movie backdrop

3 months ago

From Russia with Love

a review by CinemaSerf

We used to have a maths teacher at school who was small in stature. When the class got a little unruly, she used to stamp her foot on the floor like a petulant child. We called her Miss "Klebb"! I don't think that she ever had a poisonous spike that protruded from her shoe, but I wouldn't have been surprised. In that role, Lotte Lenya is up there in the league of deadly protagonists faced by 007 in this franchise. Robert Shaw - always underrated, I feel - is superb as "Grant" and Pedro Armendáriz is entirely convincing as the urbane "Karim Bey". The story here is a bit of a stretch, but Terence Young keeps it moving along as Sean Connery vies with SPECTRE to pinch a secret decoder from the nasty Soviets with a lethal briefcase of gadgets and gizmos. It's great!