FAQ

In case Tania was planning on betraying Bond. Bond considered that Tania was trying to entrap him and as soon as he attempted to rob the consulate he would be ambushed by Russian authorities and arrested (Tania would have tipped them off that Bond was going to rob the consulate and steal the Lektor). However, if Bond told Tania they were going to do the job on the 14th and Tania was planning on betraying Bond, she would have told the Russians to be prepared to arrest him on the 14th when in reality they were doing the job on the 13th. This would catch Tania and the Russians off-guard and they would not have been prepared to arrest Bond, giving him a better chance of getting away with stealing the Lektor.

No, the actor in that scene is Walter Gotell, who appears throughout the film as "Morzeny," one of SPECTRE's lead field agents.

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When Russian agent Tatiana "Tanya" Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) contacts MI6 asking to defect and offering to bring with her the Lektor decoder, M (Bernard Lee) suspects that it's a trap and sends 007 agent James Bond (Sean Connery) to meet her, none of them knowing that it's actually a plot orchestrated by Ernst Blofeld (Anthony Dawson) and SPECTRE agents Kronsteen (Vladek Sheybal) and Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya).

The majority of the James Bond movies are based, at least in part, upon stories by British author Ian Fleming [1908-1964]. From Russia with Love is based on Fleming's 1957 novel of the same name. It was adapted for this film by American screenwriters Richard Maibaum and Johanna Harwood.

From Russia With Love is sung by British singer Matt Munro. Only the melody is used in the opening titles, the full song isn't heard until the final scene.

At the start of the movie, Bond is in London when he is called to work. M sends him to Istanbul, Turkey to meet with defecting Russian operative, Tatiana Romanova. Once they have the Lektor, Bond and Tanya, posing as David and Caroline Sommerset, hop on the Orient Express, which takes them across Bulgaria to Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). The train continues across Yugoslavia to Zagreb (now Croatia), where he expects to get documentation to get him out of Yugoslavia and into Trieste, Italy. Instead, SPECTRE assassin Donald "Red" Grant (Robert Shaw) has killed Bond's contact and assumed the identity of British agent "Nash". In the final scene, Bond and Tanya wind up on a gondola in Venice, Italy. A map showing their route can be viewed here.

Just before he leaves for Istanbul, Bond is given a photo of Tanya Romanova. Before he returns the photo to M, Bond writes on it, "From Russia With Love."

SPECTRE stands for "The SPecial Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion." SPECTRE is an international terrorist organization run by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Its members are recruited from the Gestapo, Smersh, the Mafia, and the Union Corse among others. With the exception of Goldfinger (1964), all of the Bond villains from 1962-71 come from this organization. In Fleming's book, however, the plot was cooked up by SMERSH, a Soviet-Russian organization whose name ("smiert shpionam") meant "death to spies." SMERSH is mentioned in this film, but the antagonistic organization for the early Bond films was changed from the books (where SMERSH is clearly a Soviet force) to the non-country-specific SPECTRE. Number Three in this film is a former SMERSH operative, now working outside the Soviet Union for SPECTRE.

That man is Benz (Peter Bayliss), a Soviet agent responsible for watching airports and stations. He can also be seen during the meeting on which Bond and Ali Kerim Bey (Pedro Armendáriz) spy with the periscope underneath the Soviet embassy.

Bulgaria was a Communist satellite state of the Soviet Union during the Cold War era. Bulgaria also borders Turkey so it would be more convenient for the Soviets to employ Bulgarian spies to do their dirty work in the Balkan region.

The Cold War involved the Warsaw Pact and NATO countries. As this movie shows, those two sides carried out their spy games in countries all over the world, including Turkey.

Chloral hydrate, a mild but fast-acting sleeping pill.

Barbara Jefford dubbed Daniela Bianchi's voice because her affectation of a Russian accent was considered too hard to understand.

SMERSH are the villains of the story. Blofeld is not in the book, instead the villains' boss is a general named Gruzaboyschikov. Kronsteen does not die. Bond and Kerim Bey assassinate Krilencu when he enters through Marilyn Monroe's mouth in a poster for Niagara (1953). There are no chase scenes. Grant's first name is Donovan instead of Donald. The decoding machine is called a "Spektor". The Spektor is booby trapped with a bomb. Grant's weapon is a gun hidden in a book. He shoots Bond as the train goes through a tunnel but Bond's cigarette case and book stop the round from entering his heart. Bond kills Grant by shooting him with Grant's concealed weapon. At the end of the novel, Bond finds Rosa Klebb in a hotel disguised as an old woman waiting for Grant. She tries to kill him with poisoned knitting needles. Bond's friend, Rene Mathis, comes in with some men to take Klebb away but not before she kicks Bond with her poison tipped shoe and Bond falls to the floor and presumably dies.

Publicity photos exist of Ian Fleming visiting the outdoor film set of From Russia with Love wearing a white sweater and dark pants, posed sitting on a English shooting stick (a walking stick with a small, fold-out leather seat at the top) on the train tracks in front of the engine of the Orient Express. In the scene where the train passes by one of Kerim Bey's sons, who was waiting there as part of Bey's original escape plan, there is a man seen in the field beside the tracks, wearing a white top and dark pants, standing in an odd, bent-legged posture, suggesting that he's sitting or leaning on something. It is believed that the man is Ian Fleming with his shooting stick.

Blofeld is played onscreen in From Russia with Love by Anthony Dawson. However, his voice was dubbed by actor Eric Pohlmann. The actor(s) playing Blofeld were credited with a question mark in order to add a sense of mystery to the character.

Yes, but it will cause them great confusion and disruption to do so. It also means that Western intelligence agencies will have the opportunity to go back through all past communications that they have intercepted but were unable to decode and to glean a treasure trove of information from them, such as the identities of Soviet agents operating in the West. They can also reverse-engineer the lektor, knowing how they made the current generation of code machines, may help them to crack the new code of future transmissions.

Including From Russia with Love, Connery made seven movies in which he played James Bond: Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), and Never Say Never Again (1983).