JOHN CORK: Hello. I'm John Cork of the Ian Fleming Foundation.
Welcome to the audio commentary for From Russia with Love.
On this commentary, we will hear from director Terence Young,
actors Walter Gotell, Martine Beswick and Aliza Gur.
From the crew, we will hear from composer John Barry, editor Peter Hunt,
production designer Syd Cain, sound effects editor Norman Wanstall,
special effects supervisor John Stears
and from Dana Broccoli, wife of producer Cubby Broccoli.
The stories reflect the personal recollections and opinions
of those who provided the interviews.
Some comments have been edited for time and clarity.
They are not meant to provide the definitive history of the film.
We begin with the first true pre-title sequence of the James Bond movies.
This scene was filmed on the nights of April 16th and 17th, 1963,
in the Renaissance Garden at Pinewood Studios outside of London, England,
with reshoots filmed in mid-June.
Director Terence Young, in an interview recorded in the early 1970s by Steve Mori,
talks about how this scene came about.
TERENCE YOUNG: The producer, Harry Saltzman, in my mind,
is a producer who is very interesting to work with because...
he has some of the worst ideas I've ever listened to, but also some of the very best.
Your problem is to persuade him the bad ideas are bad
and the good ideas are good.
He had the idea of killing James Bond
before the credit titles started, which is a splendid idea.
He wanted to do it in a training school, like the Spartacus training school.
Having built the set, we used that for a later sequence.
I transported it completely into a garden
and I shot it at night, so it looked faintly like L 'Année dernère à Maríenbad.
CORK: Actor Walter Gotell, whom we will shortly meet on screen,
appears in seven Bond films.
For six of those films, he plays General Gogol, head of the KGB.
Here, he plays SPECTRE agent Morzeny. He remembers shooting this scene.
WALTER GOTELL: The teaser was shot in the maze.
In the teaser, somebody was playing Bond,
crouching about the place until he was suddenly garroted.
And as he fell, a mask of James Bond was pulled off his face.
When the rushes were seen the next day,
they found that the man the mask was torn off from
looked exactly like Sean Connery, so it had to be shot again.
YOUNG: Just shows how stupid directors are.
I had to go back and reshoot the close-up
because we got a man who looked vaguely like Sean Connery
and a lot of people thought they were taking a rubber mask off Sean Connery.
So I had to shoot a man with a mustache.
CORK: Welcome to SPECTRE Island.
The pulling-off of the mask is a great moment,
which lets the audience know they are entering a strange world.
According to director Terence Young, this teaser or pre-credit scene
was producer Harry Saltzman's idea.
Saltzman felt it would be interesting to see James Bond killed at the opening.
This idea became somewhat of a theme in many early Bond pre-title sequences.
In Thunderball we open with a casket draped with a shroud initialed "JB",
which turn out to be the initials of a SPECTRE agent.
In You Only Live Twice, Bond is killed in the bed of a Hong Kong double agent.
Or so it seems. It is really a ruse to throw off Bond's enemies.
In Diamonds Are Forever, the device is reversed.
Bond kills the villain in the first few minutes
until we later find out that it was the villain's surgically-enhanced double.
In The Man with the Golden Gun...
the last film with which Harry Saltzman was involved...
we once again see a false 007, as in From Russia with Love,
this time in the form of a mannequin in Scaramanga's fun house.
In the original script these titles were meant to open the film,
but in the editing Peter Hunt and Terence Young
found they liked the idea of the teaser scene before the titles...
a concept which obviously quickly developed
into a highly anticipated part of the James Bond films.
The belly dancer, whose body serves as a screen for Robert Brownjohn's titles,
is the same person who appears in the gypsy camp sequence.
She worked under the name of Leila, but her full name was Leila Guiraut.
Let's meet editor Peter Hunt...
a key member of the creative team of the early 007 films...
who recalls how title designer Robert Brownjohn became involved.
PETER HUNT: Brownjohn was a find of Harry's.
He was a Canadian. Harry was a Canadian.
Brownjohn had worked all the time in commercials and things like that.
It was Harry who brought him in
as something new and something brilliant and wonderful.
Brownjohn was a fun man, a nice man. I liked him a lot. He did Goldfinger as well.
CORK: Another key player in the success of
From Russia with Love is composer John Barry,
who is responsible for the thundering sensual sounds of this overture.
He talks about how he became involved in the film
after arranging the James Bond theme on Dr. No.
JOHN BARRY: I never saw anybody on Dr. No. I only saw Noel Rogers
who was United Artists Music. I never saw anybody from the movie.
It wasn't until From Russia with Love that Noel said, "I want you to meet them."
And that was the first time I met Cubby Broccoli, Harry Saltzman and Peter Hunt.
And though I'd had instrumental hits, I hadn't had a song hit.
I'd accompanied song hits on records, but I hadn't actually written a hit song.
They wanted a song over the opening titles
and Lionel Bart had just written Oliver! and had a huge hit with it in the West End.
So they called Lionel Bart... and I knew Lionel...
and Lionel wrote "From Russia with Love" and I arranged it for the movie
and did the rest of the score.
It was a big hit with Matt singing it... Matt Monro.
Knight... takes bishop.
(AUDIENCE MURMURING)
CORK: This sequence takes place in Venice,
but it is actually shot on a set on D Stage at Pinewood Studios.
It was filmed during the first week of shooting
and features one of production designer Syd Cain's most elaborate sets,
including a marble floor which features a chessboard pattern.
The day this was shot was also the first day of rehearsals for a young actress...
Aliza Gur-who plays Vida, one of the gypsy fighting women featured later.
Gur remembers her reaction to the set.
ALIZA GUR: I remember walking with Lotte Lenya in the morning.
We both left the make-up room and walked on the set
and the two of us went "Wow!"
Lotte said to me, "That is one spectacular set."
We were both sorry that we were not in that shot.
As a matter of fact, seeing that set, I was adamant to learn how to play chess.
CORK: Aliza Gur won the role of Vida
after appearing in the short-lived musical Ramona in London's West End.
Harry Saltzman saw the play,
liked Gur's performance and asked her to become part of the James Bond cast.
Terence Young pulled together a wonderful supporting cast for this film.
Here, he talks about two actors who turn in tremendous performances.
YOUNG: Rosa Klebb was an idea I had out of the blue.
We were originally thinking of using Katina Paxinou,
but there was some reason we couldn't get her-she was in a play in Athens...
and it didn't work.
So I had just been given, about two days earlier, a new gramophone record...
a disk called "River's End", I think, and there's Lotte singing and on the outside,
and I said "Why don't we try her?"
I had to go over and see her.
She's not a young girl at all, but she's full of life and she's a marvelous character.
She said it would be terrific fun and I said, "It'll be a tough picture for you."
But she was delighted with the idea of doing the picture.
Kronsteen... I wanted somebody whose face would be very memorable.
Often in a picture you have a problem reminding an audience who a character is
if he only makes three or four appearances.
I stumbled by accident on this Polish actor, Sheybal,
and he went later into a film of Russell's... Women in Love.
He's had quite a big career since From Russia with Love.
This was his first film part... he'd been an extra before.
But he had a great face. He looked intellectual enough
to be a chess champion,
and, as I said, a very distinctive face.
He also had one of the most distinctive, marvelous voices I've ever listened to.
He had a great voice. One of the best voices I've ever...
He only had to come on and everybody said, "Yes. The chess player."
CORK: This scene has a wonderful assortment of actors.
To play Blofeld, Terence Young asked Anthony Dawson...
who played Professor Dent in Dr. No... to sit in the chair and pet the cat.
Actor Eric Pohlmann provided the voice of Blofeld in post-production.
Both men would repeat their roles in Thunderball two years later.
Anthony Dawson worked with Terence Young on They Were Not Divided...
a film that also introduced Young to Welsh actor Desmond Llewelyn,
who we will meet later.
Dawson is best remembered for his role in Dr. No
and his performance as the shifty-eyed hired killer
in Alfred Hitchcock's 3-D masterpiece, Dial M for Murder.
Austrian actor Eric Pohlmann had the perfect voice for Blofeld.
By the time of From Russia with Love, he was often being cast as portly villains.
He had become famous in Austria in the late 1930s for his stage work.
After the Nazis rose to power, Pohlmann escaped to London
where he worked for the BBC's Overseas Service...
a strong propaganda weapon for the Allied cause.
He can be seen in many great films of the late 1940s and '50s,
including The Third Man, Mogambo, Moulin Rouge, Lust for Life, Anastasia
and a number of films produced by Albert R "Cubby" Broccoli
before he began making Bond films.
Pohlmann appeared in many London theater productions,
including The Threepenny Opera, which brings us to his co-star...
another performer famed for her memorable voice-Miss Lotte Lenya.
In 1928, Lotte Lenya, then married to composer Kurt Weill,
debuted as Jenny in The Threepenny Opera.
She became a sensation across Germany
and her husband's royalties made the pair wealthy.
Lenya and Weill moved to New York to avoid the Nazis.
After Weill's sudden death in 1950, Lenya had a huge career
singing the songs of her late husband and his collaborator, Bertolt Brecht.
For those who only know her from this film,
it is hard to imagine her tremendous talent and stage presence.
She wowed audiences across the globe.
When Louis Armstrong recorded an English version
of the most famous song from The Threepenny Opera-"Mack the Knife"...
he added a new name to the list of victims of the title character's murderous temper...
Miss Lotte Lenya.
This sequence is a combination of Ian Fleming's novel
and a suggestion from Harry Saltzman.
Saltzman had seen the film Spartacus
and liked the idea of the gladiator training school.
He wanted to see SPECTRE agents training in the same brutal fashion,
but updated for modern times.
The result is a wonderfully macabre set by Syd Cain
in the gardens of Pinewood Studios.
Sound engineer Norman Wanstall recalls how he added some reality
to the sound effects in this sequence.
