cent) and production costs £238,776 (61 per cent) – a higher percentage of budget went on labour as opposed to the screen in From Russia With Love.95 The labour cost per minute of From Russia With Love’s running time was £2,798.96 The first scenes to be shot at Pinewood Studios were ‘int. m’s office and reception room’ on Stage B, with Connery, Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewellyn and Lois Maxwell.97 The attaché briefcase was required as a prop, Bert Luxford having been tasked with creating it three months prior to shooting.98 At the same time, Aliza Gur, Martine Beswick and stuntman Peter Perkins rehearsed the ‘Gypsy Camp’ fight sequence in the gymnasium in I Block, which continued on 3, 5, 8 and 9 April. It was intended that these scenes would be shot on location in Istanbul; however, owing to the refusal of the Turkish authorities, they would later be filmed on 4 June after the crew’s return to Pinewood. Lenya and Bianchi began filming their scenes together (‘int. caravanserai corridor and room’) in the afternoon of 2 April. On 4 April Vladek Sheybal, Peter Madden and Maitland Moss rehearsed for the chess game scene, with Brian Reilly, a chess expert and editor of British Chess magazine, in attendance to advise on the correct game moves.99 The scenes were shot the following day. On 8 April, Connery and Bianchi filmed their first scene together (‘int. bridal suite’), with an audition of twelve men held to hire two camera operators for it.100 On 9 April, the call sheet reported that while Connery and Bianchi were completing this scene, with Lenya ‘on standby’, Shaw and Armendáriz attended Pinewood that afternoon for ‘make-up/ hairdressing/wardrobe discussions’.101 On 10 April the unit began shooting the SPECTRE yacht scenes with Dawson, Lenya, Sheybal

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Aliza Gur and Martine Beswick rehearsing for their fight scenes (courtesy BFI National Archive)

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and Walter Gotell.102 Mention of the white cat, a tank of ‘fighting fish’, Blofeld’s ring and the ‘Special boots’ worn by Gotell can be viewed on this sheet under the ‘Props’, ‘Animals’ and ‘Special Requirements’ section headings. Duncan reports that filming of the yacht scenes was slow owing to difficulties with the Siamese fighting fish that refused to perform.103 The Renaissance Garden scenes were shot at night on 16 and 17 April with Connery, Shaw and Gotell. John Ketteringham was named as Connery’s stand-in who would wear the ‘Bond mask’. Call sheet #12 documents that Perkins was originally fitted with the ‘Bond mask’; however, according to Young, it was felt that Perkins resembled Connery too closely after it was peeled off in the scene, and so he was replaced by Ketteringham, who was also supplied with a moustache.104 These were the last scenes to be shot before the unit flew to Istanbul for the film’s location shooting. Location work began in Istanbul on 22 April with the ‘int. sophia mosQue’ scenes, and filming continued in and around the Turkish bazaar scenes and Caravanserai Hotel over the course of the week until 28 April. Night shooting for the ‘ext. schedazi mosQue’ scenes that included the distinctive Call Me Bwana poster took place on 29 and 30 April, and the scenes ‘ext. zagreb station’ and ‘ext. sofia station’ were rehearsed using stand-ins.105 Between 1 and 5 May, the station scenes were shot with the cast, but filming was ‘frequently interrupted by the scheduled trains needing to pass’ and because of damage to the hood of the flower truck.106 It was during attempts to shoot the SPECTRE boat chase sequence (‘ext. gulf of venice’) that serious issues began to arise, significantly affecting the film’s schedule. The crew arrived at 8 am on location in Pendik on 8 May to discover the boats were not there; delayed by low water in the channel, when they eventually turned up, the camera boat was found to have a leak.107 By 11.45 am the leak had been fixed, but then one of the SPECTRE boats sank after it crashed into a submerged buoy. Following which, the camera boat then proved to be too slow in capturing the action, and it was determined that the weather was too dull to film the scene. Returning

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to attempt to film the scene on 9 May, the crew found that not all of the boats were able to run, having been refuelled with kerosene rather than gasoline, and filming was further delayed by waiting for the light to change.108 After lunch, it was decided that the crew would attempt to film the scene in dull light; however, due to mechanical issues, the boats were unable to reach full speed and shooting was abandoned. The decision was made to shoot the helicopter sequence instead, but this too was abandoned when the helicopter malfunctioned; both sequences were later shot after the unit returned to the UK.109 In Istanbul, Dana Broccoli was tasked with accompanying Fleming while he attended the location shooting; together they went sightseeing, and Broccoli found Fleming to be ‘a delightful, charming man and a great [tour] guide’.110 Cilento, too, reflected that ‘Istanbul was simply the most exciting and extraordinary city I have ever visited … Fleming and his bodyguard, the mammoth Mustapha, were my companions when Sean was working and we were all treated like royalty.’111 However, not everyone experienced the welcoming, touristic side of Istanbul as a representative of a country that wanted to further integrate itself with Western Europe in the early 1960s. In particular, Rickards reflected that for women working in the unit ‘Turkey is a progressive country,’ we were told … In any event, Turkey proved a difficult country to film in with any degree of freedom and pleasure. The people are suspicious, the bureaucracy is appalling, and above all, the Turks are contemptuous of emancipated European women. Daniela and I used to be given an escort of ten stuntmen when we walked from her caravan to the shooting location.112

Rickards later offered a specific example of the verbal abuse she received on location: I was standing watching [the stuntmen] with Dosia [Dorothea Bennett, Young’s wife]. We’d finished watching and we were waiting for the car to come and collect us … [it was] about two o’clock in the morning … and

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suddenly a little squealing car pulled up beside us, [a] young man got out and said, ‘You fucking cunts, why don’t you go home?’ And I remember thinking, ‘what have we done to him?’113

Arriving back in the UK, the unit discovered that Armendáriz was terminally ill with cancer. The actor wanted to complete his scenes to ensure that his family would be financially secure after his death, and so they were hastily rescheduled to accommodate him and were filmed between 20 May and 7 June. Armendáriz died on 18 June after returning to Mexico. On 27 May, the call sheet records that Perkins discussed the Orient Express fight sequence with Connery, Shaw and Young, and this scene would be shot over 19, 20 and 21 June.114 By this time, the production was now eighteen days over schedule, with the main action sequences, including the helicopter and boat chases, still to be shot. On 30 June, the unit left the studio for Lochgilphead and the Crinan Canal in Scotland, shooting the sequences between 1 and 19 July. However, filming was not without incident: Young and Michael White, the assistant art director, were passengers in a chartered helicopter when it crashed on 6 July. The Daily Telegraph reported that a sudden down-draft of air was believed to be the cause, with Young quoted as saying: ‘We are lucky to be alive … If the cabin of the helicopter had not shattered when we hit the water we would probably have drowned.’ Young returned to work the following day with his right hand and leg in bandages.115 After returning to the studio on 22 July, it was intended that parts of the ‘int. bridal suite’ scenes would be reshot. However, this proved impossible as Bianchi had been involved in a car accident on 19 July, leaving her with facial swelling and bruises. A cable from Hill to Saltzman reads: Daniela made up and filmed through mirror [in] bridal suite. Main problem is swelling [on] left side which is serious photographically. Tests made, close shots [with] Daniela to be seen early tomorrow for decision regarding further filming on her. All being done to concentrate [on] Sean Connery.116

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Tatiana’s hairstyle for the bridal suite scenes in the film

Tatiana’s hairstyle for the promotional shot taken on the bridal suite set (courtesy BFI National Archive)

This is reflected in the subsequent call sheets: on 23 (‘amended’) and 24 July, only Connery is listed as present, with Bianchi returning on 25 July to reshoot her parts in the scene with Connery.117 Tatiana’s hairstyle was changed to hide the bruising on her face, which is evident on comparing the final film with the promotional shots that were taken of the scene. Main shooting was completed on 2 August, with post-production work finished on 2 September, forty days over schedule.118

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3 The Film It is in From Russia With Love that we see elements of the cinematic Bond formula refined from Dr. No, while at the same time the film remains relatively faithful to Fleming’s novel. Janet Woollacott explains that ‘Bondian’ was the term used by Saltzman and Broccoli to mean ‘in the spirit of James Bond’, and thus she argues that Bond films can be understood as forming a genre ‘in their own right’.119 Reflecting on the Bond formula, Maibaum explained how the pattern of the story is the same in all of the Bonds, and I think that it is one of the attractions of the pictures … with all the conspicuous consumption, the luxurious locales, the beautiful women, the larger-than-life villains. We’ve carried it much further than Ian Fleming.120

For Lewis Gilbert, who directed You Only Live Twice (1967), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979), the formula includes: ‘An unknown leading lady. All the people who are well known like M and Miss Moneypenny. The character of Bond, you couldn’t change … but you can change his attitude to a certain extent.’121 Woollacott outlines the other parts of the formula, namely what she terms ‘Bondian effects’, such as the importance of the sets, the gadgets, the foreign locations, the threatening character of the villains (which must incorporate both a physical threat and an intellectual threat to the hero), Bond’s relationship with the girl in the story, the jokes and the form of the crucial pre-credits sequence.122

However, it can be argued that From Russia With Love is also unique within the series in that it is the Bond film that most reflects the spy/ thriller genre of British films released in the 1960s.123

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In From Russia With Love, the narrative and cinematic conventions that can be understood to be part of the formula include: • The introductory ‘gun barrel’ sequence. • A distinctive musical style, including Monty Norman’s ‘James Bond’ theme. • A pre-title sequence. • A main title sequence including nude or scantily clad women. • The use of exotic location(s). • The establishment of Bond’s mission parameters through M. • A central villain of foreign descent with a distinctive personality, physical disfigurement and/or sexual dysfunction. • A powerful henchman whom Bond has to fight. • Real, physical stunts and practical pro-filmic effects such as miniatures and models. • Humorous dialogue involving sexual innuendo, double entendres and pun-based quips. •  Self-referential humour and in-jokes.124 Absent, however, are the elements that would be later determined as part of the formula: an early encounter between Bond and the villain (the ‘Bond’ in the pre-credit sequence is a practice target for Grant, not Bond himself); two or three women termed ‘Bond girls’ of whom at least one is ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’; tongue-in-cheek names for the women (for example, ‘Pussy Galore’); an elaborate villain’s lair; and cocktails or scenes at a casino or card table. In relation to the adaptation of From Russia With Love, it is helpful to understand the novel, script and film texts from the perspective of Umberto Eco’s ‘play situation’ theory, a tool which Eco uses in his attempt to distinguish the specific narrative structure of Fleming’s novels through a structuralist approach.125 Eco explains his theory: ‘The novel, given the rules of combination of opposing couples, is fixed in a sequence of “moves” inspired by the code, and constituted according to a perfectly prearranged scheme.’126

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Typically, the ‘moves’ would go from A (‘M moves and gives a task to Bond’) through to I (‘Bond convalescing enjoys Woman, whom he then loses’) – Dr. No (1958) being a prime example of a novel that smoothly transitions through these moves. However, some of the Bond novels offer inversions and variations of this scheme, and Fleming’s From Russia, With Love presents a complicated version of Eco’s model, as can be seen in the first two columns in Table 3.127 The subsequent columns demonstrate how Maibaum’s script with Mather’s revisions, and the final film are reflective of Eco’s moves. Owing to the producers electing to make SPECTRE rather than SMERSH the villains, the three ‘B’ moves that follow the introduction of Grant include Klebb, Kronsteen (Vladek Sheybal) and Blofeld (Anthony Dawson), whose character replaced the novel’s Colonel General Grubozaboyschikov. The table further shows that the scenes introducing Klebb and Kronsteen have been switched around so that the plot and narrative make more sense to the audience. After Bond’s arrival in Istanbul, the novel, script and film then progress to the three moves representing the incidental storyline depicting the tension between Kerim and Krilencu (Fred Haggerty). Both (B) moves are similar between all three texts; however, (C) differs in that the script has Bond shooting Krilencu on Kerim’s behalf, for which Kerim acknowledges his debt to Bond, with Bond replying: ‘Forget it. With a double 0 number it’s on the house anyway.’128 Returning to the main plot, all three include ‘E’ followed by ‘F’, ‘G’ and ‘H’. The script and film then depart from the novel, electing to add four further moves to the plot, alternating ‘G’ and ‘H’ twice, in part to add more cinematic action sequences. These moves are also used to provide additional encounters with SPECTRE adversaries, particularly Rhoda (Peter Brayham) and Morzeny (Walter Gotell). The script and film then return to the ‘G’ and ‘H’ moves present in the novel between Klebb and Bond, omitting Klebb’s poisoned knitting needles but including the poisoned flick knife in the toecap of her shoe. In the draft manuscript, Fleming originally envisaged that

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Play situation ‘moves’ (Umberto Eco)

Novel

Script

45

Film

PART ONE: THE PLAN B: ‘The Villain moves and appears to Bond (perhaps in alternating forms)’.

Donovan ‘Red’ Grant/Granitsky, Chief Executioner of SMERSH.

Donovan ‘Red’ Grant garrottes ‘Bond’ in the gardens of the SPECTRE Island training ground with Morzeny watching on.

B

Colonel General Grubozaboyschikov, ‘G’, Head of SMERSH.

Colonel Rosa Klebb visits SPECTRE Island to view its training ground and ascertain Grant’s fitness.

Kronsteen outlines plan to Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Klebb for the SPECTRE organisation to trap and kill Bond by using Corporal Tatiana Romanova and the promise of a Lektor cypher machine, leading to heightened tensions between Britain and Soviet Russia.

B

Colonel Rosa Klebb, Head of Otdyel II, Department of Operations and Executions, and Grant’s superior.

Tatiana is sent by Klebb (whom she presumes to be working for SMERSH) on mission to seduce Bond and feed false information to the British Secret Service.

Klebb visits SPECTRE Island to view its training ground and ascertain Grant’s fitness.

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Play situation ‘moves’ (Umberto Eco)

Novel

Script

Film

B

Kronsteen, ‘the Planner’, who devises a trap to kill Bond and destroy his reputation.

Kronsteen outlines plan to Blofeld and Klebb for the SPECTRE organisation to trap and kill Bond by using Tatiana and the promise of a Lektor cypher machine, leading to heightened tensions between Britain and Soviet Russia.

Tatiana is sent by Klebb (whom she presumes to be working for SMERSH) on mission to seduce Bond and feed false information to the British Secret Service.

D: ‘Woman moves and shows herself to Bond’.

Corporal of State Security, Tatiana Romanova, is sent by Klebb to speak with Head of Section T, Darko Kerim, who reveals to M that she wants to defect to the West with a Spektor machine after falling in love with Bond’s photograph.

Off screen, Tatiana contacts Head of Section T, Kerim, who reveals to M that she wants to defect to the West with a Lektor machine after falling in love with Bond’s photograph.

