From Russia With Love

SECRET AGENT 007 is very much with us again, and anyone who hasn’t yet got to know him is urged to do so right away!
He is, of course, the snappy fellow who goes by the name of James Bond in Ian Fleming’s thrilling novels and is reproduced on the screen by an equally snappy actor by the name of Sean Connery. His reappearance in this instance is in the second delightfully wild film made from a Fleming novel, “From Russia With Love.”
Don’t miss it! This is to say, don’t miss it if you can still get the least bit of fun out of lurid adventure fiction and pseudo-realistic fantasy. For this mad melodramatization of a desperate adventure of Bond with sinister characters in Istanbul and on the Orient Express is fictional exaggeration on a grand scale and in a dashing style, thoroughly illogical and improbable, but with tongue blithely wedged in cheek.
Again good old “Double Oh Seven” is sent by his London chief, “M,” to look into a promised opportunity to tweak the hide of the Russians in the Near East. It seems there’s a secret mechanism called a Lektor that may be filched from the Soviet Embassy in Turkey, if the cards — and the cads — are smartly played. This means the agent who does it must work in consort with a beautiful girl and a Turkish voluptuary, which is right down old “Double Oh Seven’s” street.
Of course, he doesn’t know the whole set-up is a diabolical plant of that international apparatus, Spectre, aimed to snag Lektor for itself and also to place its favorite nemesis in the gravest jeopardy. And he doesn’t sense that the strange and solemn fellow who tails him all over the place is a homicidal paranoiac (“the best kind”) working for Spectre, until almost too late.
Well, there’s no point in trying to tell you all the mad, naughty things that take place — the meetings with mysterious people, the encounters with beautiful girls, the bomb explosions, the chases, the violent encounter of Bond with a helicopter, a motor boat race. Nor is there any point in trying to locate the various characters in the plot, all of whom are deliciously fantastic and delightfully well played.
There’s Lotte Lenya as an arch Spectre agent, Robert Shaw as the paranoiac, Pedro Armendariz as the jovial Turkish contact and Daniela Bianchi as the beautiful girl. And, oh, how beautiful, luscious and voluptuous she is! Even old “Double Oh Seven” cannot resist her, and takes her home at the end.
Terence Young has directed the whole thing grandly, with some color photography of Istanbul and surrounding country that gives it the proper key. Don’t ask any more. Just go to see it and have yourself a good time. It is at the Astor and other “showcase” theaters.