NORMAN WANSTALL: At the training school,
you hear voices and it creates an atmosphere.
Without them it's a different effect.
That's where I could add to a scene
where perhaps no one had thought of doing it before,
which was something I learnt from Win Ryder, who was a great fan of this.
I learnt how he brought scenes alive just by having distant voices.
CORK: Peter Hunt and Terence Young play a trick here.
To make the camp look larger,
they show this long shot of the actors walking into another section.
It is, of course, the same set filmed from a different angle.
The masseuse is played by actress-model Jan Williams,
who appeared mainly in television comedies in England.
Let's turn to actor Robert Shaw, who plays Donald Grant with icy calm.
Although best known for his role as Quint in Jaws
and as the mark in The Sting,
Robert Shaw made an equally big splash as a novelist and playwright.
In 1959, Shaw published The Hiding Place,
which won him acclaim and opened doors for him.
Shaw's first love, though, was acting.
He grew up in tough circumstance. His father died
when Robert Shaw was only 12.
Shaw turned to writing and acting for comfort.
Theater provided a surrogate family
and he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1949.
Shaw made a name for himself on British television
in much the same way that Sean Connery did,
by appearing in short plays adapted for the BBC.
Shaw was nominated for an Academy Award
for his performance in A Man for All Seasons.
He later appeared with Sean Connery in Robin and Marian
before his untimely passing at age 50 in 1978.
In 1963, Shaw was asked if he preferred acting to writing.
He said he preferred the financial comforts of acting and added:
"Let's face it. There are more than a hundred published novelists in England
who can't get up the price of a decent meal."
Italian model and actress Daniela Bianchi
faced tough competition for the role of Tatiana Romanova.
The producers, eager to repeat their success with Dr. No,
wanted to find a new international beauty along the lines of Ursula Andress.
Film companies would often publicize the names of actresses auditioning for a role
and publicity agents for rising actresses would try to link their clients
to roles which were not yet cast.
As a result, there was a flurry of press attention
surrounding the casting of Tatiana Romanova.
Journalist Donald Zec even sat in on auditions in Rome,
writing about auditions of actresses such as Yugoslav Sylva Koscina,
Italian actress Virna Lisi... who was deemed too thin...
Annette Stroyberg... who was deemed not thin enough...
French actress Hélène Chanel and Eleonora Ruffo.
The producers announced three finalists.
Elga Andersen from Austria, Maria Xénia from Greece
and Daniela Bianchi-former runner-up in the Miss Universe competition.
Reportedly, Sean Connery made the final choice from the three.
Bianchi had been a successful model in Rome
and had done only a few Italian films before From Russia with Love.
Although she worked hard on her English skills,
she... like many of the performers in the early Bond films... was revoiced.
Actress Barbara Jefford did the honors,
capturing a perfect blend of Eastern European mystery and sexuality.
- I was in love. - And if you were not in love?
CORK: Let's return to editor Peter Hunt,
who talks about the transition from Dr. No to From Russia with Love.
HUNT: Of course, on From Russia with Love we had a longer time.
I was right in at the beginning.
Once they'd got a script, I was around and talking with people-Terence, particularly.
It's a good novel, really.
It's full of Fleming's snobbery, which people loved in those days.
It's full of the right way to live and the right way to behave
and the right clothes to wear and the right food to eat
and the right wines to drink.
And all of that class stuff which, obviously, was delightful to have
after a number of years of war and rationing
and all the problems that we had to have during our daily life
of that Second World War.
Fleming wrote for the reader. He didn't write visually, as it were,
although his descriptions of places were pretty good.
Transposing any book from the book form to a shootable script is not easy.
Very few books
transpose, in fact, easily.
Some of them do it better than others
and Maibaum was a very good converter of this type of work.
And, of course, Richard Maibaum had written a number of Broadway plays too.
He was one of the older... younger older writers, as it were, still left in Hollywood.
And he had an enormous talent and ability for transposing things
and for writing scripts and making films work.
He was like all of them-like Ben Hecht and all those wonderful old writers
that turned out those wonderful films in the '40s.
They really did have a wonderful idea, a knack, a way of working
and turning out those films... romantic films...
and writing dialog and writing situations.
Sean carried on the same character,
but, by then, Sean knew what he was doing.
It became a lot better. But, remember, it was the second one.
Many of these series of films just collapsed after the second one
because the second was nowhere near...
Look at all the remakes. They're never as good as the first.
CORK: Now to Lois Maxwell, who achieved fame as Miss Moneypenny.
LOIS MAXWELL: Now, this was the part that I didn't fancy myself playing.
Isn't she lovely?
CORK: Lois Maxwell talks about her early career.
MAXWELL: This particular part that Eunice played...
it was so clever of Terence because they end up together
and she's in the beginning of From Russia with Love.
I was a soldier... a Canadian soldier-when I was 16
and I came to England just before Christmas of 1943.
It was a dreadful time.
I had a wonderful teacher and he encouraged me enormously
and I won verse-speaking contests and things like that.
And, in actual fact, I was recruited by the Canadian Army
to join the army show as the gag girl for Wayne and Shuster...
the famous Canadian comedians.
And they were in the army show.
And Robert Farnon... the famous composer and musician...
he was in charge of our orchestra. It was a large orchestra.
We traveled by train for nine months all over Canada.
In fact, we even played in Detroit
and we played in Quebec for the famous Quebec Conference.
I was then, with my group, brought to England
and I was here for about a year and a half, I suppose,
when the headquarters...
My unit was being sent to Italy
and somehow Headquarters found out that I was not yet 18
and I should have been about 22.
So they decided to send me back to Canada
and they sent me to this sort of holding hospital for Canadian women.
And I asked for weekend leave
and I went to London to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
and I told Sir Kenneth Barnes there that I didn't want to go back to Canada,
I wanted to stay and go to the Academy.
So he said to come the following Wednesday and have an audition.
That meant that I had to go AWOL from the army...
that means absent without leave from the army...
which put me in a very difficult situation.
However, I did that, went back the following Wednesday.
I had auditioned for him, personally, when I first met him.
There was a skit I used to do in the army show
and it was called "The Bearded Lady".
And I had a long, crinkly, false red beard and I'd sing
I love the bearded lady cos her whiskers tickle so
Her whiskers make me tickle from my head down to my toe
All this was with a sort of dance.
So at the audition, which was in the theater at RADA,
I did a very serious piece and a poem and then a comedy piece.
Then I was just about to walk offstage
when out of the darkness came Sir Kenneth's voice.
He said, "I say, my dear, would you mind doing 'The Bearded Lady'?"
(MAXWELL CHUCKLES)
So I did "The Bearded Lady" again
and I heard shrieks of laughter
and went off and sat in the office near his office.
After about an hour, he came in and said,
"I am very pleased to tell you, my dear,
that you are the first winner of the Lady Louis Mountbatten Scholarship at RADA."
So that evening, as I was progressing euphorically up Oxford Street
to my bedsitting room,
the military police picked me up
and I was in dreadful trouble.
So I asked them if I could call Sir Kenneth Barnes, and I called him and I said,
"I'm not going to be able to take the scholarship,
because I've been arrested and they're going to send me back to Canada."
And I don't know to this day what he did,
but I suspect that he instantly got in touch
with the Mountbatten&headquarters and told them what had happened,
because it was 24 hours later that I was discharged from the Canadian Army.
CORK: One of the reasons Bond's relationship
with Moneypenny works so well
is the sense of playfulness the actors give the characters.
There is sexual tension between the pair, but not romantic longing.
Terence Young and Lois Maxwell avoided all the clichés
of the lovesick secretary with glasses on, her hair in a bun
and a pencil stuck behind her ear.
The scenes between Bond and Moneypenny
are looked forward to by the fans in each 007 adventure.
A bit of trivia...the hands that were writing on the photo belonged to Terence Young.
Now James Bond is off to Istanbul.
Here, Terence Young creates echoes of Dr. No
with Bond's arrival in the enemy's territory.
We see the exact same order of shots from Dr. No...
the plane landing, the tower announcing the arrival
and a reverse tracking shot of Bond in the airport terminal.
Other details are copied as well.
Bond is met by a chauffeur, watched by a mysterious figure
and eventually observed by another man in a car in the airport parking lot.
But Young switches things around.
In this film, the chauffeur is a good guy... the son of Bond's ally, Kerim Bey.
In Dr. No, the chauffeur was the enemy.
The man watching Bond from the car in Dr. No was Quarrel,
who helps Bond infiltrate Dr. No's headquarters.
In this case, it is SPECTRE agent Donald Grant.
Even the figure in the background at the airport
has switched from CIA agent Felix Leiter
to a Bulgar working for the Soviets here.
Istanbul proved to be a tough location for the film crew...
two major sequences set to film in Istanbul were eventually shot in England...
but most of the members of the crew also have fond memories of the city.
Walter Gotell, who was in Istanbul to shoot the film's climactic boat chase,
recalls the extent of his visit.
That's very friendly.
GOTELL: We went to Turkey to shoot locations.
It was a lovely time to go-April.
And we settled down and I found myself taking a house in Yesilkoy,
which is on the European side of Istanbul.
We were going to be there for about six weeks.
And after about three or four days, Cubby said,
"Sorry, we're wrapping."
"We're not staying here. We're going to the northwest of Scotland."
What we found...what he found and everyone else found...
was that the helicopters found it very difficult to take off
and the speedboats just wouldn't go fast enough.
And if speed boats don't go fast enough you cannot "undercrank", as it's called,
which is to speed the film up.
Because you cannot, with water, speed a film up.
So we packed-in in Istanbul.
CORK: Now we meet Kerim Bey...
a favorite character from the novel and the film.
Terence Young recalls Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz who played Kerim Bey.
YOUNG: Armendáriz was a natural.
He played the Turkish military intelligence representative.
And I have to tell you en passant that he's one of the great men of my life.