PART TWO: THE EXECUTION A: ‘M moves and gives a task to Bond’.

Bring Tatiana and the Spektor (novel)/Lektor (script and film) cipher machine to Britain.

(B)

Krilencu and the Bulgars plant limpet bomb in Kerim’s office, which explodes.

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Play situation ‘moves’ (Umberto Eco)

Novel

Script

Film

(B)

Krilencu and the Bulgars, assisted by the Russians, attack the gypsy camp that Bond and Kerim are visiting as guests. Krilencu and the Bulgars have been warned by the Russians not to attack Bond.

Krilencu and the Bulgars attack the gypsy camp that Bond and Kerim are visiting as guests. Grant ensures that Bond is not killed in the attack.

(C): ‘Bond moves and gives a first check to the Villain or the Villain gives first check to Bond’.

Kerim shoots and kills Krilencu with Bond’s assistance.

Bond shoots and kills Krilencu on behalf of Kerim.

E: ‘Bond consumes Woman: possesses her or begins her seduction’.

SMERSH (novel)/SPECTRE (script and film) positions Tatiana to have sexual intercourse with Bond in the bridal suite of the Kristal Palas hotel (later revealed to be filming the pair through a false mirror with the intention to embarrass the British Secret Service).

F: ‘The Villain captures Bond (with or without Woman or at different moments)’.

Grant (under pseudonym of Captain Norman Nash) in Bond’s cabin on the Orient Express.

G: ‘The Villain tortures Bond (with or without Woman)’.

Grant psychologically taunts Bond for being ‘a bloody fool’.

H: ‘Bond conquers the Villain (kills him, or kills his representative or helps at their killing)’.

Bond shoots Grant after playing dead and stabbing Grant with one of the knives in his attaché briefcase.

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Kerim shoots and kills Krilencu with Bond’s assistance.

Bond tricks Grant into opening attaché briefcase, causing smoke to be emitted that leads to Bond gaining the upper hand during a physical fight between the pair, Bond managing to kill Grant with his own garrotte.

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Play situation ‘moves’ (Umberto Eco)

Novel

Script

Film

G

SPECTRE helicopter attempts to kill Bond and Tatiana during their escape in a truck.

H

Bond assembles his folding rifle, aims and shoots at the helicopter’s passenger, who drops a live grenade intended for Bond that explodes within the cabin.

G

Speedboat chase between Morzeny/ SPECTRE and Bond.

H

Bond fires pistol at fuel drums that explode and destroy the SPECTRE speedboats.

G

Klebb attempts to kill Bond when disguised as Comtesse Metterstein by stabbing the latter with poisoned knitting needles in Room 204 at the Ritz Hotel, Paris.

Klebb attempts to kill Bond when disguised as a maid by stabbing the latter with a poisoned flick knife in the toecap of her shoe in a Venetian hotel suite.

H

Mathis arrives to arrest Klebb, but Klebb manages to stab Bond in the ankle via a poisoned flick knife in the toecap of her shoe.

Bond uses a chair to force the poisoned flick knife into Klebb’s ankle.

(I): ‘Bond convalescing enjoys Woman, whom he then loses’.

On Tatiana, Eco writes that ‘In the train and during his convalescence, Bond enjoys love interludes with Tatiana’. However, there is no ’convalescence’ in the novel.

Bond and Tatiana take a romantic ride in a gondola down a Venetian canal.

Tatiana shoots and kills Klebb with Klebb’s gun.

Table 3: From Russia With Love novel, script and film plot using Umberto Eco’s ‘play situation’ theory (Source: Oreste del Buono and Umberto Eco (eds), The Bond Affair (London: Macdonald, 1965), p. 53; BFI, S6501)

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The poisoned flick knife positioned in the toecap of Klebb’s shoe

Bond would get the better of Klebb and her poisoned knitting needles by using a chair to pin her to the floor, whereupon René Mathis, Bond’s friend and a French intelligence operative employed by the Deuxième Bureau, arrives with his associate, Jacques, who injects Klebb with a shot of pentothal after being directed to ‘Give this pretty rose a prick of your thorn.’129 After dealing with Klebb, Mathis suggests that Bond accompany him to lunch, to which Bond refuses as he already has ‘a date with the most beautiful woman in Paris and I’m going to spend the night with her’. Asked who the woman is, Fleming writes: ‘“We shall be having dinner as usual on a train.” Bond smiled grimly at the thought. “And the girl? Well, apart from being the most beautiful woman in Paris she also happens to be the most beautiful woman in SMERSH.”’130 In the manuscript, Fleming makes no mention of a poisoned flick knife in the toecap of Klebb’s shoe. In the published novel, Klebb uses the weaponised shoe to kick Bond before she is bundled off in a basket, and thus Fleming affords From Russia, With Love a deliberately ambiguous ending. However, Fleming revealed in Dr. No that, owing to the efforts of Mathis, Bond survived the poison that ‘comes from the sex organs of the Japanese globe-fish’ (Tetrodotoxin), enjoyed ‘a dreary convalescence’ and that the ‘Russian woman’ – Klebb – died.131 Of course, the film required a definitive ending, and Klebb is killed on screen, as the script describes:

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BOND sees blade in KLEBB’s shoe. He snatches up a small chair, holds it like a lion-tamer, pins KLEBB against the wall with it. She kicks at him viciously from beneath chair. He eludes the blade. She spits at him, curses in Russian. He slides chair down. CAMERA COMES IN CLOSE as he twists it, turning foot with blade inward, to cut ankle of her other foot.132

In the film, the scene is similar, with Bond pinning Klebb against the wall with a chair; however, it is Tatiana who kills Klebb by shooting her with Klebb’s discarded .25 Beretta. Klebb’s owning of a .25 Beretta is a humorous reference to Geoffrey Boothroyd’s description of the gun he offered to Fleming in their correspondence: ‘I dislike a man who comes into contact with all sorts of formidable people using a .25 Beretta. This sort of gun is really a lady’s gun, and not a really nice lady at that.’133 Both the script and the film include Bond’s quip after Klebb’s death: ‘She’s had her kicks.’134 Eco affords ‘I’ as the last move of the novel, which is inaccurate as Bond does not ‘enjoy [the] Woman’ while ‘convalescing’ before ‘losing her’, but instead leaves Tatiana at the British Embassy in Paris after alighting from the Orient Express. This is a good example of how Fleming’s novels do not always neatly correspond with Eco’s ‘play situation’ theory, although the author’s draft manuscript fits Eco’s analysis better. The script and the film both conform more closely to ‘I’, with Bond and Tatiana enjoying a romantic gondola ride at the end of the film while Barry’s ‘From Russia With Love’ theme tune plays over the credits, which is more in keeping with the ending Fleming originally envisaged in his draft of From Russia, With Love. Although the film offers a sense of completeness that differs from the novel’s ambiguous ending, it does adapt From Russia, With Love’s ‘to be continued’ finale by announcing to the viewer that ‘The End’ is: ‘Not quite the end. James Bond will return in the next Ian Fleming thriller Goldfinger.’ The film’s main themes include suspense and intrigue set against the backdrop of the Cold War and British and Russian relations, summed up by SPECTRE’s attempt to play the two

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countries off against one another.135 Table 4, taken from the analysis of From Russia With Love by Hollywood’s Production Code Administration (PCA), is a good example of how race and nationality are represented in the film. The assigning of Robert Shaw as ‘Irish’ is curious, but is likely because Grant is Irish in the novel. The character’s nationality in the film remains ambiguous. Klaus Dodds has argued that From Russia With Love is the most ‘European’ of all the Bond films produced by Eon Productions, including the changes made from Fleming’s novels that ‘came together most clearly’ in

English Irish Turkish

Russian

Sean Connery

¡

Robert Shaw

¡

Pedro Armendáriz

¡

Group ¡

Lotte Lenya

¡

Unidentified European Spy Bulgarian Yugoslav

Spy

Indifferent

Unsympathetic

Sympathetic ¡

¡ ¡ ¡

Daniela Bianchi

Group

Incidental

¡

¡ ¡ ¡

¡

Group Gypsy

Characterisation

¡

Group

Government Agent

Minimal

Role Prominent

‘Race’ or Nationality

¡ ¡

¡

¡ ¡

¡

¡

¡

¡

Spy

¡

Group

¡

¡ ¡

Table 4: ‘Portrayal of “Races” and Nationals’ in From Russia With Love according to the PCA (Source: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Social Sciences Margaret Herrick Library: MPAA/PCA Records, From Russia With Love, 29 January 1964)

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this film, as well as its experimentation with the Cold War spy genre and distancing itself from previous films that were produced in the 1940s and 1950s which took the ‘fairly rigid view’ that the Soviet Union and communism were a threat to the American or British way of life: for example, The Iron Curtain (1948) and My Son John (1952).136 As Dodds points out, the inclusion in the film of Klebb’s line, ‘Who can the Russians suspect but the British? The Cold War in Istanbul will not remain cold much longer’, emphasises that the Cold War directly involves Britain and Russia, rather than Turkey and the Americans, its NATO ally.137 Part of this approach also involved an attempt by the producers to distance the films from Fleming’s own prejudices, exemplified by the following description that was included in the novel, when Bond shakes Kerim’s hand for the first time: ‘[Kerim] had a wonderfully dry hand-clasp. It was a strong Western handful of operative fingers – not the banana skin handshake of the East that makes you want to wipe your fingers on your coat-tails.’138 However, some elements of Fleming’s ethnic stereotyping remain in the film. As is reflected by Table 4, the English and Turkish characters are predominantly portrayed as ‘sympathetic’, while the majority of the Russians, Bulgarians and Yugoslavians are ‘unsympathetic’ or ‘indifferent’. Dodds explains: Places like Turkey … were never simply passive backdrops and or ‘exotic locations’. The escape of Bond on the appropriately named Orient Express actively created a sense of an ideological and geographical boundary between an unsafe and claustrophobic Balkan space and a civilised and friendly European space (in this case Venice, Italy).139

Originally, the script was to include the line delivered by Kerim’s chauffeur (Neville Jason) to Bond after they are tailed from Yes¸ilköy Airport, ‘they’re Bulgarians … The Russians always use Bulgarians for the really dirty work … the driver’s a strong-arm man … the other’s a killer.’ This was, however, omitted from the final film.140

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In relation to Eco’s ‘play moves’ and the themes of East versus West, both Fleming’s novel and the film make reference to chess, and how Bond, and by extension the British Secret Service, are to be manipulated by SMERSH/SPECTRE into their honeytrap, chess being synonymous with the tactics used by Eastern spies. In both the script and the film, Kronsteen, ‘the planner’, is an East European chess grandmaster. Kronsteen was explicitly Czechoslovakian in the film, although Maibaum envisaged him as German in his second treatment.141 Fleming afforded Kronsteen the moniker ‘the Wizard of Ice’ in From Russia, With Love, perhaps as a double entendre aimed at both the Cold War and the fact that L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), was a recognised chess player. The chess tournament included in the film reflects the East/West divide by positioning Kronsteen against MacAdams (Peter Madden), a Canadian chess grandmaster. Kerim also refers to the chess theme in the novel, telling Bond: ‘Well, the game must begin sometime. I have made certain small moves.’142 The set designed by Cain for the chess tournament is the most spectacular in the film: resplendent with chess motifs throughout, including a gold-andwhite chequered floor to reflect a giant chessboard. The room’s ceiling mural was a matte painting created by Cliff Culley to hide the studio lighting, and the wall surrounds were painted by an unnamed Scottish scenic artist, both artists producing work that appeared in The magnificent set for the chess tournament, created in Pinewood Studios, designed by Syd Cain and with a matte ceiling painted by Cliff Culley

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keeping with the style of Italian Renaissance paintings. The scene is dominated in the centre by a crystal chandelier suspended above Kronsteen and MacAdams. Three further key themes in From Russia With Love are gender, sexuality and voyeurism. As in Dr. No, Bond himself is presented and promoted as the epitome of heteronormative masculinity and virile sexuality in the film – men are to want to be Bond and women are to be attracted to him. This is clearly conveyed in our first view of the ‘real’ Bond as he and Sylvia cavort semi-naked in a riverside picnic scene, before a phone call from Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) recalls him to M’s (Bernard Lee) office. Bond as an object of desire is further underlined when M explains that Tatiana has apparently fallen in love with Bond’s photograph, although neither is convinced: M Ridiculous, isn’t it? BOND

It’s absolutely crazy.

M Of course, girls do fall in love with pictures of film stars. BOND

But not a Russian cypher clerk with a file photo of a British agent.

Regardless, M instructs Bond to visit Istanbul and wield his sexuality as a weapon to ensnare Tatiana so as to acquire a Lektor machine for the British Secret Service. This scene also possesses the self-referential quality that is encapsulated throughout From Russia With Love in relation to its status as a film. The trope of Bond using his sexuality as a weapon was developed and refined in From Russia With Love from Dr. No, in which both Bond and Miss Taro (Zena Marshall) attempt to use their sexuality against one another to their own advantage: in Miss Taro’s case to ambush and subsequently trap Bond in her apartment to allow Professor Dent (Anthony Dawson) to assassinate him, and in Bond’s case to seduce her and manipulate the situation to his advantage. However, From Russia With Love is the first and one of the only times in the Bond films that M explicitly directs Bond to seduce a woman for the purpose of achieving a successful mission outcome.143

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As with Bond’s representation, gender and the depiction of healthy, fit and nubile women is a common, recurring theme in both Fleming’s novels and the Bond films, and is a good example of Laura Mulvey’s theory of women in cinema as objects of the male gaze.144 See, for example, Bond’s description of Tatiana in the novel: She certainly looked like a Russian princess, or the traditional idea of one. The tall, fine-boned body that moved so gracefully and stood so well … The wonderful Garboesque face with its curiously shy serenity. The contrast between the level innocence of the big, deep blue eyes and the passionate promise of a wide mouth … There was the confidence of having been loved in the proud breasts and the insolently lifting behind – the assertion of a body that knows what it can be for.145

In a reference to the film’s voyeuristic theme, Bond views Tatiana via Kerim’s secret periscope beneath the Russian consulate. The script directs: 109. WHAT HE [Bond] SEES. EFFECT SHOT THROUGH PERISCOPE. Most of TATIANA’s magnificent legs. They stop in front of table. 110. INT. ALCOVE. BOND. KERIM. BOND’s eyes glued to eyepieces. KERIM

How does she look to you?

