With all films, Bond is overpowered and held captive briefly before getting the upper hand with some help from his gadgets from Q. And he gets the girl who didn’t realise she was being used by a double agent in her Russian agency. It is also the first glimpse of Number 1, the head of Spectre as he kills the person who planned to kill Bond because it went wrong.
The story is simple, the budget was bigger and it shows. Connery had found his footing a little bit more with the character, they get to head to Turkey to film along with the always present Pinewood studios. Even with it’s budget getting bigger it still falls down in places and they hadn’t got the hang of music in films around this time using the same tracks over and over and this does make some scenes drag on or seem odd as the music doesn’t link with the scene. I feel the early films have not dated well and you notice the clunky wooden style of film making. It showed in the reviews of the film at the time, saying it was slower in pace and not well made but it was fun.
From Russia with Love did start something for the Bond series as a whole, the pre-title sequence. Gone was the obscure psychedelic intro and goes straight from the intro Bond theme to the sequence, which now we all know will come and sets up the story for the film. The casting of this Bond film is a little bit more forgettable than the previous outing and the sad news at the time that actor Pedro Armendariz the MI6 operative in Istanbul we meet, sadly committed suicide before the release of the film. And the fact the first screenplay was basically a follow of the book but was later changed making it what it is now. After reading the book I would like to see what that would have been like.
In all it is a fun film, but time has not been kind and looking upon them with a more critical eye has really shown its old style losing some of the memory I had of the franchise.