I think it's one of the most tragic things that ever happened, his death,
and he is a real man in every sense of the word.
It was during this picture that he learnt that he was going to die
and he came to me and he said, "Amigo, I would like this to be my last picture."
"I would like to have completed this picture. Don't replace me."
We were going to get another actor.
And even John Ford... He telephoned John Ford, who telephoned me and said,
"For Christ's sake, help him." So I said, "I intend to in any case."
"We'll shoot round him for the rest of the picture and we'll do all his scenes first."
Which we managed to do. The doctors gave me three weeks to do his scenes.
It was one of those miracles.
We were shooting the gypsy camp sequence
and I'd finished the last scene with Armendáriz
and he was walking round shaking hands with everybody, limping very badly.
In fact, if you notice, he limps.
Not in the long shots... I had a double because he couldn't even walk that far...
but even in the close shots, he limped with great pain.
But he was a man in every sense.
And he was walking around the cast and crew shaking hands with everybody.
He got in his car and I said, "Put the camera here for the next setup",
and the rain started to fall and it rained for five days.
If I hadn't had that night without rain we'd never have finished with Armendáriz.
He was a marvelous man. A dear man. I loved him.
CORK: Pedro Armendáriz's son, Pedro Armendáriz Jr,
appeared in 1989's James Bond film, License to Kill,
as Hector Lopez-the president of the fictional nation, Isthmus.
For three decades, Pedro Armendáriz's warm smile
and strong masculine screen presence
made him a favorite with many top international filmmakers.
His last and personally heroic performance in From Russia with Love
would prove to be a wonderful testament to his career as an actor.
Armendáriz was born in Mexico,
educated in the USA, where his family moved after the Mexican Revolution.
He returned to Mexico after the 1933 declaration of amnesty
and worked for the railroad and other jobs before turning to acting in local theater.
Soon he became Mexico's best-known leading man
and a favorite of temperamental actor-director Emilio Fernández.
His acclaimed performance in Maria Candelaria
helped propel Fernández's film to win the Palme d'Or
at the first Cannes film festival in 1946.
Armendáriz worked with such great directors as John Ford and Luis Buñuel,
lighting up the screen with his broad, generous grin and twinkling eyes.
He even starred opposite Roger Moore in the Lana Turner period film Diane
about the life and loves of Diane Poitiers.
A bit of obscure trivia.
Part of Diane's story is set at the Chateau d'Anet,
which was built for her by the King of France.
The real Chateau d'Anet would feature as a location
in the James Bond film Thunderball.
Now back to Istanbul and the trials of shooting a complicated film on location.
Special effects supervisor John Stears recalls his attempt...
along with Joe Fitt and Frank George... to get a crashed helicopter as a prop.
JOHN STEARS: Quite a few things happened on From Russia with Love.
We went to Istanbul.
One thing I remember, we wanted a helicopter
because, as you're aware, the helicopter crashes.
We did attempt to do some of that stuff in Istanbul,
but Harry told us... that's Joe Fitt, Frank and myself...
that he had made arrangements with the Turkish air force
to go to an airfield and bring a crashed helicopter back
that we could burn and make it look like the one we're using.
So, duly armed with a truck
and cutting equipment,
off we went to this air force base.
We got straight through the gate, the guard. There was no problem.
Mentioned Harry's name... they didn't understand us, I guess.
And, eventually, we came to where the wrecked helicopters were
and we got out and said, "OK. Fine."
So we started to dismantle this thing and put it in the back of the truck
and the next thing, Joe said, "I think we've got a problem."
I looked around and there were about 40 guys standing round us
with guns pointing at us.
So I thought, "Oh-oh. We've got a big problem here."
We were frog marched off into a guard room
and from the guard room we were taken to a...
I suppose it was the camp commander's office.
We were sat in chairs in front of him.
I can see it now-he's sitting there with a big eagle behind him
and the Turkish flag and the American flag.
And we were asked, through an interpreter, what we were doing.
I said, "We came to pick up a helicopter."
"We were told by Harry Saltzman that we could take a helicopter for our filming."
They said, "Who is Mr. Harry Saltzman?" I thought, "Now we've got a big problem."
So we explained as best we could and we were getting nowhere fast.
I could see we were in trouble this time.
Then this commander said something to this guy
and he went out of the room and the other guys went out of the room.
This guy hadn't said a word to us in English and he said,
"I think I can understand the problem." He spoke perfect English.
We'd been interrogated for about two hours and he starts speaking English.
He said, "I can understand your problem,
but a lot of paperwork goes on here and it didn't get through from Mr. Saltzman."
"You were obviously trespassing
and you were stealing an American helicopter,
and we have no right to give them to anybody
because they have to be destroyed."
"But you're very lucky, because had I not been here
you might have spent quite a few weeks in jail."
So that was a close call.
I had visitors.
Limpet mine on the wall outside.
Timed to catch me at my desk.
CORK: Composer John Barry traveled to Istanbul
under the theory that he should listen to local music.
He visited the city with the head of United Artists Music in London-Noel Rogers.
Barry remembers the odd experiences the pair had.
BARRY: Istanbul was one of the strangest towns...
we're talking 30 years ago, I guess.
It was like no place I'd ever been in my life.
I'd been in the army, I'd traveled a lot.
It was supposedly to seep up the music,
so Noel Rogers and I used to go round nightclubs and listen to all this...
(IMITATES TURKISH MUSIC)
Talk about culture shock.
Really came away with absolutely nothing except a lot of ridiculous stories.
Then went back, talked to Lionel and he wrote "Russia with Love".
That was it. We used hardly anything out of that trip at all.
It was really, as far as the music was concerned,
of no real use to the dramatic feeling of a James Bond movie.
We went to this... It was like a barn.
We were told that this gentleman appearing that night
was the biggest, the hottest star in Istanbul. So we went along to this.
And the audience was such a mixture. You get people in evening dress...
It was like a theater restaurant. It was all tables with booths and chairs.
The whole hall was this.
There would be one table with people in evening dress and another table, farmers.
Shepherds just come off the fields.
This is a really weird place.
And this guy came out with this big Turkish band... singing all these songs.
Then he went off.
Then he came back on and he'd changed.
He'd now just got his trousers on and a silk shirt.
And as he went through the whole act,
finally he came on as a woman.
I'm looking at Noel... "I've never seen an act like this."
And they were going crazy. This audience were going out of their minds.
By the time he came on in this big pink dress at the end, they were going nuts
and we were just like...
"This is out of Kafka, this thing. I mean, what is this?"
And we walked out into the streets absolutely bewildered.
Never been to an event like that...
either before or since. It was totally unique.
He was like the young Elvis Presley of Turkey at that particular time.
Amazing.
We were told to go to this bar. They said, "They have great music there."
We went along, I think it was about 7.30 at night,
and we were sat there till about 9.30 - 10,
and we were still the only people in this place.
It was a huge old building with this huge old oak bar
with this big brass rail screwed into the bar.
Noel and I said, "When does this place liven up?"
And the guy behind the bar couldn't speak a word of English.
Finally I said, "Let's get out of here. Nothing is happening."
And I leant on this rail and the whole thing collapsed the whole length of the bar.
When I say 50 foot, I'm not kidding. It was this huge hail.
This rail had been there probably 30-40 years.
The whole thing went on the floor.
About three guys came out and looked at us and looked at the bar.
I just said to Noel, "Let's go." So we said, "Night. Thank you very much."
We got out of the door. They didn't come after us.
It was just so bizarre. If you put that in a movie, people would say, "Come on!"
It was like this... as I say, this Kafka bar.
We were quite happy when we got on the plane to fly back to London.
I see now why you keep the Rolls.
One of my sons is driving it. With two dummies in the back.
In the opposite direction. They'll follow it for hours.
You'll like my Gypsy friends.
I use them like the Russians use the Bulgars.
It's created a blood feud between them.
CORK: Actor Pedro Armendáriz was gravely ill with cancer while filming
and died before completion of the film.
In shots like these, a double was used instead of Armendáriz,
but Armendáriz worked diligently to complete as many shots as he could
and he arranged to re-record his dialog
before he left to go back to Los Angeles where he passed away.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
We're in the gypsy camp, which was slated to be filmed in Turkey
near the Topkapi section of Istanbul,
but it was actually shot on the back lot of Pinewood Studios,
as Terence Young recalls.
YOUNG: It worked awfully well and, strangely enough,
we had found a place like that.
I shot that eventually in the studios in England.
It was too cold, but I reconstructed completely an area like that...
above Topkapi where the gypsies do hang out.
We auditioned a whole lot of girls.
In fact, we practically had eliminating contests.
We started with eight girls in training
and ended up with these two because they were the best.
They were the wildest-looking
and both of them had a very, very strongly gypsy look about them.
Martine Beswick is half Jamaican.
Aliza Gur is Israeli.
Let's put it this way-they didn't look like white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
We had them training for about three or four weeks,
and you needed to do that.
CORK: While we watch Leila perform, let's spend some time with Aliza Gur
who, like Martine Beswick, achieved a certain level of fame
as one of the gypsy fighting women.
GUR: Originally, the set was scheduled and, I think, partially built
and also located in Istanbul, Turkey.
Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli decided,
"Let's build a set in Pinewood and let's shoot it all in Pinewood."
CORK: Aliza recalls working with stunt arranger Peter Perkins
on choreographing the fight.
GUR: Peter took Martine Beswick and myself on three weeks' training.
We came to Pinewood Studios every day and rehearsed.
Interestingly enough, my mother was a prima ballerina at the Paris opera house
and Peter knew and admired her work.
And she came over while we were doing From Russia with Love,
which, according to Peter, made his day.
That fight, which lasted on screen less than two and a half minutes,
got me more publicity, till today, and more fan mail
than any leading role I ever had.
There is a big cult of fans
and now I'm really glad that I listened to Peter,
for once we filmed it, it was rough.