BOND

From this angle, I’d say things were shaping up nicely –146 ‘Things were shaping up nicely’: Bond observes Tatiana’s legs through a hidden periscope beneath the Russian consulate

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‘I will wear this one in Piccadilly’: Tatiana is presented with her trousseau of clothing aboard the Orient Express

The later bridal suite scenes also define Tatiana by her body and lack of attire, save for a black velvet ribbon around her neck, quite literally presenting herself as a ‘gift’ for Bond. The script directly adapts Fleming’s description of Tatiana’s ‘costume’: ‘The effect should be as though [Bond] saw her nude as he entered [the bedroom]. She wears black stockings and a black ribbon around her throat. Her hair is done on top of her head.’147 Tatiana is also defined by her use of feminine accessories, such as placing a hand-drawn map of the Russian consulate in her compact mirror for Bond to find in the St Sophia mosque, and her delight in clothing, as evidenced in the ‘fashion show’ scenes aboard the Orient Express. This scene is accompanied in the film’s score by an instrumental cue that includes twinkling piano music evocative of Cinderella (1950) as Bond presents Tatiana with a trousseau of ‘honeymoon’ clothing, much to her delight. Items of clothing are also used for gendered quips in this scene, such as: TATIANA I will wear this one in Piccadilly. BOND

You won’t. They’ve just passed some new laws there.

The scene ends with Bond telling her that they ‘will continue the fashion show later’ after he is requested by Kerim to join him outside their compartment.

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Similarly to the novel, the film presents Tatiana as somewhat naive and adapts Fleming’s playful jest against the character through her frequent use of the word kulturny (cultured). This naivety is evident in the film when she innocently asks Bond ‘No tea?’ after the train conductor informs them that a ‘terrible accident’ has occurred between Kerim and Benz (Peter Bayliss). In the novel, Fleming does afford Tatiana the knowledge that Grant, masquerading as Captain Norman Nash, is not to be trusted – ‘I do not like him … he is not kulturny. I do not trust his eyes’ – and she attempts to warn Bond: ‘I suppose you know what [Nash] means in Russian. Nash means “ours”. In our Services, a man is nash when he is one of “our” men. He is svoi when he is one of “theirs” – when he belongs to the enemy.’148 This is omitted from the film. However, in Maibaum’s second treatment he did afford Tatiana a line telling Bond that she does not ‘like’ Nash before going to dinner, to which Bond dismisses her feelings.149 Kerim’s ‘girl’ (Nadja Regin) is the purest example in From Russia With Love of the male gaze directed at women in the Bond films (Tatiana’s framing is complicated by the gaze of Klebb and Grant, as I argue later in this chapter), with the audience first viewing the ‘girl’ leaving Kerim’s office as Bond arrives. In the script, the scene describes how: ‘The door opens and a stunning-looking girl comes out, her chic hat slightly askew. bond glances after her appreciatively.’150 In a later scene in Kerim’s office, the ‘girl’ is framed to mirror how Miss Taro is positioned in Dr. No, who wore a Sulka white silk dressing gown while lying on her back upon her silk-lined bed sheets talking to Bond on the telephone. In From Russia With Love, the ‘girl’ also lies on her back on Kerim’s chaise longue wearing a salmon-coloured silk dupioni form-fitting cocktail dress with two off-the-shoulder straps and a low-cut scoop neckline that has been chosen to enhance her figure and cleavage. The dialogue in this scene emphasises the character’s status as being there purely for Kerim’s pleasure:

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Miss Taro in her Sulka silk dressing gown in Dr. No (1962)

‘Kerim’s girl’ in her salmon-coloured silk cocktail dress in From Russia With Love

GIRL

You are not glad to see me this morning, cherie? …

KERIM

Overjoyed.

GIRL

I no longer please you?

KERIM

(sharply) Be quiet.

GIRL

(pouting) No – you are too busy –

KERIM

(taking off his coat, tossing it onto chair) Never too busy for you, my Romanian rosebud!151

Following the explosion of a limpet bomb in Kerim’s office, he tells Bond that ‘the girl left in hysterics’, to which Bond flippantly quips: ‘Found your technique a bit too violent?’ The other key scene in relation to gender, which is also used to emphasise the cultural differences between the East and West and the exoticism of Istanbul, takes place during the gypsy camp scenes,

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Zora and Vida during their ‘girl fight’ in the gypsy camp

involving a belly dance and a ‘girl fight’ – softened from the term ‘cat fight’ that Bond uses in the script – between Zora (Martine Beswick) and Vida (Aliza Gur) over their attraction to the same man in the tribe. Zora and Vida are described in Fleming’s novel as ‘two beautiful, taut, sullen animals’. Zora is portrayed as ‘handsome in a rather leonine way, and there was a slow red glare in her heavy-lidded eyes’, while Vida is ‘a panther – lithe and quick and with cunning sharp eyes’, demonstrating the ethnic stereotyping evident in From Russia, With Love that was reflective of cultural attitudes at the time.152 After the fight is paused when Krilencu and his associates ambush the gypsy camp, Bond requests to the tribe’s leader, Vavra (Francis De Wolff), that the women ‘call the fight a draw’.153 This fight sequence is similarly adapted for the film, although owing to the cuts demanded by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) and the PCA, it had to be ‘considerably shortened’, and cuts to the ‘gypsy dance’ prior to the fight were also required, ‘removing as many of the shots as possible where she is wriggling her stomach or bending right over backwards’.154 The film also extends the gypsy camp scenes from the novel following Krilencu’s ambush, with Bond in the script being offered both Zora and Vida: ‘The girls smile at [Bond] invitingly. bond glances from one to the other, obviously in a dilemma. He sighs resignedly and turns back into the wagon’, delivering the line ‘Might take some time.’155

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The opening credits: Sean Connery’s name splayed over the belly dancer’s navel …

… and Daniela Bianchi’s lit in between the belly dancer’s upper thighs

The exoticism and eroticism of this scene are directly comparable with Robert Brownjohn’s credits at the beginning of the film, including a gyrating, anonymous Turkish belly dancer, mostly presented in shadow, on whose partially lit body the opening titles are creatively superimposed.156 This includes splaying ‘007’ over her breasts, ‘Sean Connery’ on her abdomen, ‘Daniela Bianchi’ in between her inner thighs and ‘Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli’ over her cleavage. Brownjohn has explained that he used three women and a 3,000-watt slide projector to design the credits, and described the filming process: There was no depth of focus, so the belly dancer had to undulate in a very controlled manner in order to keep within the correct distance. It was all done with the camera … I hate storyboards and scripts. It’s just nice to have

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an idea and go on the floor and play around with the camera and the lights, and then shoot what you want.157

Relating to gender and sexuality, the motif of voyeurism is emphasised, with four of the film’s scenes creatively making use of this theme in different ways, all of which involve characters, notably Grant and Klebb, observing or listening in to sexual relations between Bond and Tatiana. The main scene involving voyeurism is set in the bridal suite at the Kristal Palas Hotel, as in Fleming’s novel when SMERSH operatives take film footage of the pair: Above them, and unbeknown to both of them, behind the gold-framed false mirror on the wall over the bed, the two photographers from SMERSH sat close together in the cramped cabinet de voyeur … the view-finders gazed coldly down on the passionate arabesques the two bodies formed and broke and formed again, and the clockwork mechanism of the cine-cameras whirred softly on and on as the breath rasped out of the open mouths of the two men and the sweat of excitement trickled down their bulging faces into their cheap collars.158

The seduction dialogue in the script also follows that of the novel: TATIANA You look surprised, Mr. Bond, I thought you were expecting me .… You look just like your photograph. BOND

(sitting closer to TATIANA, continuing to frisk) You look better than yours – (one arm around her, still frisking with the other) Much, much better.

She gestures to indicate ‘Where would I be carrying it?’ BOND grins, plays with the black ribbon. TATIANA You do not think it is kulturny? BOND

I’ll tell you something kulturny. You’re one of the most beautiful women in the world –

TATIANA Thank you. I think my mouth is too big. BOND

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It’s just the right size. For me anyway.159

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Extreme close-up of Tatiana’s mouth in the bridal suite sequence

Close-up of Anita Ekberg’s mouth on the poster of Call Me Bwana, as viewed through Bond’s sniper scope, used to conceal the opening of Krilencu’s escape window

It is at this point in the film that the camera offers an extreme closeup of Tatiana’s open mouth with moist, glistening lips, which directly evokes the framing of the image of Ekberg’s mouth in the poster of Call Me Bwana in the previous scene; viewed through Bond’s sniper scope, the effect shot is described after Kerim informs Bond, ‘She has a lovely mouth, that Anita’: ‘Trained on Anita’s mouth, the great violet lips half open in ecstasy.’160 The bridal suite scene continues with Bond telling Tatiana, ‘I hope I come up to your expectations’, to which Tatiana replies, ‘I will tell you … in the morning’, before the camera tracks around the room to focus on the cabinet de voyeur with Grant and Klebb framed behind the mirror watching on.161 In the PCA file, Geoffrey M. Shurlock told Robert Blumofe (United Artists) that the film should

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The audience views Bond and Tatiana’s lovemaking

Klebb and Grant voyeuristically gazing at and recording the sexual relations between Bond and Tatiana through a two-way mirror, aligning the audience with them

Remove the shot where Tania is seen walking nude towards the bed. Remove the reference to ‘searching’ [‘frisking’] her, and shorten the kissing between her and Bond in bed, and remove her remark ‘I hope I come up to expectations’. The episode in which men take photos of the two in bed should be shortened and darkened.162

Maibaum recognised the potential BBFC/PCA cuts that might conceivably be made to this scene in his first treatment, advising that it be shot in ‘two ways’: one with the faces of the cameramen ‘sweating’ for European audiences, and for the American audience with ‘just the camera’.163 In the event, the ‘frisking’ reference was omitted, and the ‘expectations’ line was afforded to Bond instead. However, the producers elected to retain the shot of Tatiana in a nude

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body stocking creeping towards Bond’s bed. The voyeurism in this scene is particularly interesting, in that it presents and aligns the gaze of the viewer with the perspective of Klebb, Grant and the SPECTRE organisation. The inclusion of the lesbian Klebb smoking a cigarette – the coded cinematic euphemism for sexual pleasure (Tatiana smokes one later in the film after implied sexual relations with Bond in their train cabin) – and the ‘lunatic’ Grant watching the sexual activities of Bond and Tatiana thus flips Mulvey’s theory relating to the male gaze, as well as offering the negative assertion that lesbianism and asexuality are aligned with voyeurism and psychopathy. This is directly adapted from Fleming’s novels, in which homosexuality and/or asexuality is commonly associated with the villains. In From Russia, With Love, Klebb is named as the mistress of Andreas Nin and that she ‘undoubtedly belonged to the rarest of all sexual types. She was a neuter … She might enjoy the act physically, but the instrument was of no importance.’164 In his draft manuscript, Fleming assigned Klebb the forename of ‘Biela’, and originally wrote that as a ‘neuter’, Klebb had sexual relations with ‘men, women and animals’, although this hint of bestiality was removed in the published novel.165 In the film, Klebb appears to be more lesbian rather than a ‘neuter’, and her lesbianism is at its most apparent when she attempts to flirt with Tatiana on assigning the latter her mission. Fleming describes Klebb as ‘the oldest and ugliest whore in the world’ after changing into a semi-transparent nightgown in orange crêpe de chine … a brassière consisting of two large pink satin roses … old-fashioned knickers of pink satin with elastic above the knees … Klebb had taken off her spectacles and her naked face was now thick with mascara and rouge and lipstick.166

After she ‘throws’ herself upon a chaise longue in a ‘caricature of a Récamier pose’, Klebb tells Tatiana: ‘Turn out the top light, my dear … Then come and sit beside me. We must get to know each other better.’167

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In Grant’s case, Fleming equates the character’s asexuality with his physical description, using words such as ‘opaque, inwardlooking eyes’, ‘small cruel lips’, ‘bestial’ and ‘reptilian’. Grant’s psychopathic tendencies come to the fore during the full moon, ‘his body began to feel strange and violent compulsions around the time’, and: When he killed the occasional girl he did not ‘interfere’ with her in any way. That side of things, which he had heard talked about, was quite incomprehensible to him. It was only the wonderful act of killing that made him ‘feel better’. Nothing else.168

In Grant’s psychological report, the experts ‘agree that he was an advanced manic depressive whose periods coincided with the full moon. They added that Grant was also a narcissist and asexual and his tolerance of pain was high.’169 The film is not as explicit as the novel, although Grant is portrayed by Shaw as sexually ambiguous. In the film’s version of the scene between Klebb and Tatiana, Lenya emphasises her character’s sexuality when asking Tatiana to take off her jacket so that she can admire her body (‘You’re a fine-looking girl’), her brassière visible beneath her gauzy blouse. Klebb moves to sit on her desk so that she can be closer to Tatiana and touch her, notably on her upper thigh (‘I have selected you’) and ‘A real labour of love’ 1: Klebb touching Tatiana’s knee

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‘A real labour of love’ 2: Klebb stroking Tatiana’s cheek and playing with a curl of hair

subsequently her right shoulder, before stroking across Tatiana’s upper back (‘Come, come, my dear. You are fortunate enough to have been chosen for such a simple, delightful duty’) and the left side of her face (‘A real labour of love, as we say’). Tatiana looks uncomfortable throughout. Another brief moment that alludes to Klebb’s lesbianism occurs in an earlier scene when she arrives at SPECTRE Island to confirm Grant’s fitness, a scene that is also indicative of Grant’s asexuality. Here, both Grant’s and Klebb’s sexuality is framed by the inclusion of the ‘girl masseuse’ (Jan Williams), a character adapted from Fleming’s novel. Grant does not react to the masseuse when she strips off her blue shirt and skirt to reveal a white cotton brassière Grant ignores the ‘girl masseuse’

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Shot: ‘girl masseuse’ looks up at Klebb

Reverse shot: Klebb gazes back at ‘girl masseuse’

and full white cotton briefs before beginning to massage his back by the pool. After Klebb arrives with Morzeny and Rhoda, Klebb looks appreciatively at the masseuse, whose body is now covered in oil, in a shot/reverse shot, before requesting Morzeny call Grant to her. Moneypenny provides a further example of the voyeurism that is centred on Bond and Tatiana in the film, though in this instance the trope is instead used for humour. This scene was added after Mather’s revisions had been made. When Bond asks Tatiana to speak into a microphone hidden inside a camera on a ferryboat in the Bosporus, the microphone is directly connected to M’s office so that it can be ascertained whether the Lektor machine is genuine. M tells Moneypenny, who is busily transcribing Tatiana’s description, to leave his office owing to the following dialogue:

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Moneypenny listening in to Bond and Tatiana’s sexually implicit conversation (note the positioning of the pencil)

TATIANA Doushka, tell me the truth … Am I as exciting as all those Western girls? BOND

Well, once when I was with M in Tokyo, we had an interesting experience …170

Moneypenny proceeds to listen in to Bond and Tatiana’s flirtatious conversation in her own office: TATIANA James, come closer. I want to whisper something … BOND

Go on with what you were telling me … No, not that! The mechanism!

