Caught In A Cold War Moment-Sean Connery’s 007-“From Russia With Love” (1963)-A Film Review

Caught In A Cold War Moment-Sean Connery’s 007-“From Russia With Love” (1963)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Guest Film Critic Si Lannon

From Russia With Love, starring Sean Connery, Lotte Lenya, based on the character by spy thriller novelist Ian Fleming, 1963 

Okay, okay I won’t bore the reader with yet another mea culpa about how I have gotten myself ensnared in what my old high school friend Sam Lowell called a “run.”  That is going through some subject, here a frontal attack on the first series of spy thriller novelist Ian Fleming’s’ British secret agent James Bond, 007, played by Sean Connery (covering other later players of the role in the now seemingly endless series I will hold judgement on-for now), and finding a common thread to hang my hat on. This film, the third now (although in sequence the second after the initial Doctor No offering), From Russia, With Love has given me pause as to the why of my grabbing on to this particular series other that the obvious fact that these early Bond films meshed with Connery’s portrayal still hold up as well-done spy thrillers that one can come away thinking positively about.             

Naturally, naturally for those of us elders who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s the underlying subject of these films, beyond the patented Hollywood script of getting the bad guys, was a tip of the hat to the Cold War red scare exemplified by the Chinese in Doctor No (the then sleeping giant to worry about now turned behemoth) and here with the real villain of the times-the Russians who were uppermost on the average Western citizen’s mind when thinking about existential threats. Add in a nefarious shadowy SPECTRE organization of international criminals to off-set the political threats and you had the making of some serious subconscious associations to draw you to the themes of the films.      

That subconscious political stuff is okay, makes for a nice “think piece” atmosphere, to think through now some fifty plus years later but that is really all hogwash. All hogwash for the real reason that a bunch of kids, a bunch of working class kids, guys, were enthralled

by the Bond character or at least showing up to see the film came from elsewhere.  I have already mentioned in that very first review and paid a mention in the second to the place where we saw these vaunted shows-the North Adamsville Drive-In Theater in the heyday of that now most forgotten way to view films. I have gone chapter and verse over the scam we pulled on the unwary ticket-seller in the entrance booth by showing three guys and hiding three on backseat floors and in trunks in the days before the theater owners got wise and started charging by the carload rather than individual admission. I have also mentioned more than once that the reason for this scam was to get to the area in back of the refreshment stand where all the high school kids hung out away from those infernal eternal families with young kids (the single date lovers had their own section way up back and no one not in that category it was understood was to approach that area under severe penalty). And “connect” with the carloads of girls, young women, who also for the most part also had pulled the scam. So while we were as spoon-feed worried about the red menace and such we were hedging our bets against some grim future by “hooking” up with a stray damsel or too to while away the time.            

For any given film seen at that revered drive-in theater it was an open question whether a person had actually seen the production depending on whether you got “lucky” that night and wound up fogging up some windshields or not. I clearly remember the plot line of Doctor No but after re-watching this film I don’t really remember the details so I probably got lucky that night. For those who were similarly situation back then or for the too young to have been there I give a few highlights. Our man Bond having already won his spurs knocking off Doctor No’s SPECTRE-funded operation down in the Caribbean was called up by his superiors to squelch this latest attempt by that nefarious operation to steal a Russian cryptograph-apparently then the top shelf tech instrument of its kind and thus valuable to both British intelligence and the Russians who were to be dealt in by being ready to buy back the damn thing.      

The whole treacherous SPECTRE plan revolves around getting Bond to steal the item and then kill him off as revenge for the Doctor No caper. The lynchpin of the plan is put in place by a ruthless female Soviet counter-intelligence office who has defected to SPECTRE played by the legendary German movie star Lotte Lenya (think Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Three Penny Opera, etc.). The plan is to entice Bond with, what else, a beautiful Russian woman from the Soviet Embassy in Turkey. And dear James bites to a degree, beds her, and then the caper takes off. From the consulate to the Orient Express to a gypsy camp and finally to Venice all along the way there is plenty of duplicity and plenty of bodies of failed agents, some Bond allies, some sworn enemies, working for every side and for every reason. In the end Bond gets to keep the instrument and hand it over to his paymasters-and have a nice little tryst with that comely Russian woman who decided in the end to change sides and in the process saved his bacon from that relentlessly determined Soviet intelligence defector. Yeah, not as clever a plot as Doctor No, and filled with more up to date then improbable techno-gizmos, but a good tongue-in-cheek look at fantasy spy-craft which is what has always been attractive about this whole series. Maybe that is the ultimate reason that I am on a “run” on this Sean Connery-driven James Bond part of the series.