And Martine was terrific to work with. She was just terrific.
Martine is originally from Jamaica.
When I met her, she felt that I was a baby I was 17... and she would protect me.
She advised me on hair, on make-up, on what to do with my hair.
She advised me on men... whom to talk to, whom not to talk to.
Once my mother arrived, she felt like she didn't have to chaperone me anymore.
She sure was a great girl.
CORK: Now we hear from Aliza Gur's combatant...
Jamaican actress Martine Beswick.
MARTINE BESWICK: We were supposed to go to Turkey
and we had everything ready...
the visas, the passports, everything was ready.
Then they said, "We're going to shoot it on the back lot."
We were so disappointed. We spent about a week there on the back lot.
It sort of put me on the map, I suppose, really.
It really sort of started my career.
Then I got kind of serious about it and I realized I had to take some training.
As a matter of fact, Sean was very terrific because my voice was like.., in here
and he said, "I think you should go and see Cicely Berry."
"You've got to see her. She'll tell you how to bring your voice up."
And I went, "Oh, thanks, Sean!" So off I went and she was great.
He put me in touch with this wonderful woman who changed my voice...
completely changed my voice and my whole instrument and my acting.
She was very, very good. So he was responsible for that, actually.
Also, Terence said, "Go and get some experience, darling." So I did.
I loved Terence, I really did. He was just great.
He always took charge and completely took care of us
and I loved that about him, I really did.
He was terribly grand and I really enjoyed being around him for that reason.
CORK: As the fight ends, an enormous battle erupts.
Terence Young does two things with this scene.
First he creates a sense of chaos in the proceedings.
The battle is messy, loud. The gunfire comes from all directions.
But then Terence Young makes a brilliant choice.
Bond does fight, but he moves around the battle, attacking as he sees fit.
Rolling a burning wagon into two grappling men, firing an occasional shot,
knocking out the unsuspecting enemy agent.
What this shows us is Bond moving above the chaos...
never getting drawn into the mire.
It is a point Young makes in all of his Bond films.
007 goes for the big targets.
In Dr. No, Bond rips up the girl photographer's film,
but he doesn't have her arrested, even though she's in league with the villain.
In Thunderball, Bond sends an assassin
to report back to SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo.
He tells the man, "The little fish I throw back into the sea."
Here, Bond acts in much the same way.
It is not his fight. He just helps settle it.
Now John Barry talks about this piece of music-the 007 theme.
BARRY: That was a product of...
leaning slightly more to the sense of fun of the Bond movies.
After Dr. No and then From Russia with Love,
there was a sense that adventure was fun
and so I wanted to write an adventure theme that had an up feeling about it.
Because the audience caught on so quick.
Even when they went into From Russia with Love,
they knew they were in for a good time.
The style had been set in Dr. No.
And the audience are very quick.
The audience are sometimes ahead of the game.
So I wanted a lighter, adventuresome sound in the adventure theme...
so the audience could sit and relax
and they started to have fun with the adventure
and they knew he was going to come out at the end of it.
So it was a little more tongue in cheek in terms of the theme than the original
and we used it on throughout a lot of the Bond movies.
It was a lighter, more airy, uplifting kind of a theme.
That was the thought behind that.
It's a very military kind of... The secret service was a very military operation.
That's where the military thing came from, plus my own experience of the military.
It had a great driving sense too.
And then I just wrote this big, big 16-bar open melody...
which was like a feel-good adventure theme with the trumpets and the horns
and that staccato accompaniment.
And that's how it came out.
CORK: Director Terence Young discusses John Barry's contribution.
YOUNG: When we did From Russia with Love,
we brought in another composer
to write the theme song, "From Russia with Love".
But John Barry... that was his first dramatic score for a whole picture
and the rest is history. John is one of the most famous musicians in the business.
He's incredibly professional,
has a got tremendous smell for the type of music.
I mean, at various times I've wanted something different
and he's said, "Try it this way and if you don't like it I'll do what you want."
And, with one or two exceptions, I've always been able to say,
"I'm completely wrong and you're completely right, John."
If I've said I want to change it he goes straight away,
because he knows I'm not doing it for any ego trip or anything like that.
I think music is enormously important.
I had one of the most successful films
which had one of the most successful musical scores of all time.
It was called "The Warsaw Concerto", which was made during the war.
I don't think there's a place in the world that hasn't heard that bit of music.
But John is a very gifted film musician.
In my opinion, one of the best film musicians.
He has a feeling for celluloid.
He knows where it should be and where it should not...
where music should be and where it should not be.
I think he's a very, very gifted person. I think it's one of his very best scores.
His music... It's a funny thing. Very often, somebody who writes...
"important" scoring...
that the music is very heavy and all that... very often it can be distracting.
But in John's case, I'd have said nearly always...
they are helpful, they add to the mood, they add to the excitement of a sequence.
They certainly did in that gypsy sequence
and that battle... it was enormously effective.
It was a long stretch of music running about eight minutes. Very, very effective.
CORK: Production designer Syd Cain created the sets for From Russia with Love.
He had worked as Ken Adam's art director on Dr. No.
Here he tells a wonderful story about Harry Saltzman in Istanbul.
SYD CAIN: We were filming out in Turkey, staying in the Hilton Hotel.
And in the evening, I used to go down below and look at the shops,
because I'm a teetotaler, I don't drink.
There's a jeweler's shop underneath the Hilton
and I was there one evening looking for a present for my wife
when a voice said, "What ya doin', Syd?" and it was Harry.
I said, "I'm looking for a present for my wife, Harry."
In this shop there was a long glass showcase with jewelry in.
And I was down this end, which was the cheap end,
and it went up in price as you went along.
Harry said, "This is where you wanna buy."
I said, "Harry, that's your end. I'm looking..."
I was getting about ¡ê55 a week then.
He brought a ring and he said, "Why don't you buy that?"
It was a beautiful ring. It was what they call a harem ring.
It was gold and enamel with rubies.
So I said, "Harry, I could never buy that for my wife."
Anyway, to cut a long story short,
I go back to my room, eventually,
and there's this ring by my bed.
I felt terribly embarrassed.
The following morning I said to Stanley Sopel, who was the managing fella,
"Stanley, I want to see Harry. He's embarrassed me no end."
So I go and see Harry and he said, "I hear I've embarrassed you."
I say, "You have, Harry."
"It's very, very kind of you to put this ring there,
but my wife would know immediately I couldn't afford that."
He said, "Here's what we'll do."
"You give it to your wife from me for allowing you to come on location
and bring her out for a fortnight on the firm."
And that was Harry. She's still got the ring. It's beautiful.
Harry was very generous. I liked him, really.
CORK: This scene, where Bond meets Tatiana Romanova in his bed,
is very similar to Fleming's novel.
Even much of the dialog is unchanged.
But production designer Syd Cain, director of photography Ted Moore
and director Terence Young created a mood of seduction
by the use of gauzy curtains, soft lighting, rich, cool colors
and a palpable sexual tension between the actors.
This theme of a female spy sent to seduce a man
has been touched on since biblical writings about Samson...
the Old Testament hero and Israelite judge who battled the Philistines.
Unfortunately, Samson was seduced by a Philistine woman, Delilah,
who discovered the secret of his strength, cut his hair,
and reduced him to a blind slave before he found vengeance and salvation.
In World War One, Mata Han was famed for seducing men of power
and selling their secrets... costing lives on the battlefield.
Alfred Hitchcock explored the inner life of the female spy
who is asked to seduce the enemy.
He came up with a classic tale of soul erosion and salvation in Notorious,
where a loose woman, played by Ingrid Bergman, marries a Nazi agent
to pay for her father's sins.
In From Russia with Love, Fleming and the filmmakers offer a nice twist.
The seductress herself gets seduced.
Fleming plays with the sexuality of the task
and the fantasy of strangers meeting
who already know they are scripted by their governments to sleep together.
Neither Fleming nor the filmmakers allow Tatiana...
or Tania, as she likes to be called...
to be in on the full scope of the plot and thus she is not linked to the villains.
She is an innocent, working under penalty of death.
From the very beginning, when we see Klebb with Tatiana,
the audience understands that James Bond has nothing to fear from her.
She is just a pawn.
Indeed, she serves the same structural purpose as the Lektor decoder.
Bond must bring her back to the West
for there to be a satisfactory conclusion to the story.
In emotional terms, Tania is far more important than the Lektor.
She is the maiden who is tormented by Rosa Klebb's fiery-haired dragon.
Bond must do more than bed her. He must win her over.
Let's return to James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming,
who visited the location in Istanbul.
Fleming had a wonderful trip
and enjoyed spending time with the cast and crew.
One person he got to know was Cubby Broccoli's wife.
Dana Broccoli recalls spending time with Ian Fleming in Istanbul,
and a memorable dinner with Harry Saltzman on his last night in the city.
DANA BROCCOLI: Ian was there during the filming
and we were both great sightseers, so we went everywhere...
into the markets and the mosques, up and down the Bosporus. We had a great time.
It was Ian's last night in Istanbul and he was very tired.
He really wanted to stay in the hotel with us and have dinner,
but we were giving this company dinner at a restaurant just outside the hotel
and we talked Ian into coming along.
He said, "I hope it's a quiet place." We said, "I'm sure it will be."
When we got there, there were belly dancers all over the place
and a German wedding going on at the next table.
And Harry had this wonderful thing of ordering food for everybody
and if he didn't like what he got, everybody's order went back.
So Ian was there
and food was coming in from every angle,
and he held his head and he said, "Cubby, I don't want any of this food."
"I'm tired and this is noisy and it's..."
So Cubby said, "That's all right, Ian. What would you like to eat?"
He said, "I want a Spanish omelet." Cubby said, "I'll see if I can arrange that."
He took the next half-hour trying to describe a Spanish omelet to the waiter.