With comic timing, M cuts over Bond and Tatiana’s conversation to interrupt Moneypenny’s pleasurable aural voyeurism with: ‘Miss Moneypenny, as you are no doubt listening, perhaps you would take this cable?’ The emphasis in the film that it is Tatiana who is flirting with Bond was changed from the script: TATIANA (plaintively) James, it is so difficult to concentrate when you are doing that.171

Grant’s speech after he manages to successfully outwit Bond aboard the Orient Express further emphasises the theme of

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voyeurism. According to the script, this scene was originally to include a moment of self-referential humour and is in part adapted from Fleming’s novel, which includes references to the processes of film-making, with Kerim telling Bond: Has it ever occurred to you that our kind of work is rather like shooting a film? So often I have got everybody on location and I think I can start turning the handle. Then it’s the weather, and then it’s the actors, and then it’s the accidents. Love appears in some shape or form, at the very worst, as it is now, between the two stars.172

Revealing SPECTRE’s ultimate plan, Grant gloats to Bond in the script: GRANT

That’s only part of it, old man. She’ll have this roll of film in her handbag – (slips letter into BOND’s pocket) That’s a letter from her – threatening to give the film to the press if you don’t marry her for helping you get the Lektor –

BOND

(puzzled) Film?

GRANT

Best show I ever saw. Shot in the bridal suite at the Kristal Palas, starring James Bond and Tatiana Romanova. Something else she didn’t know about. What a performance!

BOND

(ruefully) We should both get Oscars.173

Grant’s line ‘What a performance!’ was omitted from the script at the direction of the BBFC and the PCA, as was Bond’s response. According to the export script, the same line was also to be repeated by Bond at the end of the film after he pulls the roll of film out of his pocket and uses the sunlight to examine it. This too was omitted at the request of the BBFC and the PCA: M.C.S. [medium close shot] of TANIA and BOND kissing. TANIA to BOND: ‘James, behave yourself, we are being filmed.’ BOND to TANIA: ‘Oh, not again!’ BOND takes the reel of film given to him by Grant from his pocket.

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‘What a performance!’: Bond looks at the roll of film recorded by Grant

M.C.S. of TANIA and BOND. He’s looking at the film. BOND to TANIA: ‘He was right, you know. What a performance!’ TANIA to BOND: ‘What is it?’ BOND to TANIA: ‘I’ll show you.’ He kisses TANIA. Camera pans up, excluding Bond and Tania. BOND’s hand enters with the reel of film. He throws it into the water … C.S. [close shot] of Bond’s hand waving.174

Bond’s destroying of the reel of film changes throughout Maibaum’s scriptwriting process. In the first of Maibaum’s treatments, Bond discards the film into the Adriatic Sea prior to the SPECTRE boat chase, telling Tatiana, ‘Officially I suppose I should present this to the National Archives’, and Maibaum does not mention how Bond destroys it in his second draft treatment.175 Bond disposes of the film reel in the Venetian canal when on the gondola with Tatiana at the end of the script, though it does not include the ‘what a performance’ line.176 From Russia With Love’s self-referential quality is further expressed in clear allusions to Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) as well as other films; Young affirms that the opening scene which depicts ‘Bond’ and Grant tracking one another in the Renaissance Garden on SPECTRE Island was inspired by Last Year in Marienbad (1961). James Chapman has analysed

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Hitchcock’s particular relationship with the Bond films, explaining that the director was tangentially involved in the origin of the film series, and that North by Northwest can be understood as a prototype for the Bond films: ‘with its glossy visual style, extravagant action set pieces, high-living consumer lifestyle trappings, and its debonair hero, sexually assertive heroine and suave villain’.177 From Russia With Love is the most ‘Hitchcockian’ of the Bond films, and North by Northwest is specifically referenced in the St Sophia mosque scenes and the helicopter action sequence. Besides imitating Hitchcock’s use of famous landmarks for atmospheric backgrounds, the film references Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest in Bond’s costume – in the St Sophia mosque, Bond is garbed in an Anthony Sinclair-tailored two-

Bond wearing a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses during the St Sophia mosque scenes

Roger Thornhill wearing tortoiseshellrimmed sunglasses to disguise himself on the Twentieth Century Limited express passenger train in North by Northwest (1959)

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piece grey glen check suit with a pale blue shirt and navy grenadine tie, and wearing tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses when he joins a tour while waiting for Tatiana to appear with her map of the Russian consulate. In North by Northwest, Thornhill wears a two-piece bluegrey glen check suit, believed to have been tailored by Kilgour, with a white shirt and grey silk tie. Thornhill wears tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses when attempting to keep his identity hidden aboard the Twentieth Century Limited express passenger train from New York to Chicago where he meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). Tatiana in these scenes reflects Kendall’s character, in that she is costumed in a conservatively designed and fitted cotton shirt-shift dress with alternating stripes in lighter and darker shades of blue and white that is cinched at the waist with a white leather belt, and her

Tatiana’s costume and hairstyle in the St Sophia mosque, an image that evokes comparison with Eve Kendall in North by Northwest

Eve Kendall aboard the Twentieth Century Limited express passenger train in North by Northwest

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blonde hair is styled into a side-parting so as to curl and frame her face in a similar way to that of Kendall’s. Suspense and intrigue, a cornerstone of Hitchcock’s films, is also employed to great effect in From Russia With Love, in particular the play of shadow and light in many scenes. For example, when Bond and Kerim stand in the shadows of the Schedazi mosque waiting for Krilencu, the lattice work of the windowpane frames the characters hiding against the stonework, heightening the tension of the scene. However, Shaw’s performance as Grant perhaps best encapsulates these themes by creating a sinister effect as he prowls through the Orient Express train corridor, a haunting menace, predatorily stalking Bond who walks down the platform at Sofia station, with Grant framed through the train’s windows as a dark mirror image of Bond.

Use of lighting and shadow to evoke suspense and atmosphere in From Russia With Love, as evidenced by the creative use of the latticed stonework of the Schedazi mosque illuminated across Bond’s and Kerim’s profiles

The ‘haunting menace’ of Grant stalking Bond aboard the Orient Express

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The clearest reference to North by Northwest in From Russia With Love is the helicopter scene, which mimics the crop-duster sequence. Critics have argued that the Bond ‘imitation’ is inferior, with Robin Wood damning in his assessment: From a purely technical viewpoint (if such a thing exists) the Hitchcock sequence is incomparably superior; it is prepared with so much more finesse, shot with so much more care, every shot perfectly judged in relation to the build-up of the sequence … In comparison, the Bond sequence is messy and disorganised, the mise-en-scène purely opportunistic … The suspense in the Bond sequence is meaningless: the attack is just an attack, it has no place in any significant development, there is no reason apart from plot – no thematic reason – for it to happen to Bond then or to happen in the way it does.178

Roger Thornhill and the crop-duster sequence in North by Northwest

Bond and the SPECTRE helicopter sequence in From Russia With Love

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However, as Chapman maintains, merely arguing that Hitchcock’s films are superior is ‘limiting and problematic’, with critics downplaying narrative elements of the Bond films, and exaggerating their ‘badness’ in direct relation to Hitchcock’s celebrated status as the ultimate auteur, genre films being perceived as ‘formulaic, derivative, film-making by numbers’.179 In relation to narrative, the helicopter sequence not only extends the ‘play moves’ between ‘G’ and ‘H’ in From Russia With Love, using action to demonstrate that Bond continues to be marked by SPECTRE after the death of Grant, but the sequence also highlights the order of importance of what Bond takes with him on his escape from the Orient Express, with the script directing: ‘(Throughout this sequence we see that his concern is for the three bits of “property” he is transporting in the order of lektor, tania, case).’180 To emphasise this order of importance, Maibaum originally envisaged in both of his treatments that Bond, not Grant, would drug Tatiana’s glass of wine during their meal in the dining car, with Bond subsequently telling Grant, masquerading as ‘Nash’, that she would have compromised their escape from the train and border crossing at Trieste in order to fulfil their mission. He relents after Grant reveals who he really is and that Tatiana was unaware of SPECTRE’s plan, but Bond remains suspicious of her to the end of both treatments, until Tatiana reveals Klebb’s true identity.181 In the final script, it is Grant not Bond who drugs Tatiana.182

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4 Promotion and Reception With From Russia With Love, we begin to see a development from the promotion and marketing campaign of Dr. No. The UK press book evidences the beginning of fashion, cosmetic and toiletry brands being directly linked to the Bond films that would become de rigueur by Goldfinger.183 For example, Pond’s Angel Face lipstick produced a thirty-second television advertising campaign related to ‘007’, and a ‘From Russia With Love’ Nylon faux-fur hat was available to obtain at a ‘token price’ following the purchase of a bar of Lux toilet soap (retailers were offered the use of a promotional image of Bianchi sporting the hat).184 The advertisement was made by personnel who would come to be employed on later Bond films, not least Guy Hamilton, the director of Goldfinger, while Charles Gray, who provided the voiceover for the advertisement, was cast as Dikko Henderson in You Only Live Twice and Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever.185 Gray asks the audience whether they are ‘brave enough to wear Double-0 colours’ and recommends to women: ‘Tomorrow, wear 007. In the most ruthless pink’, which is ironic, given that the advertisement was shot in black and white.186 The advertisement was released in May 1963. As the ‘Agency View’ in Television Mail pointed out: ‘I liked the esoteric humour of 007 Angel Face Make Up (although it’s nice to see “with-it” humour, I doubt whether many of the general public will get the tie-up between James Bond and this product)’, given that it was screened five months prior to the UK cinema release of From Russia With Love.187 In the press book, the advertisement’s show card advises consumers that ‘Bond’s girl Daniela Bianchi wears 007 in From Russia With Love’, and includes the range of 007 lipsticks placed within bullet holes, along with an image of the Pan edition of Fleming’s From Russia, With Love. The book’s cover includes

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promotional stills taken from the film and prominently features the face of Connery in the centre. Besides the campaign tie-ins with the Pan reproduction, as well as the records and sheet music for the film’s title song, these advertisements demonstrate how Eon Productions were particularly keen to encourage a market for both women and men early on in their approach to promoting the Bond films. This is reflective of later fashion and cosmetic brand tie-ins related to the Bond films, in that women were encouraged to be ‘fit for James Bond’, while men were urged to buy 007-branded products for their Television advertisement for Pond’s Angel Face ‘007’ lipstick (courtesy History of Advertising Trust)

The 375-piece jigsaw produced by Arrow, c. 1965 (courtesy The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter)

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An example of the types of shop-window displays following the release of From Russia With Love, this one the City Station branch of W. H. Smith in Leeds

wives and girlfriends. Other branded items included a 375-piece jigsaw by Arrow, recreating the image of Bond using his sniper rifle to shoot down the SPECTRE helicopter. For the tie-in with Pan, Eon Productions were keen to persuade local shops to create window displays for From Russia With Love, offering £250-worth of prizes for the best displays, with the first and second prizewinners getting the chance to see Goldfinger in production at Pinewood Studios: ‘Ian Fleming and Sean Connery … will judge the displays from the photographs submitted.’188 Articles published in the British press book focused on the stars, in particular Connery, Shaw, Bianchi and Lenya. Connery was described as a ‘rugged Scots actor’ who offered a ‘dazzling portrayal’ of Bond, and Shaw a ‘versatile’ and ‘distinguished’ writer-actor, who had previously worked on theatrical Shakespeare adaptations and was an established author, notably for his ‘best-selling’ novels The Hiding Place (1959) and The Sun Doctor (1961).189 The press book continued the myth, established in Dr. No, that Connery was dressed in Savile Row-sourced attire for his portrayal of Bond in From Russia With Love, and exaggerates his working-class roots by incorrectly suggesting that he worked as a milkman prior to his acting career.190

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On comparing Bianchi’s description against that of Lenya’s, notably Bianchi is described as a ‘lovely golden-eyed Italian’ who is ‘slender, delicately-featured’, is promoted as ‘single’ and whose suitably girlish interests include ‘clothes’ (owing to her modelling career), ‘swimming and tennis’. Whereas Lenya, described as ‘dynamic’ and offering the role of Klebb ‘a rare gem of characterization’, is framed by her marriage to Kurt Weill and Weill’s collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, with her acting skills coming to the fore after beginning her career as a ‘circus dancer’.191 All four actors are thus framed through the lens of their gender: Bianchi for her youthful beauty and Lenya through her acting career, which, as implied by the press book, relied on collaboration with her husband and his connections with the famous German playwright. In comparison, Connery is framed through his ability to successfully transcend class and become a ‘star’, while Shaw is presented as an established and successful actor-writer in his own right. The American press book contains similar articles, albeit including more details of locations and on-set gossip, such as the uncorroborated story of Fleming cutting Connery’s tie on the set of From Russia With Love. The actor had ‘dared’ to knot Bond’s tie in the ‘Windsor’ style, with Connery supposedly telling the author: ‘When I buy a $40.00 tie, I tie it my way.’192 The US-published press book also included a clever cartoon, sketched by the celebrated American caricaturist Al Hirschfeld in ink on paper, that was based on Hirschfeld’s interpretation of the ‘between-takes’ set-up for the bridal suite scene in the Kristal Palas Hotel, with the ‘assistant cameraman’ – sketched by Hirschfeld to look like Young – taking a light reading for Bianchi, who lies beneath the bed sheets resplendent in her ‘costume’ of a black velvet choker, with Connery looking on in his bath towel and armed with his Walther PPK prior to shooting the scene.193 The posters produced for different territories make for interesting comparison in relation to both style and substance. The following foreign translations of the film’s title were not always

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successful in avoiding the connection between Britain, Russia and the Cold War: • France: Bons baisers de Russie [Good Kisses from Russia] • Germany: Liebesgrüsse aus Moskau [Love Greetings from Moscow] • Italy: A 007, dalla Russia con amore [To 007, From Russia With Love] • Belgium: Used both the French title, Bons baisers de Russie, and the Dutch title, Hartelijke kussen uit Rusland [Warm Kisses from Russia] • Spain: Desde Rusia con amor [From Russia With Love] • Denmark: Agent 007 jages [Agent 007 Is Being Hunted] • Finland: Salainen agentti 007 i Istanbul [Secret Agent 007 in Istanbul] • Sweden: Agent 007 ser rõtt [Agent 007 Sees Red] • Turkey: 007, James Bond Rusya’dan sevgilerle [007, James Bond From Russia With Love] • Brazil: Moscou contra 007 [Moscow Against 007] •  Mexico: El regreso del agente 007 [Return of Agent 007] The British quad crown poster, featuring the tagline ‘JAMES BOND IS BACK!’, was designed by Eric Pulford with the artwork by Renato Fratini in gouache, pastel and watercolour on art board.194 Set within a blue frame with the credits printed at bottom, the characters are juxtaposed so that Bond is prominently positioned in the foreground, with Tatiana to the left above Bond, the ‘gypsy dancer’ to Bond’s right, and Vida and Zora placed in the bottom-left corner. Key moments in the film, namely the helicopter and the Orient Express sequences, are framed by the St Sophia mosque at the top-left corner behind Tatiana. Bond dominates the poster, wearing a black dinner jacket, white dress shirt and black bowtie, and the red cufflinks that fasten his turnback cuffs reflect the red text used for ‘James Bond’, ‘Ian Fleming’s’, ‘Sean Connery’ and ‘007’, as well as the red pastels

