The second Bond film invented much of what we now call a Bond movie
President Kennedy listed Ian Fleming's From Russia, with Love among his ten favourite books, so the producers picked it for Bond's second outing. The 1963 film, made for $2 million, earned $78 million worldwide. It was also the last film Kennedy watched at the White House, on 20 November 1963.
After Dr. No succeeded, United Artists doubled the budget and gave Sean Connery a $100,000 bonus on top of his salary. Terence Young directed again, with shooting in Istanbul, at Pinewood Studios and in Scotland. The production ran late and over budget and was finished in a rush to meet its release date. Writer Len Deighton was dropped for slow progress, and Richard Maibaum kept rewriting throughout the shoot, adding a helicopter chase and a speedboat pursuit and moving the final confrontation from Paris to Venice.
Fleming's novel was a straightforward Cold War thriller, but the producers swapped the Soviet agency SMERSH for the criminal syndicate SPECTRE to avoid political controversy. In the story, SPECTRE wants revenge for Dr. No and baits a trap with a Soviet cipher machine and a consulate clerk, Tatiana Romanova, who claims she wants to defect. Robert Shaw plays the assassin Grant, and Lotte Lenya plays Rosa Klebb with her poisoned shoe blade. Much of the chase unfolds aboard the Orient Express.
Several fixtures of the series began here: the pre-title sequence, a gadget from Q Branch, a helicopter scene, a theme song with lyrics, one last action scene after the apparent climax and the promise in the credits that Bond will return. The shadowy SPECTRE chief appears for the first time, credited only with a question mark. Desmond Llewelyn, a fan of the Bond comic strip, stepped in as the equipment officer and went on to play Q in all but one film until his death in 1999.
Critics and audiences both embraced it. It outearned Dr. No, won the series its first BAFTA for cinematography, and in 2004 Total Film ranked it ninth among the greatest British films, the only Bond entry on that list. Goldfinger followed in 1964.
Source: From Russia with Love (film)