GUIDE: We are now approaching the most interesting corner of Saint Sophia.
Including these two great
red porphyry columns, stolen and brought from Egypt.
CORK: Editor Peter Hunt's skills are quite evident in this scene.
Hunt worked with the first three actors to play James Bond.
He edited the first five Bond films
and was second unit director on You Only Live Twice.
He then directed George Lazenby's sole Bond film,
On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
After On Her Majesty's Secret Service,
Hunt went on to direct Roger Moore in the television series, The Persuaders!
and then in Gold and Shout at the Devil... two films he made in the 1970s.
He directed two films with Lee Marvin... Shout at the Devil and Death Hunt.
He worked with Terence Young again on The Jigsaw Man in the mid-1980s
and then returned to editing for the Michael Cimino thriller, Desperate Hours.
GUIDE: ...the Saint Sophia wishing column.
Tens of thousands...
CORK: Editor Peter Hunt talks about the elements
which make this sequence a success.
HUNT: The sound was the sound of the mosque... you know?
That whole commentary of the guide,
who was going round behind the whole scene-moving around...
that was actual, it was real.
John Mitchell was the sound man and he shot it in the mosque like that
and it was wonderful.
Of course, what contributed greatly to it was the music.
John Barry's music behind that was remarkable and worked so well.
A wonderful instance of what a film musician can do for a scene.
CORK: Legendary composer John Barry had been a band leader for a number of years
with the group, the John Barry Seven.
From Russia with Love was one of his early film scores.
Here he discusses how he shaped the music.
JOHN BARRY: The actual content of the music
was not based on the Turkish scale... that chromatic scale.
It was based on Western musical structure.
And it was purely the instrumentation
that gave it the slightly exotic kind of feel of Istanbul.
The finger cymbals and the cymbaloms and things like that.
It was really like salt and pepper.
It was like the dressing... the condiments of the orchestra.
The orchestra was a full-blooded traditional English symphony orchestra,
with these colors added to it that gave it that Turkish feeling.
But it really was no more than that.
CORK: Norman Wanstall helped create
the other end of the spectrum of sounds.
Although sound is recorded on location,
Wanstall was responsible for replacing most location sounds with sound effects.
He talks about the difference between From Russia with Love and Dr. No.
WANSTALL: The thing about moving on to
Russia with Love was that I wasn't questioned so often
because recording theaters are very expensive
and people were saying to me, "We don't have the money"-this is Dr. No...
"You're spending time creating all these sounds. We don't have the money."
"So can you cool it? Can you stop doing it?"
That was frustrating
because I knew it was the best way to approach the picture...
to get important sounds created early on.
As we moved on to Russia with Love,
we were established. We'd made our reputations.
We were trusted that we weren't wasting money
and that we were trying to make Bond films as dramatic as we possibly could.
I went on to Russia feeling a lot more confident
that I wasn't going to be questioned as to whether we had to watch the pennies.
It wasn't a big budget picture
but I don't seem to remember that I had so many times
when I felt I wanted to go and spend people's money.
What did happen with the films was that you could go to the production manager
and ask for the most outrageous facilities and they never questioned it.
CORK: This material in Istanbul comes from the fertile imagination
of the filmmaking team.
In Fleming's novel, Bond sleeps with Tatiana,
then the pair leave the next morning on the Orient Express.
The filmmakers have Bond and Tatiana together, then separate them.
They only meet furtively in public places, which serves two purposes.
First, the audience wants them together,
and creating obstacles to that end makes the audience even more eager.
Second, in Fleming's novel, Tatiana decides to defect from the outset.
The suspense is based on whether she will succeed.
Richard Maibaum creates more suspense
by having Kerim Bey constantly question Tatiana's true motivation.
And Tatiana herself is torn between her fear of Klebb and her interest in Bond.
This dramatic separation presents an opportunity to the filmmakers
to utilize the scenic locations in Istanbul
by creating sequences in the St Sophia mosque,
this scene on the Bosporus ferry
and the stealing of the Lektor decoder from the bowels of the Russian Embassy.
Each of these scenes allows the opportunity for the filmmakers
not only to create suspense and dramatic tension,
but also to give the audience a look at the more exotic parts of Istanbul.
Terence Young has also taken great care to make certain
that Sean Connery looks as attractive as any other element in the film.
Connery was outfitted with eight suits, two topcoats,
and a full evening suit for the opening sequence...
all tailored by Anthony Sinclair of Savile Row.
In 1963, these hand-tailored items cost over$2,000.
Connery's bespoke shirts were produced by Turnbull & Asser
at a cost of$30 each.
At the time of this recording, the Savile Row suits would cost over$20,000
and the shirts$200 apiece.
Such is the price of elegance.
James Bond is now about to steal the Lektor decoder from the Soviet Embassy.
In the novel, Bond is not required to do anything to get the decoder.
Tania delivers it to him.
The filmmakers return to "St George versus the dragon",
so that Bond rescues Tania.
The pair escape through the tunnels, which enabled the filmmakers to recreate
one of the most vivid moments from Fleming's novel.
In chapter 16 of the novel From Russia with Love,
Kerim Bey shows Bond how he uses the tunnels
of the city's 80 underground cisterns
to get beneath the Russian Embassy where Kerim has a periscope installed.
The scene is recreated in the film,
but the element which makes the reader's skin crawl-the rats...
is saved for Bond and Tania's escape with the Lektor.
In the novel, as Bond and Kerim approach the Russian Embassy,
they force thousands of rats up the tunnel ahead
and then when they reach the alcove beneath the embassy,
they watch the rats swarm back down the tunnel by the thousands.
It is one of Ian Fleming's more vivid passages.
The filmmakers used the explosion beneath the embassy as the motivation
for the rats to swarm in the movie,
but creating the effect proved more complicated
than the filmmakers could have possibly imagined-as Syd Cain remembers.
CAIN: We weren't allowed to use real wild rats in England,
so I got white rats and we covered them in cocoa...
darkened them down with cocoa.
But the heat of the lamps made them very lethargic
and they just used to sit and lick this cocoa off.
So we had brown-and-white rats, which wasn't quite the thing.
So I went to Spain and found a warehouse
and we were allowed there to use real rats from the sewerage.
Horrible things-all moth-eaten. Huge things.
So I built a glass cage for the camera crew,
obviously, to be behind, and the rat-catchers...
We blocked as many holes as we could to stop them escaping.
And I built the set in the warehouse.
The rat-catcher let about 200 rats free and they came pouring round.
That was all right for take one. Then they wanted a take two.
We got our shot and then they all escaped.
It was mayhem. I can't tell you.
Cubby was the first one up the steps.
He was up some steps first. He beat me by a short head.
And we were hanging on to everything with these bloody great rats chasing us.
So that was quite an exciting sequence, actually.
CORK: Even catching the rats proved to be an adventure.
First, Syd Cain offered a London dock worker ten shillings
for each rat he could catch.
Soon, British health authorities stepped in and confiscated the wild rats.
As Syd Cain relates, the white rats proved unworkable
and the filmmakers decided to shoot the scene in Spain.
They hired one Pedro Vidal to supply the rats.
Mr. Vidal went to the Madrid sanitation department...
as he related in interviews during the film's release.
Sanitation workers placed 15-gallon wine casks in the Madrid sewers.
They would bait the casks
and each morning huge sewer rats would be found inside,
unable to climb up the slick glass walls.
Publicity materials bragged that the rats were "ferocious and disease-ridden
and sometimes they were growing as large as house cats."
Eventually, more than 500 wild rats were captured.
In 1963, Vidal talked about his task.
He said "I have never done a job I hated more. Rats give me the creeps."
One of the big problems in Istanbul can be seen in this shot-the huge crowds.
Terence Young talks about the challenge of shooting
when the film crew becomes a tourist attraction.
YOUNG: We were shooting in the main square
and we had 12,000 people.
There were 400 policemen, including 60 on horses, trying to control the crowds.
The only way we were able to shoot, to get them away from the camera,
was we faked another sequence with two stunt men
climbing out of an eighth-story window on a rope
while they were being filmed.
While everybody watched them, we got on with our picture.
CORK: If you're quick, you can glimpse Harry Saltzman's wife, Jackie,
in the window just in front of Robert Shaw.
We are aboard the Orient Express...
one of the great trains of Europe.
In its heyday, the Orient Express traveled 1400 miles
from Istanbul to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Venice, Milan, Lucerne and Paris.
The train was immortalized by Graham Greene
in his 1932 novel Orient Express
and by Agatha Christie in her 1934 classic mystery, Murder in the Calais Coach,
which was later renamed Murder on the Orient Express.
Sean Connery also starred in the film version of the Agatha Christie novel.
The Orient Express itself connected Paris and Istanbul from 1883 to 1977
when the line was closed due to declining business.
Eventually, the old coaches were restored and refitted
and the trains were reintroduced as the Venice-Simplon Orient Express...
open to the tourist trade as a first-class rail travel adventure
with formal black-tie dinners and service from London or Paris to Venice.
These interiors were recreated on sound stages at Pinewood Studios by Syd Cain.
Cain recalls going to France to examine the train itself.
CAIN: I went to France to copy the inside of the real thing
and I was drawing away and measuring
and the bloody train started to move off and I was in it.
I had to go miles up the track before I could get back again.
That's how we did it. I thought it looked quite good. I was quite pleased with it.
The original one was a bit tatty for filming.
We painted it slightly better, touched it up a bit, added a bit of glamour.
CORK: Syd Cain is one of the great English production designers,
although that is a title he never fully embraced.
He was in the air force during World War Two, but his plane crashed in Rhodesia
and Cain suffered a broken back and two broken legs.
Cain recovered from those injuries and was then promptly struck by lightning.
He was assigned to ground duty where he was first introduced to the film industry.
CAIN: I was in charge of flying control in Tangmere in England in 1944...
after my accident and so forth,
and a couple of chaps came from the film industry.