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British quad crown poster (1963), designed by Eric Pulford, with artwork by Renato Fratini (courtesy BFI National Archive)

Daniela Bianchi’s black-and-white publicity photograph (courtesy BFI National Archive)

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and watercolours used to depict St Sophia. The rest of the text is stamped across the poster in black, with the exception of the film’s title in white, slanting across Bond’s chest. The ‘O’ of ‘LOVE’ inverts the Russian emblem of a hammer and sickle. Fratini’s dark and angular sketch of Bond’s face was inspired by a head shot of Connery taken for Dr. No.195 The figures of the women take on a sketchy and lyrical quality, with their costumes coloured in shades of gold and blue throughout. The depiction of Tatiana was based on a black-and-white publicity still taken of Bianchi, where she is dressed in a long, heavy silk nightgown with balloon sleeves cuffed at the elbow, a lace-trimmed collar and a long ribbon fastened at the pussy-bow neckline. Bianchi also wears the black velvet choker, reminiscent of Tatiana’s attire in the bridal suite, and fishnet stockings. Fratini’s interpretation omits the stockings, and provides the nightgown with a transparent quality and a lowercut neckline so as to emphasise Tatiana’s cleavage. This, along with the sketch of the ‘gypsy dancer’ who is costumed in a bedlah (a matching brassière and belt set, depicted by Fratini as a gold bikini top and gold-belted blue chiffon skirt, both resplendently adorned with gold coins) with her naked arms, navel and legs visible, would cause this version of the poster to be ‘censored’ in Ireland. Both sketches were strategically shaded in with brown paint, with Tatiana now appearing to wear a jumpsuit beneath the chiffon nightdress to cover her legs and arms, and the ‘gypsy dancer’ clad in a brown A-line sheath dress.196 Curiously, Fratini’s sketches of Vida and Zora were left alone and remained ‘uncensored’. Spain, too, offered a demure depiction of Tatiana in Macario ‘MAC’ Gómez Quibus’s interpretation of the poster, albeit in an artistically superior rendering to that of the Irish version: in his portrait bust of Tatiana, she appears to be wearing a strapless evening gown with a sweetheart neckline rendered in different shades of blue. By comparison to the UK quad poster, the American 1 sheet (style ‘A’) was text heavy, and designed in portrait rather than landscape format, featuring the colour scheme of red, black and

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Reproduced image of American 1 sheet (style ‘A’) on a promotional postcard (courtesy The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter)

white more prominently. The 1 sheet states: ‘Meet James Bond, secret agent 007. His new incredible women … His new incredible enemies … His new incredible adventures …’ – along with six images taken from publicity stills placed in descending order down the left side to emphasise the lines of text. The top three images are of the ‘incredible women’ Tatiana, Vida and Zora, with two taken at a photo session with David Hurn retouched for use in the poster.197 The bottom three images depict Bond’s ‘incredible enemies’ and ‘incredible adventures’: Grant using his garrotte, Bond escaping SPECTRE’s helicopter and the explosion of the SPECTRE boats. The American 6 sheet poster was particularly witty, with the action figure of Bond placed in the

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centre and six arrows targeting him at different angles from above: ‘Target: The unkillable James Bond 007’, ‘Blast him!’, ‘Seduce him!’, ‘Bomb him!’ and ‘Strangle him!’ interspersed with promotional photographs. The UK’s press book included advertisement blocks that could be used in newspapers and other print press that featured ink on paper illustrations attributed to the artist Mitchell Hooks based on Hurn’s photographs of Tatiana wearing the blue chiffon nightgown with lace detailing over the bust which she wore during the ‘fashion show’ scenes in the film. Hooks also produced a sketch of the UK quad poster, parts of which were used in similar advertisements and ‘scene cuts’ in the American press book. Sketch of Tatiana and Bond attributed to Mitchell Hooks, based on David Hurn’s promotional shot (courtesy BFI National Archive)

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Tatiana’s blue nightgown with lace trim worn during the ‘fashion show’ scenes set on the Orient Express

Mitchell Hook’s sketch based on the UK quad poster (courtesy BFI National Archive)

From Russia With Love was released in the UK on 10 October 1963 and in the US on 27 May 1964. Riding the wave of the success of Dr. No, the film was generally well received by both UK and US critics. Felix Barker stated that it ‘is even more exciting, preposterous, and entertaining than Dr. No … 100 per cent entertainment all the way’, and praised Young and Maibaum in particular for concocting ‘a heady draft of school-boy adventure, violence and sex’ and Connery for being ‘the perfect, laconic 007’.198 Ann Pacey praised the film as ‘a splendidly exciting piece of hokum – chilling, thrilling,

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and often very funny too’, while Thomas Wiseman referred to it as an ‘expensive penny-dreadful, enjoyably absurd, calculatingly sadistic … and very bizarre’.199 Penelope Houston felt that ‘Money has been spent, sensibly, where it shows on the screen; and in contrast to many British thrillers, this one has a fine range of sets and locations.’200 Hollis Alpert believed that compared to Dr. No, Young ‘has now learned how to balance the thriller and the spoof qualities about equally, and the blend results in a superior kind of entertainment’.201 The term ‘nonsense’ was commonly used by critics to describe From Russia With Love, generally in positive terms, with Fergus Cashin reviewing the film as ‘this beautiful nonsense’ that offered ‘sheer escapism, for absolute delight and giggling fright’, adding: ‘It’s the kind of film where you keep grabbing hold of each other on the way home and hooting with laughter and saying “Remember that part where …”.’202 Bryan Buckingham exclaimed: ‘Spectacular and beautifully photographed in colour, it’s sheer hokum from start to finish. But what entertainment! … What a load of wonderful nonsense!’203 Cecil Wilson used the British colloquialism ‘twaddle’ in lieu of ‘nonsense’, writing that Young ‘directs this orgy of strip cartoon blood and thunder with a zest of a lounge-suited Western. Incredible twaddle it may be, but I for one find such twaddle irresistible.’204 Although this was not the case across the board, with Isabel Quigly complaining that although the film was made ‘competently’, and was, ‘I suppose, inventive in the sense that a new nonsense always follows hard on the heels of an old nonsense … It’s terribly lowering to sit unamused while everyone around you is yelping with glee.’205 Echoing Quigly, Nina Hibbin also found From Russia With Love decidedly unfunny: Personally, I find it just about as funny as someone slipping on a banana skin. Or, to be precise, as a blind man slipping on a banana skin personally placed there by his mother … What sort of people are we becoming if we can accept such perversion as a giggle?206

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Notably, both Quigly (Spectator) and Hibbin (Daily Worker) held similar views on From Russia With Love, albeit writing for newspapers at the opposite ends of the British political spectrum. Particular praise was afforded to the pre-credit title sequence and the film’s opening credits. Alexander Walker explained that, at the press preview, ‘we shushed in suspense at the brilliant spoof opening’,207 and Penelope Gilliatt believed: The sequence before the credits … is so good that anyone but the James Bond filmmakers might be frightened they couldn’t top it … The remarkable thing is that the film does manage to keep up its own cracking pace, nearly all the way. The set-pieces are a stunning box of tricks.208

However, although Gilliatt felt that From Russia With Love was ‘brilliantly skilful’, she critiqued that the film ‘begins to slip off the rails halfway through [because] Bond is made to look too thickheaded … I wish he thought his way out of more situations, instead of kicking his way out.’ Houston felt that the sequence was ‘brilliantly conceived and shot with enough precision to promise something really out of the way in thrillers’. Writing for the trade paper Amateur Cine World, John Saunders had been concerned that ‘the titles for Dr. No were so good … that I was doubtful if they could be equalled’, but was relieved to find that Robert Brownjohn and Trevor Bond had achieved it, offering a rare insight into the reaction from the audience: ‘There were gasps from the people sitting around me in the cinema during these titles, a spontaneous reaction which I have not heard since the Saul Bass titles for Around the World in Eighty Days [1956].’209 Saunders celebrated the film as a ‘visual triumph’, recommending that amateur film-makers should see From Russia With Love twice: ‘Once to enjoy it, the second time to study the technique.’210 Regarding critics’ perceptions of Connery, the majority were positive, with David Robinson opining that the actor has ‘a great deal more charm that Fleming’s decidedly U-style tough’, and Dilys

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Powell similarly believed that he was ‘composed and debonair … with the sexual arrogance and the cool delivery of the throwaway line proper to Mr Fleming’s hero’.211 As in the reviews of Dr. No, many of them drew upon the character’s love of wearing welltailored suits; Philip Oakes, for example stated: ‘No one could better [Connery’s] wry blend of Establishment thug and Savile Row stallion.’212 Wilson described Connery’s performance as a ‘laconic blend of Tarzan and Superman in Savile Row dress … every time he simply dusts himself down and strolls on immaculately to the next adventure’, and Wiseman felt that the actor ‘manages to maintain 007’s reputation for sartorial elegance and virility’. Walker provided Connery with the somewhat backhanded compliment that he ‘is still a tailor’s delight and a maiden’s prayer’, but wished that they would ‘equip the character with a sense of humour in time for the film version of Goldfinger’; Bond’s quips in From Russia With Love were evidently not to Walker’s taste. Quigly was one of the few critics who did not appreciate Connery’s ‘extremely wooden playing’ as Bond. Lenya’s portrayal of Klebb was singled out for praise by most critics, and the majority would use the following terms to describe the sexuality of her character: ‘Lesbian’ (Barker), ‘red vixen’ (Walker), ‘desperate lesbian’ (Gilliatt), ‘discreet hint of lesbianism’ (Oakes), ‘Lesbian villainess’ (Wiseman) and ‘vicious’ (Boxoffice).213 Houston believed that Lenya was ‘splendid’, Robinson declared her ‘inimitable … She reflects upon the film her own unique sophistication’, and Richard Roud felt that Lenya was ‘superbly tough’.214 Esquire offered one of the rare reviews that did not praise Lenya’s performance, writing that it was the ‘Miscasting of the year … Her eyes are hopelessly kind and long-suffering no matter what riding whip she brandishes.’215 ‘Rich’, writing for Variety, also believed that Lenya ‘has been lumbered with a part that doesn’t fully come off. Instead of being sinister the character may be too grotesque even for this espionage pantomime.’216

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Walker did not particularly take to Bianchi: ‘I badly missed Ursula Andress … Miss Bianchi is the clinging type of girl and Bond films need the type who fights men off’, a reservation echoed by Pacey: ‘My only real argument with this very entertaining entertainment is that Bond’s girl Tatiana is not really up to his standard … she is not as beautiful or as fascinating as we expect Bond girls to be.’ However, Wilson opined that she was ‘a willowy Italian blonde well up to Bond standard [and] shows the same nonchalant flair for foiling death’, while the anonymous ‘Film Critic’ writing in The Times believed that Bianchi was ‘sufficiently embodied’ and in ‘recompense’ for only having one ‘girl’, the film offered ‘a memorably bizarre villainess in the shape of Lotte Lenya’s formidable Colonel Klebb’.217 Similarly to Pacey, ‘Rich’ felt that although Bianchi was ‘a good-looking Italian girl with shapely legs and a promising smile’, her performance was limited owing to the very few acting opportunities afforded to her character in the script. In terms of the box-office potential for From Russia With Love, Graham Clarke predicted: ‘Every known ingredient for moneyspinning success is here in this film. It’s a must for all. Box-office smash hit,’ and indeed it was.218 On the film’s release at the Odeon, Leicester Square, London, the Daily Cinema exclaimed: Crowds had been besieging the theatre since mid-day and by early afternoon it was obvious the opening day house record was going to be beaten and it was just a question by how much. By the time the last house was due to start the queues around the theatre had grown to fantastic proportions.219

The film was reported to have broken the house record at this theatre by £481.220 Describing the queues that continued to form outside the theatres following the film’s release, an excited Monty Morton stated: ‘Extra police had to be drafted into [Leicester] Square and scenes like this have never been known before. It’s the same story from the eleven provincial pre-release situations.’221

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Photograph taken during the evening of the film’s opening night at the Odeon, Leicester Square

By 17 October, Kinematograph Weekly was reporting that ‘everyone expected it to do a burster at the Odeon, Leicester Square. In fact it has done a bomb-hydrogen variety,’ and Table 5 details the first week’s takings for various UK cinemas.222 By the end of the second week, London’s West End cinemas were reporting takings totalling £29,595 (Odeon, Leicester Square: £11,928/first four days of third week: £6,200; New Victoria: £5,252/Sunday of third week: £500; Odeon, Kensington: £5,115/Sunday of third week: ‘nearly’ £600).223 It was further reported that the Odeon, Marble Arch, had taken a total of £7,953 in its opening week – an increase of £2,876 from earlier reports – and took £3,900 in the first four days of the second week. This takes the total in Table 5 up to £140,249 by the beginning of the third week of the film’s run, based on the cinema takings recorded in Kinematograph Weekly. The trade paper rounded up the films on general release in the UK in 1963 that had made the most money at the box office that year, with From Russia With Love top, followed by Summer Holiday (released 10 January 1963), The Great Escape (released 20 June 1963) and Tom Jones (released 26 June 1963).224

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1st Week Takings (£)

Odeon, Leicester Square, London

14,528

91

Notes ‘an all time high, better than the previous best by £3,452’

New Victoria, London

6,874

‘house record’

Odeon, Kensington, London

6,328

‘house record’

Odeon, Marble Arch, London

5,077*

*1st four days ‘which is more than the previous best take in the first five days’

Odeon, Birmingham

7,978

Gaumont, Manchester

6,521

Odeon, Newcastle

6,004

Gaumont, Sheffield

5,192

Odeon, Bristol

4,522

Odeon, Cardiff

3,440

Odeon, Southampton

3,918

Odeon, Sunderland

4,167

Odeon, Luton

2,842

Odeon, Norwich

3,025

Odeon, Glasgow

6,736*

*1st five days

Odeon, Leeds

5,827*

*1st six days

Odeon, Liverpool

5,822*

*1st six days

Total in 1st week

98,801

Table 5: First week box-office takings for From Russia With Love at various cinemas in the UK (Source: Figures obtained from ‘Box-Office Business’, Kinematograph Weekly, 24 October 1963, p. 10)

