1963 James Bond Classic Film 'From Russia With Love' Ranked Among The Franchise’s Best — And It Holds A Near-Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score

I loved Dr. No when I saw the film as a pr-teen in the early 1960s, but I truly became an Ian Fleming (seen in the photo below) aficionado when I read all of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels after seeing the film From Russia With Love. 

In my view, From Russia With Love is the best Bond novel as well as the best Bond film. And Sean Connery remains the best James Bond.

Director Terence Young was mostly faithful to Ian Fleming's novel, save from changing the villains from the Soviets to the international criminal organization SPECTRE, which Ian Fleming created in a later novel, Thunderball. (The plot made more sense with the Soviets as the bad guys).

In addition to Sean Connery as Bond, Terence Young casts some fine actors to portray Ian Fleming's great characters. The inspired casting included Robert Shaw, who was truly menacing as Grant the assassin, as well as Pedro Armendariz, who portrayed Darko Kerim, the British head of Section T. (In the film Kerim is call “Kerim Bey.” Bey is an honorarium, like the Japanese “San”). 

Also outstanding were the villains Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb and Vladek Sheybal as Kronsten.   

The film has so many iconic scenes from the girl fight at the gypsy camp to the shooting of Krilencu as he tried to escape from a huge film poster. And I believe the fight aboard the train with Bond and Grant is the best fight scene on film. 

I love the film and I’ve seen it many times over the years. To me, it is the greatest Bond film.

Apparently, many others agree.    

Rachel Schieider at Men’s Journal offers her take on the great film thriller.             

James Bond introduced himself to audiences in Dr. No, but it was his second outing that convinced many moviegoers the franchise was here to stay.

Released in 1963, From Russia with Love remains one of the most acclaimed entries in the 007 series.

 

More than 60 years later, it still boasts one of the highest Rotten Tomatoes scores of any James Bond movie ever made.

 

Starring Sean Connery in his second appearance as the legendary British spy, From Russia with Love sends Bond to Istanbul to retrieve a Soviet decoding device before it falls into the wrong hands. 

Along the way, he finds himself caught in an elaborate trap orchestrated by the criminal organization SPECTRE, leading to one of the franchise’s most suspenseful adventures. 

Unlike many later Bond films that leaned heavily into gadgets and over-the-top spectacle, From Russia with Love is often praised for its grounded espionage story and Cold War atmosphere.

You can read the rest of the piece via the link below:

1963 James Bond Classic Ranked Among the Franchise's Best — And It Holds a Near-Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score - Men's Journal

  

On This Day In History Ian Fleming, Former WWII British Naval Intelligence Officer, Journalist And Author Of The James Bond Thrillers, Died

On this date in 1964 Ian Fleming, former WWII naval intelligence officer, journalist and author of the James Bond thrillers, died. He was 56.

I became an Ian Fleming aficionado when I was a pre-teen in the early 1960s after watching the late, great Scot actor Sean Connery portray Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond in the first two Bond films, Dr. No and From Russia With Love.

Watching the two great cinematic thrillers led me to join a book club and receive the introductory offer of a 9-volume set of Ian Fleming’s novels, which were the first nine books in my now quite extensive library. 

Reading the first two Fleming novels, I was pleased to discover that the novels were darker and more complicated that the films.  

A short time later, I heard on the radio in my father's car that Ian Fleming had died.   

Years later, in the early 1980s, I was thrilled to spend a week with my wife at Fleming's villa Goldeneye in Jamaica, where he wrote all of the James Bond thrillers.   

As History.com notes, Ian Fleming led an interesting, if all too short, life: 

On August 12, 1964, the British author and journalist Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, the world’s most famous fictional spy, dies of a heart attack at age 56 in Kent, England. 

Fleming’s series of novels about the debonair Agent 007, based in part on their dashing author’s real-life experiences, spawned one of the most lucrative film franchises in history. Ian Lancaster Fleming was born into a well-to-do family in London on May 29, 1908. As an adult, he worked as a foreign correspondent, a stockbroker and a personal assistant to Britain’s director of naval intelligence during World War II–experiences that would all provide fodder for his Bond novels. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

James Bond creator Ian Fleming dies - HISTORY 

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine piece on Ian Fleming's war and two of my Crime Beat columns on Ian Fleming via the below links:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Piece On The 30 Assault Unit, The British WWII Commando Group Created By Ian Fleming, The Creator Of James Bond

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: A Look Back At Ian Fleming's Iconic James Bond Character

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: The Ian Fleming and James Bond Phenomenon

 

On This Day In History Ian Fleming, The Creator Of James Bond, Was Born

On this day in 1908 the late, great thriller writer Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, the world’s most famous fictional spy, was born. 