They wanted to photograph the inside of flying control...
they were making a film.
I said, "No way can you take a photograph
but I'll do you a quick plan and elevation."
They said, "Can you?" I said, "Yeah. That's what I used to do before the war."
So I knocked out this quick plan and elevation for them
and I got interested in the film business.
I didn't realize they had draughtsmen in the film business.
When I gave them this, they said-thinking I was going to be in the RAE forever...
"When you come out of the RAE, come and see us."
And two weeks later I got my medical discharge.
So I thought about this film business thing and lwentto Ealing
and I saw a chap called Hal Mason.
He gave me a list of studio managers...
and one of them happened to be a friend of mine from school days.
Albert Fennell, who was a big producer. He's dead now, unfortunately.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I got in touch with Albert
and he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Nothing. I'm looking for work."
He said, "Come and join us." Not asking me what I did.
The only thing I could do was draw.
So I came into the art department.
And that's it... 1944.
And from then on, I was draughtsman, tea boy,
then I became chief draughtsman and assistant art director
and I rose to the dizzy heights of art director, eventually,
and production designer. That's how it all happened.
CORK: Cain went on to work with many of the great directors.
He worked with Stanley Kubrick on Lolita, François Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451
and Alfred Hitchcock on Frenzy.
When Peter Hunt came to direct On Her Majesty's Secret Service,
he chose Syd Cain to do the production design
and then worked with Cain on the Roger Moore films, Gold and Shout at the Devil.
Hunt discusses Syd Cain's work.
HUNT: Hewasavery good production designer.
Different personality to Ken Adam.
Ken Adam is a flamboyant and grand type of production designer,
but Syd Cain is a quiet, methodical worker
with a very good imagination
and a very good concept of the film problems.
He's got a sense of humor, a dry wit.
Production designer means that he designs not only all the sets,
but the costumes and the color... it incorporates the whole thing.
In From Russia with Love, the story is the most important thing.
You don't have to balance it with a lot of fantastic sets
or incredible.., production values.
It needed very good, practical...
A train, the nicest part of Istanbul,
the nicest part of all the towns that you went along.
So you didn't require great big fantastic sets for it.
CORK: Back to Syd Cain.
CAIN: To be quite serious, I work in conjunction
with the costume designer.
I say, "What is she going to wear?"
If she's going to wear green, I don't do a green background.
I mean, any art director can paint the set red
and people see it and say, "What a lovely set."
They don't remember who was in it, which I think is wrong.
You must design the set to give you an atmosphere for the characters.
They come first. I say to my friends, "Did you remember such and such a set?"
And they say, "Yeah, it's great." And I say, "What were the colors of the set?"
They get embarrassed because they can't remember and I say, "That's fine."
"If you don't remember, it's not outstanding."
So that's how I arrived at the various colors.
I've got what they call a cold eye.
A lot of my colors, funnily enough, are cold.
Blues and greens and yellows and things like that.
I enjoyed working with Terence. I thought he was terrific.
I thought, actually, he was Bond.
He's very elegant and had all the Bond characteristics
and l think he put this into the original Bond, to be quite honest.
And great to work with, Terence.
Always ready to accept any ideas.
He used to say, "If it's a good idea, it's my name on the credits,
which I want remembered... later."
I liked Cubby. Everybody liked Cubby, I guess.
When we did Dr. No...
I was the art director. I wasn't the production designer-that was Ken Adam.
But I was the art director and I did the locations.
When it came to the credits,
dear old whatshisname left my name off the credits accidentally.
Cubby said, "It's going to cost us a lot of money to change all the credits",
so I said, "Don't bother."
So he gave me a gold pen... a solid gold pen-in lieu of a credit.
That was Cubby. He was Aries, wasn't he?
Same as me. He was Aries. So we got on well.
CORK: We are in one of the most dramatically interesting points
in any James Bond film.
Here, note how director Young lets this confrontation unfold on the actors' faces.
Young lets the actors play out their emotions.
Connery reveals Bond's barely controlled anger in layers.
Faux patience.
Bitterness.
You're doing this under orders, I know. What are they?
- I don't know what you mean. - Liar!
CORK: And an ultimate explosion of violence.
Daniela Bianchi plays Tania's fear and confusion with conviction.
It is a risky scene to let the two leads fight this viciously this late in the film,
but the violence, the dread,
and the resignation of Bond that he can neither trust Tania nor get rid of her
makes the scene palpably real.
For the viewer, there is a sense of risk to the relationship between Bond and Tania
that, despite the chemistry between them, they may not end up together.
Director Young handles the dramatics with skill
and the performances pay off for him,
as he has a great visual moment coming up which acts as punctuation.
Note that all of what the audience is seeing
has been laid out clearly by the filmmakers.
At the beginning, Kronsteen revealed all to Blofeld and the audience,
outlining SPECTRE's plans step by step.
We know who killed the Russian in the mosque,
who killed the Bulgar following Bond and who killed Kerim Bey.
Terence Young has held nothing back
and thus creates the maximum dramatic suspense.
The audience knows why everything up until now has happened.
We just don't know what is going to happen next.
Now we see Terence Young's chilling punctuation to the previous scene...
the cool, calm Donald Grant shadowing Bond.
007's every move is watched, studied and virtually choreographed by Grant,
who now stalks the real Bond as he stalked the impostor Bond in the opening.
The visual also serves another purpose.
It explains that the conflict between Bond and Tania is manufactured by Grant.
It reminds the viewer that they are really allies against SPECTRE.
Now to dubbing editor Norman Wanstall, who talks about the sound effects.
WANSTALL: As in practically all train sequences in movies...
and the audience very rarely realize it... invariably it's a built set.
A lot of the stuff in Russia with Love was a built set.
The soundtracks were from sound effects libraries
and it's quite tricky to get plenty of variation.
It's very easy to become monotonous when you're doing train sounds.
I remember this was one of the facilities we had on the dubbing desk,
where they could produce sound that I could never do in the editing room.
The problem is that you're traveling in one part of the train,
but you move outside the carriage and you know that the sound would change.
So do you find another soundtrack, exactly the same speed
with a rattle that sounds different?
But Gordon McCallum said, "No. Give me the same track all the way through."
"Cue where we cut to the outside and to the inside
and I will swing in my facilities and we'll change the nature of the sound."
And that was a tremendous help to me.
I battled to think how I could get the difference between the inside and outside.
I don't mean the inside and outside of the train.
I mean the inside of the carriage and the inside of the corridor.
What he did was he just swung in top or took out the bass as we went across
and produced a constant flow of rattle.
CORK: Wanstall's first visit to a film set was
during the shooting of Hell Below Zero,
which was produced by Cubby Broccoli.
WANSTALL: We're going back a lot of years now,
but the film industry in Britain was a studio system.
People joined a studio like any other company
and you stayed. You would have a contract for about three years.
I knew a lady who was the mother of a very close school friend of mine
and she showed us round the studio for one day.
I was only 14 and we saw pictures of stars all round the walls
and all the girls were dressed very cool and the whole thing was magic.
We went on a set to...
Actually, it was the set of Hell Below Zero, but we didn't realize that at the time.
I remember going into this vast stage which was pitch black
and in the far corner you could see this very tiny bead of light.
We crept towards it
and the nearer you got you realized it was actually a replica of the cabin of a ship.
There was no way a lay person would believe that it wasn't a real cabin.
But as soon as we crept round the back it was all full of scaffold poles
and timber and plywood.
And us kids realized that movie-making is just magic-it's all make-believe.
We were completely and utterly captivated by the whole atmosphere.
And when I finished my national service,
I thought, "Wouldn't it be wonderful to be part of that,
to be in a movie studio and take part in some way?"
So I contacted this lady and she remembered me
and she said, "Come and talk and I'll tell you what the chances are."
But I always imagined I was going to be on a set.
I always imagined I'd be a cameraman or sit in a chair with my name on the back.
When they put me into an editing room, I wasn't too sure that's what I had in mind.
I really didn't know what the editor was doing.
Very few people do understand what an editor does.
Most people think that an editor cuts the bad bits out.
They don't realize that you have to build a film from all the different shots.
But as I realized what we were doing, I became really engrossed
and totally overcome by the whole job.
They put me under contract for three years
and when the contract was over,
I had a chance to go with probably the most famous soundtrack editor
we've ever had in this country... a man called Winston Ryder.
He was freelance whereas most people were permanently employed.
He worked on Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai.
The biggest movies were his.
And I had a chance to be his assistant on the sound side.
So rather than renew the contract, I went with him and l did three films with him
and they were all very large ones and I learnt a lot from him.
I suppose that was the basis of my knowledge for the future.
So when I had a chance to... When I had a break,
I had to fall back on all I'd learnt from him.
He was a good teacher.
CORK: A few bits of trivia about what we've just seen.
The man Grant escorts into the men's room and murders is played by Bill Hill...
the production manager of From Russia with Love.
Sirkeci Station in Istanbul doubles for both Zagreb station and Sofia station
and the scenes were shot on May 1st, 1963.
Note that Robert Shaw's character, Donald Grant,
does not speak in the film until he's aboard the Orient Express.
Editor Peter Hunt recalls Robert Shaw
and building the tension surrounding this meeting.
HUNT: I knew Robert Shaw when we used to bring him down
to play opposite actresses for tests and things like that.
Robert Shaw and I go back right to the early training days
of what was called Group Three, in those days.
He was a stage man, of course. He was a theater actor.
And great. He was a great piece of casting for From Russia with Love.
He really was. He and Lotte Lenya were very good.
I used to coach him with his dialog on From Russia with Love.
Only to listen to him. He needed somebody to listen to him.
In fact, it was my idea-which happened after we'd shot the scenes,
when I'd seen it and got it together...
that we didn't hear his voice and that he spoke imitating another spy...
on the train.
You see him talk and I put lots of train noise over it,
so there was a good reason why you never heard it.