The American trade paper Boxoffice believed that the producers ‘score an even greater smash with a second Fleming thriller … It can’t miss being one of the blockbusters of 1964.’225 Boxoffice reported in May 1964 that following a four-week run at the Astor Theatre in Times Square and in the Showcase theatres in the greater New York area, the film grossed more than $1 million (£357,143),

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‘a new high for any film to play as a Premiere Showcase or Hollywood Showcase in Greater New York’.226 In January 1965, Variety listed From Russia With Love as one of the ‘big rental pictures’ of 1964, with ‘rentals to date’ reported at $3,849,000 (£1,374,643) based on US and Canadian rentals.227 According to United Artists’ accounting statements, by 11 August 1964 the film had accrued $1,213,682.94 (£433,460.69) in profits, which were split equally between Danjaq and United Artists.228 By 1966, the film had entered Variety’s ‘all-time top grossers’ list, with a reported $8,400,000 (£3,000,000) received in rentals. This was, in part, owing to the double bill reissue of both Dr. No and From Russia With Love following the release of Goldfinger, which was even more successful on its first release than From Russia With Love.229

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Conclusion I argued in the introduction to this book that From Russia With Love is the best and my favourite film of the Bond series, because it is integral to the development of the later films, but at the same time exemplifies the bounds of difference and highlights an avenue for the series that was abandoned until Daniel Craig’s entrance as Bond in Casino Royale (2006). In relation to the film’s status as an adaptation and a spy thriller, it is often recognised as a Cold War thriller by critics, despite the producers’ attempt to distance the narrative from SMERSH by replacing it with SPECTRE. Summing up the film in relation to the other, later, Bond films, Andy Kryza maintains ‘this is one of the franchise’s purest espionage entries – it suggests an alternative universe in which Bond was closer to a John le Carré spook than a gadget-wielding action hero … Russia proved that a straightforward spy thriller equally suited the secret agent’.230 Gerardo Valero believes that the existence of From Russia With Love represents ‘a crucial reason’ for the longevity of the Bond series: namely, that it provides a better influence than Goldfinger on the films that followed, in terms of suspense and danger, ‘that couldn’t be fully replicated until the recent arrival of the Daniel Craig Bonds’, and is a Cold War thriller ‘in the best sense of the word’.231 Although it has one of the most complex plots of all the Bond films, directly adapted from Fleming’s novel, it remains relatively easy for the audience to follow, unlike some of the later, increasingly convoluted entries, such as The Living Daylights (1987) and No Time to Die (2021). In terms of From Russia With Love’s popularity among critics and fans, with hindsight the film is usually listed as one of the top five Bond films, and often takes the number one spot. In one of the more recent rankings, published by the Independent in the run-up to the release of No Time to Die, it was listed as the best Bond film:

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Connery at his grittiest, production at its suavest. A superb quartet of stars … The whole train section, helped by its Hitchcockian sense of confinement, is a simmering masterclass … the formula fell into step ideally with Fleming. Terence Young kept a tight hold on the spy thrills that were so classically tailored to Connery’s strengths, it’s as if the script came from Savile Row.232

Via IMDb’s ratings system that is scored out of ten, From Russia With Love is placed fourth (rated 7.4) behind Casino Royale (rated 8.0), Skyfall (2012; rated 7.8) and Goldfinger (rated 7.7). Metacritic, the film review website that accumulates critical scores, rates From Russia With Love at 83, second after Goldfinger (rated at 87), with From Russia With Love being the only film of the Bond series that has been awarded a Metacritic ‘Must-See’ stamp to date.233 In relation to gender and sexuality, Tatiana is not set up merely ‘to be looked at’, but is integral to the plot throughout the film. Following the cementing of the Bond formula with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Bond girls, it is not until The Living Daylights that we see another ‘one woman’ Bond film in which Kara Milovy (Maryam d’Abo) is framed in a similar way to Tatiana. Writing for Playboy in 1965, Maibaum admitted that although Bond’s affair with Honey Ryder was his favourite, ‘next to Honey I find Tatiana the most appealing of Bond’s conquests’.234 Maibaum also revealed that many women had expressed to him that their favourite Bond film thus far had been From Russia With Love, which he believed was down to the film’s more sustained love story, as well as perhaps perhaps Bianchi’s ‘unactressy performance’ and ‘fresh 4-H girl loveliness’.235 The scriptwriter further suggested that women liked Tatiana because she is portrayed as a working woman, holding down a regular job as a clerk in the Russian embassy, and that she is ‘patriotic, idealistic, and not informed by the full dastardliness of the plot against Bond to which she lends herself’.236 Maibaum was ‘saddened’ that Tatiana was the ‘only woman [Bond] ever actually strikes’; similarly, Bond would later strike Contessa Teresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg) in On Her Majesty’s

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Secret Service (1969).237 In a further connection between the two films, Tracy is the next woman in the series after Tatiana to profess her love for Bond, although in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service her love is eventually reciprocated by Bond, whereas Tatiana’s is not.238 As Maibaum pointed out: Despite Tatiana’s devotion, subsequently proved to [Bond’s] satisfaction, there is never any doubt about Bond’s attitude toward her … Although we leave Tatiana in his arms, in a gliding gondola, the audience unerringly senses whatever hopes she may have for the future will be pathetically unfulfilled. Bond, the brute, will never look back.239

Maibaum maintained in his article that the reason Bond loves Tracy and not the other women – ‘She is beautiful beyond description, but no more so than Honey or Tatiana’ – is owing to her ‘greatest appeal of all. She needs him. Unlike the others, she is the only one for whom Bond is the one man in the world.’240 Furthermore, From Russia With Love and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are the only two films in the series to feature a villainous woman – Klebb and Irma Bunt (Ilse Steppat) – whom Bond is not sexually attracted to or has sexual relations with in an attempt to ‘turn’ them for the sake of Queen and Country, and both are portrayed as possessing lesbian qualities, equating homosexuality with the ‘monstrous’, as is presented in Fleming’s writing. In terms of agency and labour, the Bond films are an exemplar of British production and labour talent, with From Russia With Love showcasing the acting skills of Connery and Shaw, and framing the extensive work of the, predominantly British, crew headed by the direction of Young. Although Johanna Harwood was involved early in the pre-production process to draft the first treatment of the film, it would not be until the employment of Dana Stevens for The World Is Not Enough (1999) that a woman would next be part of the scriptwriting process, Stevens being hired by the film’s director and her husband, Michael Apted, to polish the script so as to improve the

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lines for the female characters.241 Since the employment of Barbara Broccoli as a co-producer in the series, more women have entered ‘above-the-line’ roles; however, there is still much work to be done to showcase the work of the women ‘behind’ the Bond films, work which I hope to continue to develop with fellow scholars in the field.242 Eon Productions, too, can work towards including more women in above- and below-the-line roles, and perhaps Bond 26 might see the first woman in the director’s seat? The film’s final credits begin to roll over Bond comically and self-referentially waving goodbye to the reel of film in the canal, informing the viewer that the next film will be Goldfinger. Without this film, there would not have been other Bond films for audiences to enjoy, critics to review and academics to analyse, in what has become the longest-running continuous series in cinema history, one that spans sixty years since the release of Dr. No in October 1962. Throughout this book, I have argued that From Russia With Love should be recognised as the most creatively suspenseful and thrilling film in the Bond series, and is deserving of its well-earned place within the BFI Film Classics series in its own right. In the film, Bond asks M: ‘Suppose when I meet her in the flesh I don’t come up to expectations?’, to which M drily quips: ‘See that you do.’243 Bond and M need not have worried: From Russia With Love most certainly did, and this film continues to live up to expectations; commercially, critically and for audiences past and present. ‘The End. Not quite the end’: Bond selfreferentially waves ‘goodbye’ to From Russia With Love

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Notes 1 For an analysis of Barry’s musical scores in the early James Bond films, see Van Norris, ‘007 and Counting: An Assessment of John Barry’s Soundtrack Work on the Eon/James Bond Series from 1962 to 1969’, in Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty and Jochen Eisentraut (eds), Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 505–23. 2 Penelope Houston, ‘From Russia With Love’, Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 30, no. 358 (November 1963), p. 155. 3 ‘Get Carter tops British film poll’, BBC News, 3 October 2004. Available at: (accessed 4 September 2021). 4 Brogan Morris, ‘Sean Connery (1930–2020): 10 Films to Remember Him By’, BFI.org.uk, 31 October 2020. Available at: (accessed 4 September 2021); Scott Mendelson, ‘Every Sean Connery James Bond Movie, Ranked Worst to Best’, Forbes, 2 November 2020. Available at: (accessed 4 September 2021). 5 Fleming, quoted in Sebastian Faulks, Devil May Care (London: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 320. 6 James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, 2nd edn (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 24. 7 Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier (New York: The American Library of World Literature, 1965), pp. 54–5.

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8 Jeremy Black, The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p. 28. 9 Ibid., pp. 49, 71. This is a somewhat problematic definition as The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) was published between Thunderball and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; written from the first-person perspective of Vivienne Michel, it is also regarded as the anomaly of the Bond novels. 10 Fergus Fleming (ed.), The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 110. 11 Ian Fleming, From Russia, With Love (1957; London: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 53, 54. All quotes used in this book are taken from this published version of the novel. Fleming envisaged that the Spektor decoding machine was akin to the Enigma machine used by Nazi Germany during World War II. 12 Ibid., p. 210. 13 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, p. 72. 14 William Plomer to Ian Fleming, 1 July 1956, letter published in Fleming (ed.), The Man with the Golden Typewriter, pp. 115–16. Emphasis in original. 15 Daniel George to Ian Fleming, 8 July 1956, letter published in Fleming (ed.), The Man with the Golden Typewriter, p. 118. 16 Fleming, quoted in Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World – The Official Companion to Ian Fleming’s Creation (London: John Murray, 2005), p. 97. 17 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987), p. 24.

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18 Lietta Tournabuoni, ‘A Popular Phenomenon’, in Oreste Del Buono and Umberto Eco (eds), A Bond Affair, trans. by R. A. Downie (London: Macdonald, 1965), p. 14. 19 Fleming, quoted in John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), p. 284. 20 Ian Fleming, ‘How to Write a Thriller’, Books and Bookmen, May 1963, p. 14. 21 Albert R. Broccoli with Donald Zec, When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli (London and Basingstoke: Boxtree, 1998), p. 126. 22 Robert Sellers, When Harry Met Cubby: The Story of the James Bond Producers (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2019), p. 38. 23 Matthew Field, ‘The Girl with the Golden Pen’, Cinema Retro: Dr. No – Movie Classics Special no. 4 (2012), p. 136. Harwood had worked with Saltzman from the late 1950s, and she also worked as a continuity assistant on The Red Beret and Hell Below Zero when Broccoli was involved with Warwick Pictures. 24 James Chapman ‘The Trouble with Harry: The Difficult Relationship of Harry Saltzman and Film Finances’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 34, no. 1 (2014), p. 57. 25 The other books Kennedy included in his list were: The Red and the Black (Stendhal, 1830), Montrose (John Buchan, 1928), Marlborough (Winston Churchill, 1933), Byron in Italy (Peter Quennell, 1941), John Quincy Adams (Samuel Flagg Bemis, 1949), The Emergence of Lincoln (Allan Nevins, 1950), John C. Calhoun (Margaret L. Coit, 1950), The Price of the

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Union (Herbert Agar, 1950) and Melbourne (David Cecil, 1954). 26 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, pp. 149–50. 27 David Picker, Musts, Maybes, and Nevers: A Book About the Movies (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2013), pp. 55–6. 28 Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films (Stroud: The History Press, 2015), p. 51. 29 Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR), United Artists Corporation Records, U.S. Mss 99AN, Series MCHC82-046, Box 3, Folder 4: Ornstein to Picker, 18 September 1961. 30 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, p. 168. 31 Film Finances Archive (FFA), Realised Film Box 328: Dr. No budget (c. 1961) and final cost of production report (31 December 1962). 32 FFA, Realised Film Box 328: United Artists, Dr. No Distribution Statement to 29 February 1964. 33 For an analysis of Harwood’s work on Dr. No, see Melanie Williams, ‘Her Word Was Her Bond: Johanna Harwood, Bond’s First Female Screenwriter’, in Steven Gerrard (ed.), From Blofeld to Moneypenny: Gender in James Bond (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2020), pp. 117–27. 34 Field, ‘The Girl with the Golden Pen’, p. 139. 35 Paul Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives (Cologne: Taschen, 2015), p. 59. 36 Confirmed by Paul Duncan via email, 4 February 2021.

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37 Duncan (ed.), James Bond Archives, p. 72. 38 Ian Fleming, ‘Delinquents and smugglers’, The Sunday Times, 18 September 1955, p. 10; ‘“Drugs in Cruiser” charge: 3 remanded’, Daily Mirror, 21 June 1961, p. 13. 39 Duncan (ed.), James Bond Archives, p. 59. 40 Field, ‘The Girl with the Golden Pen’, p. 139. 41 John Montgomery, ‘Film Studio News’, The Stage, 11 October 1962, p. 14. 42 Field, ‘The Girl with the Golden Pen’, p. 139. 43 Ibid. 44 The National Archives (TNA): BT 64/5262, ‘United Artists Corporation Ltd., From Russia With Love: Application for registration of film as British under Films Act 1960’, 1963. 45 Len Deighton, James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for His Father (US: Amazon/Pluriform, 2012), pp. 232, 335. 46 Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 81. 47 Deighton, James Bond, p. 193. 48 WCFTR, Box 3, Folder 6: Picker to Saltzman and Broccoli, 15 January 1963. 49 Deighton, James Bond, p. 371. 50 Ibid., p. 348. 51 TNA: BT 64/5262. 52 Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 82. 53 Richard Maibaum, ‘Richard Maibaum: A Pretence of Seriousness’, in Pat McGilligan (ed.), Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 284.

