From Russia With Love
The intriguing story in yesterday’s Telegraph of Enigma references in Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love and the normal disappointing Monday tv fare persuaded me to watch the film version last night. They say the definition of a classic film is you start watching it, possibly one you have seen many times, for a few minutes and are drawn into to see the whole thing. My approach is slightly different, namely once drawn I try to identify elements of the film I may have missed e.g. the family dining scenes in the The Godfather. In From Russia With Love (1963) with the initial credits on the body of dancer I was struck by the film’s eroticism. The British film industry sexually was maturing from the big busts and lewd humour epitomised by the Carry On movies and the constraints of the censor. You saw no nudity but you saw sexual scenes like Ursula Andress going the X-ray machine rendering a near naked image, or emerging from the sea with a dagger in a sheath strapped to her thigh. Big breasts were still important. I heard Julie Christie once complain that she would have had more parts with a bigger bust but likes of Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner still meant that you needed to be well-stacked to get on. Dianela Bianchi, as Russian cipher agent Tania Romanova, conformed to this pneumatic prototype. After Dr No, Sean Connery looked so comfortable as Bond you could imagine no other. There were strong supporting roles from Lotte Lenya as the sadistically butch Rosa Klebb, the always magnetic Robert Shaw as the killer and Bernard Lee as M. There were also the staples that make for an entertaining Bond film: the music of John Barry and title song sung by Matt Monro, the gizmos of a case into which Q had placed all sorts of dastardly things and the locations of Venice, Istanbul and the Orient Express.
The film opens with a scene of Chess grandmasters where Kronsteen (Vladek Shabel) plays McBride. The article says that Fleming ‘s inspiration for this was a game between Hugh Alexander, who worked on the Enigma, and David Bronsteen. The description of the Lector machine sounds like the encryptor the Nazis used. Incidentally it is thought that Connery was instrumental in finding Shabel the role as Shabel cast Connery’s then girlfriend Diane Cilento in a play he (Shabel) produced at Oxford University and Connery then proposed Shabel for the role.
For all the subsequent Bonds – David Niven, Roger Moore, Piers Brosnan, George Lazenby and now Daniel Craig – I believe the early movies – Dr No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger and Thunderball – have never been beaten, that Sean Connery most epitomised the Bond of the novels and that the later outings became too removed from the story content of Fleming. For Fleming, a member of the rich banking family who served in naval intelligence during the war, his wife a leading socialist, a womaniser must have been intriguing person to meet. I don’t know if his books are still read as espionage has moved onto the murkier world of the circus of Le Carre to the tracking and surveillance devices of modern technology but I suspect every generation will enjoy the first Bond films as much as I do.
