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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Bond movie, from the golden era, 24 July 2007
The second in the Bond movie canon, and a satisfying balance is achieved in this, Sean Connery's favourite of the series. The plot is satisfyingly spy-like, with decoding machines, double crosses and foreign venues...
Cold war politics are not emphasised here, but instead Spectre, a fictional terrorist and extortion organisation, is invented for 1960 political correctness sake. However, with Terence Young once again in the director's chair we get a real cold war style spy thriller, as well as an element of the exotic we associate with Bond.
So what do you get for twice the money as Dr. No..? A then stellar cast, including the famous German cabaret star Lotte Lenya, playing Rosa Klebb, the villain who inspires the Connery quip `She's had her kicks', Daniella Bianchi who had just come runner up in Miss Universe, as well as two more beauty pageant contestants, who play the fighting gypsy girls. Robert Shaw plays one of the more convincing and genually menacing villains, and of course Q makes his debut.
The action scenes are varied, and satisfyingly interspersed with a real story, not so far removed from Fleming's original. Most famously of course, is the 6 minute fist fight between Connery and Shaw on the Orient Express, a scene which some producers at the time were worried was just too violent. Mostly, it is Peter Hunt's fantastic editing that makes the scene, and indeed adds a sense of style to the entire movie. Train fight aside, there are also set pieces including a gunfight in a gypsy camp, and a `money-shot' with exploding petrol canisters in a boat chase in a loch.
As for the remastering, the film is now spotless, although there is no one place one can say the restoration has made a startling impact. Indeed, in some places the improved colour correction has made a night scene darker than before, albeit with improved contrast. The sound has become clearer, but without obvious tricksy surround effects on the dts or dolby digital soundtrack.
The extras include all that the special edition had, plus one or two new items. Specifically, some archive material of Ian Fleming. The radio conversation between Raymond Chandler and Fleming is fascinating, while the other CBS interview and desert island disc appearance are of moderate interest but contain nothing surprising. However, even the original extras are worth revisiting, especially the documentary `Inside From Russia with Love', as the trouble shoot of this movie does have some fascinating stories behind it.
All in all, this was not yet quite the Bond movie that would emerge in its full overblown form in Goldfinger, but a terrifically good thriller, especially given its age, and more of a genuine spy movie than the movies to follow.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Classic Bond!, 26 Aug 2006
Just like the first James Bond, Dr.No, From Russia With Love sticks very close to Ian Fleming's novel which is one of his best. Sean Connery plays a slightly darker Bond than he would go on to play in the later Bond's You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever but it's all fantastic really. The pre credits sequence is one of quality, simple but effective. The films plot is one of the best of the series and you could actually believe it could happen. James Bond is informed by M that a beautiful Soviet agent has fallen in love with him and wishes to defect. She promises to steal a valued decoding machine called the Lektor which MI6 desperatly wants. Bond is warned it could be a trap and indeed it is. Unbeknown to the defector, Tatiana Romanova, the soviets and British are being used as pawns in an inspired scheme masterminded by SPECTRE. Tatiana is unaware that her immediate superior, Colonal Rosa Klebb is actually working for SPECTRE. The plan is for Bond and Tatiana to steal the Lektor then be executed by assasin Red Grant. Spectre will then recover the machine and sell it back to the soviets, embarrasing MI6 in the process and murdering Bond in revenge for his killing of Dr.No. This is real classy stuff, something that todays Bond films need to rediscover. There are no real gadgets in From Russia With Love, they would not come in properly untill Goldfinger but Bond is given a suitcase by Major Boothroyd [ Q ] who makes his first of 17 appearances in the Bond films. The suitcase has a built in knife compartment down the side of the case with two strips of gold soveriegns embedded in each end. The case also has a built in powder so if the case is opened incorrectly you will get a cloud of smoke in your face. These things come in useful to Bond as they help him kill Red Grant on the train. Red Grant is played excellently by Robert Shaw and the fight on the train is proberly the most famous fight scene in a Bond movie. The boat scene at the end of the film is done very well for the times and the all around feel of the film is that of not only a Excellent Bond film but a great Cold War thriller as well. This film had a slightly bigger budget than the first and the results can be seen on the screen.An excellent entry in the series.You get the same special features on the second disc as you got with the 2003 special edition release PLUS a lot more so i would reccomend this dvd to any Bond fan or film lover!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"You may know the right wines, but you're the one on your knees.", 12 Dec 2007
With an embryonic and not entirely successful Robert Brownjohn title sequence of credits projected onto body of belly dancer (some great spelling mistakes here, as `Monte' Norman and `Martin' Beswicke's agents probably pointed out!), Barry's first official Bond score and Blofeld's first (off-screen) appearance, the formula is clearly beginning to fall into place. This was also the first of the series to have a pre-title sequence, one of the few that relates directly to the film's plot, and it is still by far the most successful of any of them.
The gadgets that were to eventually get so out of hand make first appearance in form of Bond's ingenious attaché case, but at least here they are still entirely credible - nothing more extravagant than a well kitted-out briefcase and a breakaway sniper's rifle. Series regular Walter Gotell also makes his first appearance, though not as General Gogol but as the head of a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. training school. Unlike the cute and lovable old Russian bear at SMERSH in the Moore films, here he is cheerfully ruthless and businesslike, using live targets in training courses.
Bond's snobbery is much to the fore here. "Red wine with fish, that should have told me something," he tells Robert Shaw's working class homicidal paranoiac, the best and most genuinely threatening of the Bond heavies ("You may know the right wines, but you're the one on your knees."). It also establishes the sexual deviancy of the villains in Rosa Klebb's lesbian tendencies (very apparent as her hand wanders onto Daniella Bianchi's knee). With Bond such an amoral figure, the villains had to be even more immoral and perverse: always bastions of authority, usually millionaires they get their kicks planning global crimes, so depravity is simply foreplay to them. Even Vladek Sheybal's chess master Kronstein, looking for all the world like Vladimir Putin with mild indigestion, seems at a remove from mere mortal pleasures.
It's still the best of the series and most convincingly plotted, an excellent crane shot of the chequered setting for a chess tournament sets the scene for the chess-like nature of the plot as factions co-existing in uneasy truces are set off against each other. Indeed, directorially this is considerably more ambitious and assured than its predecessor, evident in the skilfully handled church scene and a beautifully blocked scene as Bond is followed along a train platform by Shaw inside the train.
Sadly, while pitched as the `Ultimate Edition,' the transfer is still problematic. The picture quality is certainly improved, but rather than the original British 1.66:1 ratio, it's presented in the cropped 1.85:1, but worse still, the ending is still missing footage of Bond examining the reel of compromising 8mm film in the gondola before the end title. As with Dr No there's not a huge amount of new extra material over the extras from previous release, all of which are carried over here, but it's pretty good - extracts from Ian Fleming on radio show Desert Island Discs, a TV interview with the author and a featurette on Fleming and Raymond Chandler.
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