From Russia With Love

Actor: Sean Connery
US Release Date: 8 Apr 1964
US gross, $ [adjusted]:24,796,765 [129,149,817]
Worldwide gross, $ [adjusted]: 78,900,000 [410,937,500]
World Premier - 10th October 1963 at the London Pavilion
Locations: SPECTRE island, Venice, London, Istambul, Eastern Europe aboard the Orient Express through Yugoslavia,with stops in Belgrade and Zagreb, the Aegean Sea.

Source for above info: The " mother " of all James Bond books - James Bond: The Legacy.

Happenstance
   

From Russia With Love
From Russia with Love
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After the worldwide success of Dr.No , Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman gave the second chance to Terence Young to direct James Bond's second screen adventure, with Sean Connery as 007.

This movie started the tradition of the teaser (the short film which here surprisingly has a link to the rest of the film), the gun-barrel, the Bond musical number and lots of girls prancing about. Bond appears Walther PPK in hand in a garden. Bond is stalked silently around the elegant garden by the SPECTRE assassin Übermensch Red Grant (Robert Shaw) who deals an untimely death to the Bond look-a-like by means of a wristwatch that featured a garrote wire coiled inside. This suspenseful dress rehearsal of Bond's murder was repeated in The Man With The Golden Gun where a wax dummy likeness of Bond (Roger Moore) seen losing its fingers to Francisco Scaramanga's bullets. Later to the theme song, the credits are projected onto the body of a belly dancer.

And later, (an item not repeated in later Bond films) he meets up again Sylvia Trench, the lady he had bonded with in Dr.No . This makes her the only girlfriend to appear in two films, and it seems a deliberate attempt to tie the films together. When Bond's duty calls, Sylvia complains about the last time he went away, all the way to Jamaica!

Info taken from " MR. KISS KISS BANG BANG! ", the Granddaddy of all James Bond websites.

Coincidence
         

Bond is assigned to escort a beautiful Russian defector Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) with a top secret decoding device (the Spektor decoder), but the mission turns out to be a trap set by SPECTRE. Tatiana Romanova works as an office clerk in the Russian cipher department. After Honey's nature girl in Dr.No , she was a step backward, but Daniela Bianchi (who placed 2nd in the 1960 Miss Universe pageant) was a delight again for Bond and the oglers.
Bond: You're one of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen!
Tatiana: Thank you, but I think my mouth is too big!
Bond: No, it's just the right size, for me that is!

Enemy Action
         

The Best (with a capital B) Bond villain of all time, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (rather only his hands and his white cat) are shown for the first time. Later on the Orient Express, Bond and babe (oops! sorry, fellow co-passenger) who are going back to England meet the SPECTRE assassin Übermensch Red Grant whom we saw murdering a Bond look-a-like in the teaser. What follows next is one of the best hand-to-hand fights Bond ever has but not before the mandatory talk about how SPECTRE wants to dominate the world.
Bond: Red wine with fish. Well, that should have told me something!
Grant: You may know the right wines, but you're the one on your knees!!
Grant: The first one won't kill you... not the second... not even the third... Not until you crawl over here and you kiss my foot!!
And for the first (and not the last) time in the series, Q's gadget comes to the rescue when Bond disposes of the Red scum with the help of a gas-spewing briefcase. Finally when they get off the train and after a climactic battle on a boat where Bond blows up all the baddies, they meet villainess Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) with her poison-spiked shoe. Needless to say she is no impediment for Sean Connery who has perfected the art of being James Bond in his second outing, smooth, resourceful, witty, sardonic.

The success of the second venture in a huge way at the Box Office meant that Sean Connery returned as 007 in Goldfinger .

From Russia With Love frwl_03.jpg frwl_05.jpg

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