And the steam came out from underneath the train.
So it meant that the first time you actually heard him
was when he got together with Bond.
You never heard him in the training centre when she whacks him in the stomach.
He never says anything.
CORK: Peter Hunt discusses his background in the film industry.
HUNT: I grew up in London... in the East End of London...
and I went to what is called an English grammar school at Brentwood.
I was always very keen on cinema and what have you.
Various members of my family were connected with the theater in London.
And an uncle of mine, who was actually my mother's cousin or second cousin...
we called him an uncle... was a cameraman.
At one time he was here in California and was a cameraman with MGM.
And he had a laboratory and a documentary company in London,
which I used to like to get into when I was on school holidays.
I liked him and used to talk to him
and that was really how my professional interest came about in the cinema.
I adored the cinema as a kid anyway.
I was never allowed to see as many films as I wanted to see.
So when the war came, which was in 1939...
3rd September, 1939...
chaos really reigned in England, to a certain extent.
Kids were evacuated because we all thought we were going to be bombed.
I decided I didn't want to go anywhere
and I started to do work with this uncle of mine,
who was then contracted to make a number of "instructional" films.
Instructional films about applying first-aid bandages
and things to do with the war effort.
And from there, of course, I eventually graduated into...
the cutting rooms on feature films.
I got my first editing job due to two producers
who were making a very good film, I thought, a wonderful story.
Having been an assistant in the cutting room
and gone through the whole rigmarole of learning my craft...
these two producers eventually came...
But during the course of the film they fell out with one another
and through a series of shrewd, cunning...
cunning...
diplomatic moves on my part,
I became the editor of the film.
I was able to contain one producer in his capacity and what he wanted on the film
and also the American producer in his capacity and what he wanted on the film.
They ended up by not talking to each other, so neither knew what I was doing.
They only knew what I was doing for them,
which made the film end up completely the same for both of them.
That's how I got my first break.
CORK: Now back to this classic scene...
one of the best confrontations between Bond and a villain.
Terence Young sustains the audience's interest
with only two characters in a confined space.
It works because of the groundwork laid since the opening sequence.
The filmmakers have taken care to keep the tension high and the suspense real
and it pays off.
Here Bond finds out that he has been played as a puppet by SPECTRE
and that Tania is not his enemy.
In the novel, Grant actually tries to kill Bond
with a gun hidden inside a copy of War and Peace.
When Grant fires, the bullet hits Bond's metal cigarette case in his breast pocket,
rather than his heart.
Here, Grant has taken away Bond's cigarette case.
The filmmakers also replace Fleming's gun in a book
with a gadget developed during World War Two...
a garrote wire hidden in a watch.
The character of Donald Grant is so well realized
that he was virtually recreated in the Brian De Palma film Blow Out
by actor John Lithgow.
With a straight face, De Palma has Lithgow dye his hair white,
pull on a black glove before killing
and murder his victims with a garrote in his watch.
The credit for this goes largely to Terence Young.
His work with the actors and Richard Maibaum
creates a scene filled with every bit of the tension of Fleming's novel.
Yet Young's scene is different-the setting is the same but the plot is more complex.
The interplay has been reworked from the novel
to make the film feel fresh and new.
The success of this part of the film
goes beyond any attempt to make it interesting for Fleming's readers.
It goes to the cinematic world of James Bond,
which Terence Young had such a strong hand in creating.
Young, with Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, developed James Bond
into a character that reflected the stylish elegance of Fleming's evocative prose.
James Bond's style was the key.
With Fleming's characters and stories,
Terence Young fleshed out the cinematic 007 with all the human details.
From the way he walked to how he kissed, to how he held a gun.
To capture the particularly English elegance of the character,
Young looked to himself as a person who knew style from the inside out.
Sound editor Norman Wanstall remembers Terence Young
and how he approached James Bond.
WAN STALL: A lot of people used to say that Terence Young was James Bond.
He was directing himself because he was the public school man with the blazer...
upright and good-looking and obviously had had a fairly affluent past.
The image of James Bond as in the book seemed to fit Terence.
He was fairly cavalier too.
He didn't seem to get uptight. Simple as that.
I thought he was very right for the part, as they say.
CORK: Countless actors and crew saw
Terence Young as a James Bond figure.
He was adventurous, stylish, handsome, refined, with a charming dry wit.
He was also a film director with an eye for action, an ear for dialog
and a wonderful ability to communicate and collaborate with his film crews.
Special effects supervisor John Stears recalls.
STEARS: Terence Young, the first director...
he was a phenomenal character.
He would just actually get into your mind what he was thinking.
I mean, you'd do things for Terence without thinking.
You'd just do it because you knew that was what was necessary.
In fact, there's very few directors after Terence Young
that I've had that feeling that I knew I was doing what he wanted.
But Terence had that ability.
He would tell everybody exactly what he wanted,
the sort of sound effects he wanted.
With costume and wardrobe, he knew exactly what he wanted.
There was no halfway and you knew you'd done it right.
Norman Wanstall discusses the collaborative nature
of work on the early Bond films
and how that contrasts to the individual responsibilities of each department head.
WANSTALL: Generally speaking, every expert on a film crew
is paid to do the job that they're meant to be good at.
That's why we have all the tedious credits...
because those people are experts in their field.
So even though making movies is without doubt a team job,
everyone is expected to do their best in their department.
So if you're a soundtrack editor, your job is to produce
what you feel is the very best you can for any particular moment.
If you're in any doubt, there's always people to consult.
You can always call the director in and say,
"How do you feel about this?" and they would be pleased to contribute.
But, generally, movies don't work like that.
Everyone is working in their own little cubbyhole...
the musician's off doing his stuff,
the sound effects editor is doing his, the editor's doing his...
and you hope that when they all come together, everything will work.
In a case like that, I would know what I'm supposed to produce
and when we reach the dubbing theater, we would decide whether it was working,
or if the director had a particular viewpoint,
then we would listen and try and adjust it.
The director is the king.
CORK: Now Terence Young discusses one
of the most famous fights in film history.
YOUNG: I did most of it myself... I used to be a boxer.
And I was, I suppose, the equivalent of an all-American football player.
I played rugby football... international football.
I worked it out with a different stunt man... it wasn't Bob Simmons.
And originally I worked it out with the two doubles
and I had the artists sitting by on the set watching.
When they said, "Let us do that", I said, "No, you'll get hurt
and you won't do it as well as the stunt men."
So after I'd said that three or four times
and I'd shot two or three takes with the other artists,
I had them where I wanted them.
They said, "We'll do it" and they did.
There's only one shot doubled in the whole of that fight.
I shot the sequence in two days-that's very quick because it lasts six minutes.
I couldn't get too far away from the actors as I was shooting inside a compartment.
We went from one rail compartment into the other one,
where the woman was sleeping.
And, as I said, you had to be close, they had to be on top of you,
and I think that added enormously to the effectiveness of this scene.
It made it even more violent... the close contact all the time.
The film was so violent, if I hadn't had the ending to it
the censors would have clipped it.
CORK: Peter Hunt recalls how work progressed
on the train fight sequence
as production continued.
HUNT: The train fight was really cinematic,
but we had the advantage...
of shooting it over a period of time.
I mean, the basis was shot with Terence and a couple of cameras,
then we put that together.
And it was a small set, so it was easy to keep. It was kept without any expense.
I would put it all together and then we would develop shots...
extra things that would make it more exciting.
This would all come about little by little,
then we'd do that... spend a morning on doing that.
The main part was, of course, scripted and done,
but the thing that turned it into a really exciting fight
were the extra pieces that we could put in
over a period of perhaps a week, maybe two weeks,
with odd days shooting extra inserts, extra pieces,
extra jaw socks, fighting, all the various things.
It all managed through editing it like that and building it in the cutting rooms,
as films should be made... as Charlie Chaplin made his films...
Terence would, wherever he could, leave out a close-up
or something that he knew he had to have in a sequence, and say,
"It's all right, dear boy. We'll do that later on."
Then when it was all together, he'd have the opportunity...
"But we desperately need this close-up. We always knew we needed it."
At the same time, he would say, "Do you need some more shots?"
"Shouldn't we put in this here?"
When they were scheduling the close-up which had to be done desperately,
he would manage to get extra shots and extra pieces.
He was quite clever about that sort of way of shooting.
CORK: We're coming to two sequences added
to the film to create an action climax.
In the novel, Bond drags Tania off the Orient Express at Dijon, France,
without incident.
The filmmakers wanted a more explosive climax
and writer Richard Maibaum devised two sequences.
The first is an attack by SPECTRE henchmen in a helicopter,
which both Maibaum and Young admitted
was inspired by the famed crop-duster sequence in North by Northwest.
It has some clever twists on Hitchcock's classic...
becoming a top game of strategy between Bond and the SPECTRE agents.
The second sequence, where Bond and Tania
are chased across the Gulf of Venice in boats,
was inspired by a scene in a script by Richard Maibaum
in a film directed by Terence Young called The Red Beret,
and produced by Cubby Broccoli.
The scene has Alan Ladd trapped in a minefield.
A bazooka is fired and it skips across the ground, setting off many of the mines,
creating a series of explosions.
With the mines detonated, the good guys have a way to escape from the trap.
Notice the clever visual coming up
where Bond literally gives his maiden a bed of roses to sleep upon.
Now back to Peter Hunt,
who discusses how the different styles of Hitchcock and Young
allow them to look at similar material and arrive at totally different creative results.
HUNT: Hitchcock worked everything out... he was an art director
and he storyboarded everything for himself beforehand.
So he knew how it was going to work
and in doing so, he limited the editing of it
so that it would work just as he had storyboarded it.
That way you can't do what I do.
All he's going to do is shoot what he wants and that's it.
The helicopter chase in From Russia with Love was different
in so far as it was a conglomeration of a number of shots
which had to be got under several conditions and...
a creativity about editing it.