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54 Ibid. 55 Richard Maibaum Papers, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa (RMP), Box 22: Written list of cast and crew credits for promotional purposes, c. 1963/4. 56 Field, ‘The Girl with the Golden Pen’, p. 139. The character in Maibaum’s script is not ‘Q’, but ‘Major Boothroyd’, and is mentioned by name when M asks: ‘Miss Moneypenny, ask Major Boothroyd to step in please.’ In the film, Desmond Llewellyn is credited as ‘Boothroyd’, although is not referred to by name. 57 Maibaum, ‘A Pretence of Seriousness’, p. 288. 58 RMP, Box 22: Maibaum’s first draft treatment, n.d., p. 4. Maibaum was not the only one who wanted to create a cameo role for Andress: Fleming included a ‘cameo’ for the actress in his novel You Only Live Twice. 59 Ibid., pp. 29, 36. 60 Ibid., pp. 41–3. The ‘Spektor’ machine in the novel was renamed the ‘Lektor’ machine in the script and film, presumably to avoid confusion between ‘Spektor’ and ‘SPECTRE’. 61 Ibid.: Maibaum’s second draft treatment, 28 January 1963, pp. 64–5. 62 British Film Institute (BFI), S6501: Maibaum/Mather, final draft screenplay, revised 16 April 1963, p. 57 [blue]. 63 TNA: BT 64/5262. 64 BFI, S6501: 18 March 1963, p. 1 [white]. 65 In Maibaum’s first draft treatment, he describes Blofeld’s yacht as an ‘Onassis-type’, referring to Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate who would become the second husband

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of Jacqueline Kennedy following the assassination of President Kennedy. RMP, Box 22: p. 3. 66 Peter Haining, James Bond: A Celebration (London: W. H. Allen/Planet, 1987), p. 106. 67 BFI, S6501: 18 March 1963, p. 23 [white]. 68 Image 3.30, dated 30 March 1963, published in Duncan, James Bond Archives, p. 69. ‘Iglu’ is mentioned in Maibaum’s first draft treatment. 69 TNA: BT 64/5262. Mather was paid £1,000 for his work on Dr. No (FFA, Realised Film Box 328: Dr. No budget, c. 1961). 70 Duncan, James Bond Archives, p. 64. 71 RMP, Box 22: p. 22. 72 BFI, S6501: Revised 19 June 1963, p. 64 [yellow]. 73 British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC): Roy Fowler, ‘Women’s Work in British Film and Television’, Jocelyn Rickards, interview 493. Available at: (accessed 25 June 2021). 74 BUFVC: Fowler, ‘Women’s Work’ (‘Membership number 25326’). Available at: (accessed 24 August 2021). 75 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, p. 184. 76 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Social Sciences/Margaret Herrick Library (AMPASS/MHL): From Russia With Love production file, press clippings. 77 Duncan (ed.), James Bond Archives, p. 60.

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78 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, p. 184. 79 BUFVC: Fowler, ‘Women’s Work’ (Rickards interview). 80 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, p. 185. 81 These figures were taken from TNA: BT 64/5262. It should be noted that only the crew and cast members paid over £600 were included in salary breakdown for the form submitted to the Board of Trade to register the film as British, and therefore Tables 1 and 2 are only indicative of the salaries of the higherpaid personnel. 82 Stuart Jeffries, ‘I had a whale of a time’, Guardian, 5 December 2002. Available at: (accessed 19 February 2021). 83 Kay Mander, ‘Cutters Fifth Column’, Cine-Technician (October–December 1940), p. 89; Sidney Cole, ‘BECTU History Project – Interview No. 57, Kay Mander’, 28 September 1998. Available at: (accessed 26 August 2021). 84 For further information regarding Mander’s role in continuity, see Melanie Williams, ‘The Continuity Girl: Ice in the Middle of Fire’, Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 10, no. 3 (2013), pp. 603–17. 85 Eileen Sullivan to Maureen Doyle, 2 May 1964. Courtesy of Colin Sullivan. 86 A possible reason for this anomaly might be that Newman worked for longer on the production than Barrie. 87 Eileen Sullivan tax return ledger, 1960s. Courtesy of Colin Sullivan.

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88 This is the same weekly rate that Sullivan was paid as the wardrobe mistress on Dr. No. Sullivan would receive nearly double the amount of pay that she was owed on From Russia With Love for her work on You Only Live Twice in 1967: £2,419 12s. 10d. Ibid. 89 FFA, Realised Film Box 328: Dr. No budget, c. 1961. 90 Diane Cilento, My Nine Lives (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 206. 91 WCFTR, Box 3, Folder 11: Sidney Landau to William Bernstein, 17 April 1964; Bernstein to Leon Goldberg, 19 May 1965. Connery received $150,324.58 (£53,687.35) on 20 May 1965 for his agreed profit percentage on Goldfinger. 92 AMPASS/MHL, ‘Marnie – Sean Connery’ (Hitchcock f.442): Sidney Bernstein to Alfred Hitchcock, 24 September 1963. 93 WCFTR, Box 3, Folder 11: Ornstein to Picker, 31 January 1963. 94 Calculation based on labour costs available in TNA: BT 64/5262, including the total figures of cast and crew members paid both over and under £600. 95 Figures calculated from FFA, Realised Film Box 328: Dr. No final weekly cost report, 31 August 1962. 96 TNA: BT 64/5262. 97 John Cork Collection, no. 2594, Cinematic Arts Library, USC Libraries, University of Southern California (USC), Box 12: From Russia With Love call sheet #5, 1 April 1963. 98 Duncan (ed.), James Bond Archives, p. 60. 99 John Cork Collection, Box 12: From Russia With Love call sheet #8, 4 April 1963.

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101

100 Ibid.: call sheet #10, 8 April 1963. 101 Ibid.: call sheet #11, 9 April 1963. 102 Ibid.: call sheet #12, 10 April 1963. 103 Duncan (ed.), James Bond Archives, p. 62. 104 John Cork Collection, ‘Commentary’, From Russia With Love, DVD (1963; UK and US: MGM Home Entertainment, 2000). 105 John Cork Collection, Box 12: call sheets #22 (29 April 1963) and #23 (30 April 1963). 106 Duncan (ed.), James Bond Archives, p. 66. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., p. 69. 109 Ibid. 110 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, p. 186. 111 Cilento, My Nine Lives, p. 209. 112 Jocelyn Rickards, The Painted Banquet: My Life and Loves (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p. 82. 113 BUFVC: Fowler, ‘Women’s Work’ (Rickards interview). 114 John Cork Collection, Box 12: call sheet #40, 27 May 1963. 115 ‘Air accidents injure two film directors: Escape from helicopter in 20ft of water’, Daily Telegraph, 8 July 1963, p. 11. 116 Image 3.26, dated 24 July 1963, in Duncan (ed.), James Bond Archives, p. 66. 117 John Cork Collection, Box 12: call sheets #74 (23 July 1963) and #76 (25 July 1963). 118 Cilento believes the film went around £200,000 over budget (My Nine Lives, p. 214). 119 Janet Woollacott, ‘The James Bond Films: Conditions of Production’, in

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James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), p. 210. 120 Maibaum, ‘A Pretence of Seriousness’, p. 287. 121 Woollacott, ‘The James Bond Films’, p. 211. 122 Ibid. 123 For an analysis of James Bond and the cycle of spy thrillers in the 1960s, see Alan Burton, ‘“Jumping on the Bondwagon”: The Spy Cycle in British Cinema in the 1960s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 15, no. 3 (2018), pp. 328–56. 124 Based on the ‘Bond formula’ as determined by Jonathan R. Lack, ‘Bond on Bond: Quantum of Solace and the Illusive Case of the Bondian Ideal’, personal blog, 4 June 2014. Available at: (accessed 3 February 2021). 125 Umberto Eco, ‘The Narrative Structure in Fleming’, in Oreste Del Buono and Umberto Eco (eds), A Bond Affair, trans. by R. A. Downie (London: Macdonald, 1965), p. 52. This theory is not without issue; by his own admission, Eco elects to disregard the ‘problematic’ The Spy Who Loved Me as it does not fit within his theory, but nevertheless his theoretical framework is useful in displaying the complicated structure of From Russia, With Love, and how the scriptwriters and film-makers adapted the novel for the screen. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid., p. 53. 128 BFI, S6501: Revised 16 April 1963, p. 60 [blue].

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129 Fleming mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana, LMC 2445: Fleming, From Russia, With Love (1956), p. 226. 130 Ibid., p. 228. 131 Ian Fleming, Dr. No (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958; London: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 19–20. 132 BFI, S6501: Revised 17 June 1963, p. 124 [yellow]. 133 Boothroyd to Fleming, 23 May 1956, in Fleming (ed.), The Man with the Golden Typewriter, p. 141. 134 BFI, S6501: Revised 17 June 1963, p. 124A [yellow]. 135 This is a theme that would be returned to in the film The Spy Who Loved Me. 136 Klaus Dodds, ‘Licensed to Stereotype: Popular Geopolitics, James Bond and the Spectre of Balkanism’, Geopolitics vol. 8, no. 2 (2003), pp. 130, 131, 137. 137 Ibid., p. 142. 138 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, p. 150. 139 Klaus Dodds, ‘Screening Geopolitics: James Bond and the Early Cold War Films (1962–1967)’, Geopolitics vol. 10, no. 2 (2005), p. 282. 140 BFI, S6501: Revised 17 May 1963, p. 30A [blue]. 141 RMP, Box 22: 28 January 1963, p. 9. 142 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, p. 165. 143 The only other occurrence is when M (Judi Dench) asks Bond (Pierce Brosnan) to ‘pump’ Paris Carver (Teri Hatcher) ‘for information’ in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997).

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144 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (1975; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 833–44. 145 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, p. 184. 146 BFI, S6501: 18 March 1963, p. 44 [white]. Tatiana’s legs in this scene were likely modelled by either Susan Barrett or Phyllis Cornell, as they were on set as Bianchi’s double and stand-in according to call sheet #52, 14 June 1963 (John Cork Collection, Box 12). 147 BFI, S6501: Revised 19 June 1963, p. 62 [yellow]. 148 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, pp. 279, 280. 149 RMP, Box 22: 23 January 1963, p. 53. 150 BFI, S6501: Revised 11 April 1963, p. 32 [blue]. 151 Ibid., 18 March 1936, p. 39 [white]. The ‘Romanian rosebud’ reference was omitted in the final film. 152 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, pp. 194–5. 153 Ibid., p. 202. 154 AMPASS/MHL, MPAA/PCA Records: From Russia With Love, Geoffrey M. Shurlock to Robert F. Blumofe, 24 January 1964. These recommended cuts were copied from the BBFC directive to the producers before the film was released in the UK in October 1963. 155 BFI, S6501: Revised 16 April 1963, p. 56 [pink]. 156 For a close analysis of how women’s bodies are used in the opening credits of the Bond films, see Sabine Planka, ‘Female Bodies in the James Bond Title

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Sequences’, in Lisa Funnell (ed.), For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2015), pp. 139–47; and in relation to Robert Brownjohn’s credits, see Emily King, Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography (Princeton, NJ: Laurence King Publishing, 2005). 157 Duncan (ed.), James Bond Archives, p. 77. 158 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, p. 226. 159 BFI, S6501: Revised 19 June 1963, pp. 62–3 [yellow]. 160 Ibid.: Revised 16 April 1963, p. 59 [blue]. 161 Ibid.: Revised 19 June 1963, p. 64 [yellow]. 162 AMPASS/MHL, MPAA/PCA Records: Shurlock to Blumofe, 24 January 1964. 163 RMP, Box 22: n.d., p. 14. 164 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, p. 77. 165 Fleming mss., LMC 2445: Fleming, From Russia, With Love (1956), p. 57. 166 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, p. 110. 167 Ibid., p. 111. For a close analysis of Klebb, Pussy Galore and the representation of lesbianism in fiction, see Elisabeth Ladenson, ‘Lovely Lesbians; Or, Pussy Galore’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 7, no. 3 (2001), pp. 417–23. 168 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, pp. 6, 8, 20. 169 Ibid., p. 30. 170 Tatiana’s line was originally to be ‘Was I as exciting as all those Western girls?’ in explicit recognition of the sexual intercourse between herself

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and Bond; however, the PCA requested the word ‘Was’ should be changed to ‘Am’ to make the line implicit. AMPASS/ MHL, MPAA/PCA Records: Shurlock to Blumofe, 24 January 1964. 171 BFI, S6501: Revised 11 April 1963, p. 70 [blue]. 172 Fleming, From Russia, With Love, p. 156. 173 BFI, S6501: Revised 17 June 1963, pp. 100, 101 [yellow]. 174 BFI, S18592: From Russia With Love Export Script, international version (combined continuity), n.d., pp. 11, 12 [reel 13]. 175 RMP, Box 22: n.d., p. 37. 176 BFI, S6501: 1 May 1963, p. 125 [blue]. 177 James Chapman, Hitchcock and the Spy Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018), p. 237. 178 Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films (London: Zwemmer, 1965), pp. 22–3. 179 Chapman, Hitchcock and the Spy Film, pp. 242, 243. 180 BFI, S6501: Revised 2 May 1963, p. 106 [blue]. 181 RMP, Box 22: 28 January 1963, p. 55. 182 BFI, S6501: 18 March 1963, p. 95 [white]. 183 The United Artists papers held by Wisconsin-Madison reveal that small, local fashion campaigns were planned for American clothing stores to tie in with the release of Dr. No, but these do not appear in the press book (WCFTR: Box 3, Folder 4). 184 From Russia With Love press book (UK, 1963), p. 4. Courtesy of Peter Lorenz. 185 The full advertisement can be viewed on the History of Advertising

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Trust’s website, reference HAT1000/4. Available at: (accessed 1 September 2021). 186 Author’s emphasis. 187 Agency View, ‘Comment on Monday’s Newcomers: Production View’, Television Mail, 17 May 1963, p. 18. 188 From Russia With Love press book (UK, 1963), p. 6. 189 Ibid., pp. 11, 12. 190 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 191 Ibid., p. 13. 192 From Russia With Love press book (US, 1964), p. 8. Emphasis in original. Courtesy of Peter Lorenz. 193 Ibid., p. 9. 194 Details provided by Lorenz. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid. 197 Ibid. 198 BFI press clippings file: Felix Barker, ‘Bravo Bond’, Evening News, 10 October 1963. 199 Ibid.: Ann Pacey, ‘Agent 007 is back with a bagful of hokum!’, Daily Herald, 9 October 1963; Thomas Wiseman, ‘Such jolly fun – the latest Bond 007 epic’, Sunday Express, 13 October 1963. 200 Ibid.: Houston, ‘From Russia With Love’, p. 155. 201 Ibid.: Hollis Alpert, ‘From Russia With Love’, Saturday Review, 18 April 1964. 202 Ibid.: Fergus Cashin, ‘Bond’s back’, Daily Sketch, 9 October 1963. 203 Ibid.: Bryan Buckingham, ‘Wonderful hokum for Agent 007’, News of the World, 13 October 1963.

