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From Russia with Love

United Kingdom

1963

115 Min
Color
1.66:1
Romanian, Russian, Turkish, English
  • Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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DIR Terence Young

PROD Albert R. Broccoli, Harry Saltzman

SCR Richard Maibaum

DP Ted Moore

CAST Sean Connery, Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Armendáriz, Lotte Lenya, Robert Shaw, Eunice Gayson

ED Peter R. Hunt

MUSIC John Barry

Berlinale (Retrospective)

Synopsis

James Bond willingly falls into an assassination ploy involving a naive Russian beauty in order to retrieve a Soviet encryption device that was stolen by SPECTRE. –IMDb

Director

Original

Terence Young

Stewart Terence Herbert Young (20 June 1915 – 7 September 1994) was a British film director best known for directing three films in the James Bond series, Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), and Thunderball (1965).

Born in Shanghai, China, he was public-school educated. Like the fictional James Bond, he read oriental history at St Catharine’s College in the University of Cambridge. As a tank commander during World War II, Young participated in Operation Market Garden in Arnhem, Netherlands.

Young began his film career as a screenwriter in British films of the 1940s, working, for example, on Dangerous Moonlight (1941). In 1946, he was a co-director with Brian Desmond Hurst of Theirs is the Glory, which recaptured the fighting around Arnhem bridge. Arnhem, coincidentally, was home to the adolescent Audrey Hepburn. During the filming of Young’s film, Wait Until Dark, Hepburn and Young would joke that he was shelling his favorite star without even knowing it. Young’s… read more

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Mr. Arkadin

3Jun13

My first (and best) exposure to the spy genre came in the form of McGoohan’s *Prisoner* and Caine’s *Ipcress*, examples that pushed either toward weird experimentalism or some attempt at grit and ‘realism’. As I slowly work my way through Bond, then, I find a fair amount of meh-ing and eye-rolling going on. Having said that, *FRwL* is, I think, a consistently strong example of what the Bond movies achieve when they

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    Mr. Arkadin

    3Jun13

    hew most closely to Fleming’s original stories (and less closely to Connery’s sex charisma and the cult of the insufferable pun). The series of carefully cut vignettes that open the film (including the strangling of a Bond stand-in) set an effective rhythm for the rest of the film; the character of Kerim Bay, with his endless army of sons and secret *Third Man*-like passages under the city, is a surprisingly fleshed-out and human supporting character for the film. (And *The Third Man* is a good touchstone here; the Bond film isn’t in the same league at all, but the echoes still ring throughout.) Also the extremely slow build to the climactic fight between Bond and the SMERSH master assassin. The tension that builds allowing the audience to watch the assassin shadow Bond for three-fourths of the movie before they even meet … There are still problems, many of them ported in from the novel itself: the story being shot through with the expected sexism for instance (the filmmakers are sure to include the gypsy girl catfight from the original novel, though censors no doubt nixed their ability to have them fight topless as they did in the book).

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Sagi Mendel

29Apr13

What so good about this film?he was awkward as FUCK....the russian woman at the end...damn it was like a sacha baron cohen film.

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Johnny DuBiel

18Dec12

Sean Connery was never better as 007 than he was in this one, which also stands out as one of the finest films of its type ever made. Much more confidently made, played, and paced than 'Dr. No', this is really where the series starts in my eyes. Improves upon just about everything from its predecessor (which in itself is a solid pic).

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John Barry, 1933 - 2011

By David Hudson on January 31, 2011

"John Barry, who composed the score for 11 James Bond films, has died aged 77," reports Haroon Siddique for the Guardian. "Barry won five

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A classic slow burning spy thriller without the cartoon escapades of later adventures...

By Mutt on November 12, 2010

British action director, and real-life Bond, Terence Young (“Dr. No” & “The Red Beret”) returns under the auspices of producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli to solidify all the elements of…  read review

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