Terence used to work from the moment... the situation as it was at the time...
and would deliver you a great deal of material
which was covering the story sequence.
So you had to make it work. You had to work at it.
You had to look at it and try and make out how the situations could be developed
with the material that he gave you.
He knew that he often did it that way and it pleased him to do it that way...
it worked for his personality... but it did make it hard work.
It did make it an effort on your part to make it work
in a way that he thought that it should go.
We had such a relationship and a rapport and I liked him so much
that he never upset me at any time.
Whatever outrageous things I did with his material,
he never said, "Oh, that's not how I wanted it" as some directors would do.
He always encouraged one.
He was always full of "Yeah, that's great. Let's do this."
And that is how we would develop certain sequences and make them even better.
CORK: To blow up a helicopter, John Stears built a radio-controlled miniature.
Stears refers to radio-control as RC.
STEARS: The helicopter you saw in the film was a miniature, obviously.
I think it was the first time that had been attempted.
It was about six feet long
and you had a little commercial petrol engine inside it.
RC was not really.., to a state at the time that you could depend on it totally,
but it was partially RCd.
What I did actually, I put negative instance on the rotor,
but it had an aerofoil section so it stabilized itself and actually lifted.
And the tail rotor I trimmed
to hold it in a stable condition laterally.
What we did, because we had to feed the pyros to it...
I wouldn't trust the radio at the time to do it with radio-controlled explosions...
I did feed a cable down through the main rotor
and then another one under the tail rotor.
That was purely to take the electrical current for the explosion.
The thing, virtually, was flying itself
and those two wires were for the pyros, basically.
That was the first time a model helicopter had been used like that.
That was a shot which we did one lunchtime.
Terence Young said, "Can we shoot the helicopter? It's a lovely sky, John."
I said, "Sure. Let's do it now." He said, "Fine."
So off we went and we did it, and that's the result.
CORK: When the helicopter does crash
in the film, Bond utters the line,
"I'd say one of their aircraft is missing."
The line is an in-joke, provided by production designer Syd Cain.
The war drama, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing,
was the movie which brought Cain into the film industry.
For Sean Connery, From Russia with Love was a turning point.
He moved from being the little-known star of Dr. No
to a leading man with real presence.
Dana Broccoli remembers Connery's anxiousness
to make his mark in other non-Bond films.
BROCCOLI: Sean was anxious to do other films
and although he had a contract to do a non-Bond film with Harry and Cubby,
Cubby decided, since he was unhappy, to let him out of that part of the contract.
Then he asked Sean what he would really like.
He said, "I'd like to work with Hitchcock."
So Cubby picked up the phone and spoke to Hitchcock
and he said, "I'd be delighted to use him."
And he did make a film with Hitchcock.
CORK: Connery's film with Hitchcock...
the psychological drama Marnie...
was not well received by critics at the time of its release,
but has since become regarded by many as a classic.
Now we return to Blofeld on his yacht.
Notice in this shot the back of Blofeld's head in the right corner
where actor Anthony Dawson's black hair can be seen.
This was the last time Blofeld would sport hair
until 1971's Diamonds Are Forever when actor Charles Gray took over the role.
We are about to witness the death of Kronsteen,
played expertly by Polish-born actor Vladek Sheybal.
Sheybal was in his teens when Poland was invaded by the Nazis.
He worked with the Resistance and was imprisoned, escaping twice.
In 1951 Sheybal won the national acting prize in Poland
and then emigrated to England to study film production.
His papers did not allow him to pursue acting work
and he was forced to take menial jobs.
The Oxford Dramatic Society asked him to mount productions for them
and Sheybal became a fixture in drama circles,
renowned as a teacher and performer.
Sheybal did not want the role in From Russia with Love...
he later claimed that he did not like the script or the part...
but he was friends with Sean Connery's wife, Diane Cilento,
and Connery had suggested him for Kronsteen, so Sheybal relented.
He would later claim that From Russia with Love "would change my whole life".
Viadek Sheybal went on to play many roles in spy films of the '60s and 70s,
including a comic turn in the 1967 James Bond spoof, Casino Royale.
He passed away in 1992 in his adopted home of England.
There will be no delay, Number One. There's still time.
CORK: Now back to Norman Wanstall,
who discusses the difficulties of finding just the right sound for the boats.
WANSTALL: The sound mixer who went on location with the crew
was determined that he would bring back ample tracks of those marine craft.
He became one of the crew, and they dressed him up in a cap and a sweater
and he is in front of one of the boats... he was recording.
But when we ran them, to my horror,
I realized that these boats were so refined, so highly tuned,
that they sounded more like vacuum cleaners.
I knew that Bond films would not accept such a sound. They had to roar.
We had to feel that these were turbo-charged roaring monsters.
And it just so happened that he recorded one of these going off from the harbor,
and it started up with a tremendous roar and you had the exhaust as it drove away.
That track was what I dreamed about... the sound I heard these boats making...
and that became the basis of the whole scene.
CORK: The boat chase proved to be one of the most difficult scenes to shoot
in any Bond film.
First, the crew tried to shoot it near Istanbul.
They were plagued by weather delays, choppy seas and notoriously slow boats,
which made the resulting footage look tame.
Finally, a camera boat sank on the Bosporus
and the producers decided to shoot the sequence in Scotland.
Yet bad luck followed the crew.
Ten days were allotted for the locations,
but when Terence Young and assistant art director Michael White
were involved in a helicopter crash,
the crew slipped five days behind schedule...
not because of injuries but because they had to wait on a new helicopter.
Weather also proved to be a problem, particularly for the final explosion,
as Walter Gotell remembers.
GOTELL: Believe it or not, we took a week to be able to shoot this,
due to Cubby Broccoli's determination to get the wind from the right direction.
Nothing else to be shot...we'd shot it all...
and, literally, played chess at Cubby Broccoli's expense...
and his utter grit, guts and determination to get the right ending for his film.
CORK: We are now in the paddock tank at Pinewood Studios
where all the post-explosion fire was staged.
Despite controlled conditions, the fire and explosions got out of hand,
as Walter Gotell recalls.
GOTELL: It was nevertheless a hell of an experience
because my eyelids were burnt off because I insisted on doing it myself.
They offered me a stunt man but I said, "What for?"
It was, to my mind, one of the best endings to a Bond film.
CORK: A careful listener will recall that this music
was originally heard at the climax of the first Bond film, Dr. No.
This final boat explosion was one of the final shots filmed.
The blast was so large that,
according to an Eon Productions press release,
it rattled dishes in the studio commissary.
The same press release announced that the fire seriously burned three stunt men.
We are now on a stage at Pinewood Studios
where Lotte Lenya solidifies her position as one of the great Bond villains.
Lenya did not appear in many films.
She performed in the 1930 German version of Threepenny Opera
and did not return in front of movie cameras until 1961
in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone,
where she played the decadent woman who manages a stable of gigolos.
She was nominated for an Academy Award for the role.
In 1963, she took on the role of Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love.
According to biographer Donald Spoto,
she weighed just over 100 pounds at the time
and the costumers built her clothes with padding.
The New York Post reported that she balked at the idea,
saying that she could play the part so that she would not look weak or small.
Her last film was Semi-Tough,
where she gives Burt Reynolds a sadistic massage.
Lotte Lenya passed away in 1981.
Despite her fame as a singer and stage performer,
and even the celebrity of the Academy Award nomination,
she often remarked that it was the Bond film that people remembered best.
She was remembered with fondness by the cast and crew.
In the novel, this scene takes place in the Ritz Hotel in Paris.
It is Klebb's suite and she awaits Bond with a gun built into a telephone
and poison-tip knitting needles.
Bond pins her to the wall with a chair,
but as Klebb is being taken away by the French agents,
Klebb kicks him with her poison-tip shoe.
As the novel closes, Bond collapses to the floor.
Critics have speculated that Fleming intended to kill Bond with that scene,
but by the time From Russia with Love was published,
Fleming had already written the first draft of Dr. No.
Far from trying to kill Bond off,
Fleming followed in the footsteps of authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
creating a cliffhanger ending.
From Russia with Love premiered at the London Pavilion cinema
on October 10th, 1963.
Ian Fleming held a party afterwards where he served beluga caviar.
The premiere proved to be a thundering success, filled with glamour.
Actress Aliza Gur recalls the event.
GUR: The London premiere of From Russia with Love... Wow!
First of all, they had a poster on Piccadilly Circus
that was about six stories high of myself and Martine Beswick with Sean.
I have never seen myself so big.
And I remember driving around and around Piccadilly Circus
looking at that poster and going "Wow!"
I have been to so many premieres, but never have I seen that much of a crowd.
We were lucky. From Russia with Love came after Dr. No
and Dr. No was a sensation.
Sean Connery, Ursula-gorgeous Ursula.
And we were lucky to be right after them.
And there was, amazingly enough, already a huge cult of Bond lovers.
That premiere, from Leicester Square to Piccadilly Circus
took one hour for the limo to make its way through.
You can walk it in two minutes.
It was a fabulous premiere, fabulous.
And to see the picture and hear the applause during the picture...
I knew. I walked out and I said, "Wow!" This picture will stay forever."
And it did. It really did.
CORK: Now a final comment from director Terence Young.
YOUNG: From Russia with Love is, in my opinion,
the best of all the Bond pictures.
It sounds arrogant but I'm sure it's true.
We had just the right enough money... we had $2 million...
and I had everything I wanted.
CORK: We hope you've enjoyed this audio commentary.
We'd like to thank all the actors and crew members who provided interviews
and those who conducted the interviews and helped us document these stories.
Particularly we want to thank Steve Mori,
who provided us with his interview with Terence Young.
This commentary was produced by David Naylor and Bruce Scivally.
I'm John Cork of the Ian Fleming Foundation.
This is the end of the From Russia with Love audio commentary.