Fleming died of a heart attack at age 56 in 1964. 

As History.com notes, Ian Lancaster Fleming was born into a well-to-do family in London on May 28, 1908.

"As an adult, he worked as a foreign correspondent, a stockbroker and a personal assistant to Britain’s director of naval intelligence during World War II–experiences that would all provide fodder for his Bond novels. The series of novels about the debonair Agent 007, based in part on their dashing author’s real-life experiences, spawned one of the most lucrative film franchises in history.  

"The first Bond book, Casino Royale, was published in 1953. In all, Fleming wrote 12 novels and two short story collections about Agent 007, which together sold more than 18 million copies. According to The New York Times: “Bond himself, Fleming said, was ‘a compound of all the secret agents and commandos I met during the war,’ but his tastes– in blondes, martinis ‘shaken, not stirred,’ expensively tailored suits, scrambled eggs, short-sleeved shirts and Rolex watches–were Fleming’s own. But not all the comparisons were ones the author liked to encourage. Bond, he said, had ‘more guts than I have’ as well as being ‘more handsome. 

"The first Bond film, Dr. No, was released in 1962; it starred the Scottish actor Sean Connery in the title role. Connery played Bond in six films altogether; From Russia With Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964) were the only ones made during Fleming’s lifetime. Since that time, five other actors—George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig—have played the superspy in some two dozen films from EON Productions."

You can read three of my Crime Beat columns on Ian Fleming via the below links: 

Paul Davis On Crime: WWII's Great Deception Plan: My Crime Beat Column On Ian Fleming And 'Operation Mincemeat'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: The Ian Fleming and James Bond Phenomenon

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: A Look Back At Ian Fleming's Iconic James Bond Character

When A 24-Year-Old Ian Fleming Went To Moscow To Cover a “Show” Trial: “Russia is ruled by an army of executioners with the Lubyanka as the headquarters of death.”

Lithub.com offers a chapter from Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, the latest biography of the late, great thriller writer and the creator of James Bond. 

The chapter deals with the 24-year-old Ian Fleming, then a Reuters reporter who covered the Soviet spy trials in Moscow.     

In the late 1960s, the screenwriter Jack Whittingham, who had collaborated on the writing of Thunderball, started to write a screenplay based on the life of Ian Fleming. Whittingham’s daughter Sylvan says: “He had Fleming as a Reuters correspondent travelling on that train across Russia. Fleming was sitting in a compartment, and this alter ego like a ghost came out of him, and this whole adventure took place. That was how Dad played it—that Fleming had this other life that was Bond.” 

The project was aborted, yet it reveals something of Whittingham’s perception of Bond that he saw his origins in Ian’s first important foreign assignment. During his fortnight in Moscow, Ian confronted a system that crystalized in his twenty-four-year-old mind the kind of enemy Bond would take on in the 1950s and 60s. 

Ian had been forewarned from reading Leo Perutz that “Russia is ruled by an army of executioners” with the Lubyanka as “the headquarters of death.” He understood the truth behind these remarks as he sat for six days in the packed Moscow courtroom and observed from a few feet away “the implacable working of the soulless machinery of Soviet Justice.” 

In July 1956, after delivering From Russia, with Love, Ian told his editor how it was based on what he had witnessed personally, “a picture of rather drab grimness, which is what Russia is like,” and a portrait of state intimidation on a scale that he could never have imagined in Carmelite Street. 

During his time in Moscow, Ian formed a hostile picture of the Soviet state that, twenty years later in the context of the Cold War, the rest of the world was ready to gobble up. A system built on fear, routine arrests, the terrorizing of innocent men and women in a show trial dominated by a pitiless Stalinist prosecutor, who, in his appetite to break and dehumanize the accused, compared them to “stinking carrion” and “mad dogs.” 

You can read the rest of the chapter via the below link:

When a 24-Year-Old Ian Fleming Went to Moscow to Cover a “Show” Trial ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)