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204 Ibid.: Cecil Wilson, ‘Bond back … And what incredible, irresistible twaddle!’, Daily Mail, 9 October 1963. Emphasis in original. 205 Ibid.: Isabel Quigly, ‘Into Bondage’, Spectator, 18 October 1963. 206 Ibid.: Nina Hibbin, ‘No, James Bond is not “fun” – he’s just sick!’, Daily Worker, 12 October 1963. 207 Ibid.: Alexander Walker, ‘Bond bait …’, Evening Standard, 10 October 1963. 208 Ibid.: Penelope Gilliatt, ‘Laughing it off with Bond’, Observer, 13 October 1963. 209 John Saunders, ‘From Russia With Love: An Amateur Movie Maker Goes to the Cinema’, Amateur Cine World, 14 November 1963, p. 771. 210 Ibid., p. 789. 211 BFI press clippings file: David Robinson, ‘Bond in Wonderland’, Financial Times, 11 October 1963; Dilys Powell, ‘From Russia With Love’, Sunday Times, 13 October 1963. 212 Ibid.: Philip Oakes, ‘Kinky but commercial’, Sunday Telegraph, 13 October 1963. 213 Ibid.: ‘Feature Reviews’, Boxoffice, 2 March 1964, p. a12. 214 Ibid.: Richard Roud, ‘At the cinema’, Guardian, 11 October 1963. 215 Ibid.: Esquire, 1964. 216 ‘Rich’, ‘Film Reviews’, Variety, 16 October 1963, p. 6. 217 BFI press clippings file: ‘Film Critic’, ‘Four just men rolled into one’, The Times, 10 October 1963. 218 Graham Clarke, ‘From Russia With Love’, Kinematograph Weekly, 10 October 1964, p. 9.

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219 ‘Sensational! The Opening of From Russia With Love’, Daily Cinema, 14 October 1963, pp. 6–7. 220 It was not reported in the trade press what the total amount was in relation to the Odeon’s house takings. 221 Monty Morton, ‘From United Artists With £ove: The James Bond Box Office Saga’, Daily Cinema, 16 October 1963, p. 7. 222 ‘Box-Office Business’, Kinematograph Weekly, 17 October 1963, p. 10. 223 Ibid., 31 October 1963, p. 11. 224 William ‘Bill’ G. Altria, ‘British Films Again Ahead in General Releases’, Kinematograph Weekly, 19 December 1963, p. 45. 225 ‘Feature Reviews’, Boxoffice, 2 March 1964, p. a11. 226 ‘From Russia $1,000,000 Gross in 4 N.Y. Weeks’, Boxoffice, 11 May 1964, p. e1. 227 ‘Big Rental Pictures of 1964’, Variety, 6 January 1965, p. 39. 228 WCFTR, Box 3, Folder 6: Danjaq S.A., ‘Schedule of Application of Danjaq S.A. Profits’, 28 August 1964. 229 ‘All-time Top Grossers’, Variety, 5 January 1966, p. 6. 230 Andy Kryza, ‘The Best James Bond Movies of All Time’, Time Out, 17 September 2021. Available at: (accessed 15 September 2021). 231 Gerardo Valero, ‘From Russia With Love and its Place in the Bond Canon’, RogerEbert.com, 2 August 2013. Available at: (accessed 25 September 2021).

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232 Adam White and Alexandra Pollard, ‘James Bond films: Every 007 movie ranked in order of worst to best’, Independent, 24 September 2021. Available at: (accessed 25 September 2021). 233 ‘From Russia With Love’, Metacritic. com, n.d. Available at: (accessed 25 September 2021). The use of IMDb and Metacritic scores is not without issue, as the data capture is not scientific; however, it can be a useful tool in generally comparing the Bond films as a series. 234 Richard Maibaum, ‘James Bond’s Girls: Those Sensuous Cinema Sirens with Whom Secret Agent 007 Has to Put up and Bed Down’, Playboy, November 1965, p. 144. 235 ‘4-H girl’ refers to a US-based network of youth development organisations established c. 1912–14, whose original motto was ‘head, heart, hands and health’.

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236 Maibaum, ‘James Bond’s Girls’, pp. 144, 205. 237 Ibid., p. 205. 238 In later films, Bond falls in love with Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale and with Dr Madeleine Swann in Spectre (2015), expressing to both his desire to resign from the Secret Service, as he does for Tracy. 239 Maibaum, ‘James Bond’s Girls’, p. 205. 240 Ibid., p. 206. 241 So, too, would Phoebe Waller-Bridge be employed to polish lines of script, particularly for the female roles, in No Time to Die. 242 With thanks to Claire Hines, Melanie Williams, Lucy Bolton, Stephanie Jones and James Chapman, whom I will be working alongside to achieve this. 243 BFI, S6501: 18 March 1963, p. 27 [white].

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107

Credits From Russia With Love UK 1963 Directed by Terence Young Produced by Harry Saltzman Albert R. Broccoli Screenplay by Richard Maibaum Adapted by Johanna Harwood Novel by Ian Fleming © 1963 Danjaq S.A. an Eon Productions production a United Artists release Director of Photography Ted Moore Editor Peter Hunt Production Manager Bill Hill Location Manager Frank Ernst Istanbul Production Assistant Ilham Filmer Art Director Syd Cain Assistant Art Director Michael White Assistant Director David Anderson Second Unit Cameraman Robert Kindred

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Camera Operator Johnny Winbolt Continuity Kay Mander Make-up Basil Newall Paul Rabiger Hairdresser Eileen Warwick Special Effects by John Stears Assisted by Frank George Sound Recordists John W. Mitchell C. le Messurier Assembly Editor Ben Rayner Dubbing Editors Norman Wanstall Harry Miller Costume Designer Jocelyn Rickards Wardrobe Mistress Eileen Sullivan Wardrobe Master Ernie Farrer Set Dresser Freda Pearson Titles Designed by Robert Brownjohn Assisted by Trevor Bond Title Song Written by Lionel Bart Orchestral Music Composed and Conducted by John Barry

‘James Bond Theme’ Written by Monty Norman ‘From Russia With Love’ Sung by Matt Monro Stuntwork Arranged by Peter Perkins uncredited United Artists Production Executive George ‘Bud’ Ornstein Screenplay by Berkeley Mather Len Deighton Assistant Editor Stephen Warwick Casting by Weston Drury Jr Dialogue Coach Ann Korda Associate Producer Stanley Sopel Production Accountant Barrie Davis Assistant Production Accountants Maureen Newman Wally F. Eggleden Production Assistant Marguerite Green Secretary to Harry Saltzman Francine Taylor Secretary to Albert R. Broccoli Margaret Curtis Secretary to Stanley Sopel Diana Moore

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Construction Manager Bill Surridge Second Assistant Directors Terence Churcher Christopher Lambert Focus Pullers John Shinerock Gerry Anstiss Clappers/Loaders Simon Ransley Anthony B. Richmond Electrical Supervisor Reg Blackburn Chief Electrician Frank Buck Camera Grip Reg Hall Stills Ray Hearne Special Effects Technicians Jimmy Snow James Ward Garth Inns Wally Armitage Back Projection Charles Staffell Sound Camera Operator Charles Arnold Assistant Dubbing Editor Peter Pennell Sound Mixer John W. Mitchell Boom Operator Derek Kavanagh Sound Maintenance Charles Van de Goor

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Draughtsmen Alan Tomkins Alec Gray Roger Cain Prop Buyer John Bigg Special Effects Chargehand Props Joe Fitt Chess Expert Bill Reilly Aviation Services John Crewdson Location Caterer George Crawford Director of Publicity Roy Macgregor Publicity Secretaries Valerie Rawlings Elizabeth Roberts CAST Sean Connery James Bond Daniela Bianchi Tatiana Romanova Pedro Armendáriz Kerim Bey Lotte Lenya Rosa Klebb Robert Shaw Grant Bernard Lee M Eunice Gayson Sylvia Trench Walter Gotell Morzeny Francis de Wolff Vavra

George Pastell train conductor Nadja Regin Kerim’s girl Lois Maxwell Miss Moneypenny Aliza Gur Vida Martine Beswick Zora Vladek Sheybal Kronsteen ? [Anthony Dawson] Ernst Blofeld Leila gypsy dancer Hasan Ceylan foreign agent Fred Haggerty Krilencu Neville Jason Kerim’s chauffeur Peter Bayliss Benz Nushet Ataer Mehmet Peter Brayham Rhoda Desmond Llewellyn Boothroyd Jan Williams masseuse Peter Madden MacAdams uncredited Julie Mendez title sequence dancer Maitland Moss 1st umpire

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Paul Beradi chess tournament spectator Muhammat Kohen guide André Charise hotel concierge Hugo de Vernier hotel porter Arlette Dobson hotel receptionist Moris Farhi 1st gypsy Maria Antipa Vavra’s woman Aysha Barlas 1st gypsy woman Suzy Chang 2nd gypsy woman Geraldine Moffatt 3rd gypsy woman Laurence Herder information clerk Jimmy Lodge guard Sidney Gross General Vassilly Ricky Lancing Koslovsky Bob Head attendant Arthur Howell guard Rifat Shenel dining car attendant Gordon Sterne Ronald Hatton helicopter pilots Elizabeth Counsell girl in punt

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Michael Culver young man in punt Dorothea Bennett woman on bridge in Venice Jackie Cooper Fred Zeller Michael Martin George Poli Fred Haggerty Peter Brayham Barry Du Boulay SPECTRE boat crews Bill Baskerville John Ketteringham Peter Perkins Fred Machon James Bond stand-ins/ doubles Sylvia Cummings Phyllis Cornell Tulin Tuman Susan Barrett Max Faulkner Eve Anthonie Tatiana Romanova stand-ins/doubles Fred Machon Frank Hayden Kerim Bey stand-ins/ doubles Anna Cameron Tina Collins Rosa Klebb stand-ins/ doubles Ned Lynch Brian Towns Peter Evans Jackie Cooper Grant stand-ins/doubles

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Joe Phelps M stand-in/double Yvette Mink Sylvia Trench stand-in/ double Frank Andrews Sid Hoad Walter Henry Peter Perkins Morzeny stand-ins/ doubles Bob Head Peter Brayham Vavra stand-ins/doubles John Bailey train conductor stand-in/double Kathleen Morris Miss Moneypenny stand-in/double Christine Mossman Yvonne Jose Vida stand-ins/doubles Christine Barnet Pauline Jose Zora stand-ins/doubles Frank Konvoize Ernst Blofeld stand-in/ double Jackie Cooper Krilencu stand-in/double Eric Wetherall Benz stand-in/double Doug Hutchinson Boothroyd stand-in/ double Barbara Jefford Tatiana Romanova (dubbing)

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Nikki van der Zyl Sylvia Trench/hotel receptionist (dubbing) Eric Pohlmann Ernst Blofeld (dubbing) Production Details Made on location in Istanbul and at Pinewood Studios, London, England. Music recorded at CTS Studios. 35mm 1.75:1

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Colour by Technicolor Standard projection at 24 frames per second 13 reels Running time: 116 minutes Length: 10,372 feet MPAA certification no. LP29364

Release Details UK premiere on 10 October 1963 in London; UK theatrical release 1963 by United Artists US premiere on 8 April 1964 in New York City; US theatrical release 1964 by United Artists

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Bibliography James Bond materials Amis, Kingsley, The James Bond Dossier (New York: The American Library of World Literature, 1965). Barrett, Thomas M., ‘Desiring the Soviet Woman: Tatiana Romanova and From Russia With Love’, in Lisa Funnell (ed.), For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2015), pp. 41–50. Bennett, Tony and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987). Black, Jeremy, The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Broccoli, Albert R. with Donald Zec, When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli (London and Basingstoke: Boxtree, 1998). Chancellor, Henry, James Bond: The Man and His World – The Official Companion to Ian Fleming’s Creation (London: John Murray, 2005). Chapman, James, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, 2nd edn (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007). Del Buono, Oreste and Umberto Eco, A Bond Affair, trans. by R. A. Downie (London: Macdonald, 1965). Dodds, Klaus, ‘Licenced to Stereotype: Popular Geopolitics, James Bond and the Spectre of Balkanism’, Geopolitics vol. 8, no. 2 (2003), pp. 125–56. Dodds, Klaus, ‘Screening Geopolitics: James Bond and the Early Cold War Films (1962–1967)’, Geopolitics vol. 10, no. 2 (2005), pp. 266–89. Duncan, Paul (ed.), The James Bond Archives (Cologne: Taschen, 2015).

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Edlitz, Mark, The Many Lives of James Bond: How the Creators of 007 Have Decoded the Superspy (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2019). Field, Matthew, ‘The Girl with the Golden Pen’, Cinema Retro: Dr. No – Movie Classics Special no. 4 (2012), pp. 136–9. Field, Matthew and Ajay Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films (Stroud: The History Press, 2015). Fleming, Fergus (ed.), The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Funnell, Lisa (ed.), For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2015). Funnell, Lisa and Klaus Dodds, Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Hines, Claire, The Playboy and James Bond: 007, Ian Fleming and Playboy Magazine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). Lack, Jonathan R., ‘Bond on Bond: Quantum of Solace and the Illusive Case of the Bondian Ideal’, 4 June 2014. Available at: (accessed 3 February 2021). Ladenson, Elisabeth, ‘Lovely Lesbians; Or, Pussy Galore’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 7, no. 3 (2001), pp. 417–23. Lycett, Andrew, Ian Fleming (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995). Norris, Van, ‘007 and Counting: An Assessment of John Barry’s Soundtrack Work on the Eon/James Bond Series from 1962 to 1969’, in

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Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty and Jochen Eisentraut (eds), Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 505–23. Pearson, John, The Life of Ian Fleming (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966). Sellers, Robert, When Harry Met Cubby: The Story of the James Bond Producers (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2019). Strong, Jeremy (ed.), James Bond Uncovered (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Verheul, Jaap (ed.), The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Williams, Melanie, ‘Her Word Was Her Bond: Johanna Harwood, Bond’s First Female Screenwriter’, in Steven Gerrard (ed.), From Blofeld to Moneypenny: Gender in James Bond (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2020). Woollacott, Janet, ‘The James Bond Films: Conditions of Production’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), pp. 208–25. Selected works Balio, Tino, United Artists, Volume 2, 1951–1978: The Company That Changed the Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). Chapman, James, ‘The Trouble with Harry: The Difficult Relationship of Harry Saltzman and Film Finances’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 34, no. 1 (2014): 43–71. Chapman, James, Hitchcock and the Spy Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018). Cilento, Diane, My Nine Lives (London: Penguin Books, 2006).

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Deighton, Len, James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for His Father (US: Amazon/Pluriform, 2012). Harper, Sue, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (London and New York: Continuum, 2000). King, Emily, Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography (Princeton, NJ: Laurence King Publishing, 2005). Maibaum, Richard, ‘Richard Maibaum: A Pretence of Seriousness’, in Pat McGilligan (ed.), Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 266–89. Mander, Kay, ‘Cutters Fifth Column’, Cine-Technician (October–December 1940), p. 89. Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (1975; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 833–44. Murphy, Robert, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1992). Picker, David, Musts, Maybes, and Nevers: A Book About the Movies (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2013). Rickards, Jocelyn, The Painted Banquet: My Life and Loves (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987). Stubbs, Jonathan, ‘The Eady Levy: A Runaway Bribe?’, Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 6, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1–20. Williams, Melanie, ‘The Continuity Girl: Ice in the Middle of Fire’, Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 10, no. 3 (2013), pp. 603–17. Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films (London: Zwemmer, 1965).

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