From Russia With Love's Visual Style

On the 50th anniversary of "From Russia With Love"'s US release our friend and James Bond expert Deborah Lipp (she even wrote a book about him!) is here to talk 007...

Sean Connery in "From Russia With Love" released 50 years ago today in the States

After 23 official films and 2 unofficial ones, From Russia With Love, the second James Bond adventure, remains the greatest of them all. Considered an iconic film in many ways, it may surprise the casual Bond viewer to note that certain "iconic" aspects of the Bond franchise were missing from or created in this film.

Let's focus on From Russia With Love's extraordinary visual signature on this anniversary

The first James Bond film, Dr. No, featured the production design of Ken Adam. Adam is justifiably famous. In Dr. No, he designed such sets as the nuclear launch room, and, needing one last set when the budget ran out, came up with an exquisitely simple interrogation room, as perfect as any of his more elaborate work. Adam worked on a total of seven Bond films, creating such sets as Goldfinger's Fort Knox and the hollowed-out volcano lair in You Only Live Twice. He is considered synonymous with the look of James Bond movies, but he didn't do From Russia With Love. He was busy working on Dr. Strangelove—go ahead and revisit the war room scene in Kubrick's film and ask yourself if it doesn't look an awful lot like a James Bond movie.

No, art direction for From Russia with Love was done by Syd Cain. Cain is kind of impressive. Like Ken Adam, he did multiple Bond films and worked with Stanley Kubrick (in Cain's case, on Lolita). 

The eye-popping chess tournament scene in From Russia with Love, in which the chess game takes place on a raised dais above a checkerboard floor mimicking the chessboard itself, is Cain's work. The movie also featured Blofeld's yacht-based lair, extensive scenes on the Orient Express, and location footage in Istanbul augmented by opulent set design. In fact, opulence is a good word to hang on Cain's work, and FRWL is an opulent movie.

Another iconic visual element in Bond films is the title sequence. Title design by Maurice Binder is considered part of the Bond signature, and Binder was there from the beginning. Dancing girls, silhouettes, sinuous animated movement, and the famed gunbarrel sequence were all Binder's designs. He did the title sequences for every Bond film from the first one in 1962 through License to Kill in 1989. Except two: From Russia with Love and Goldfinger. Robert Brownjohn did those. 

FRWL's title sequence features the credits projected on the mostly-nude body of a bellydancer. It's beautiful and so very Bond, so typical of Binder's signature work that you may wonder if Brownjohn wasn't influenced by the first Bond title sequence. He wasn't: Dr. No's titles are a psychedelic explosion of colored dots. Male and female dancing silhouettes come in around the 1.40 mark, and by 2.15 we're into the "Three Blind Mice" sequence—three blind beggars who turn out, as the movie begins, to be assassins. Nope, the sensual body of a woman in Bond titles wasn't made iconic by the iconic Bond title designer. 

From Russia With Love is great for many reasons: Plot, dialog, cast, and locations all play important roles. But the visual style is a key component. How interesting, then, that it stands separate from what we think of as "the" Bond style.

Review: Nymphomaniac: Parts I & II

Michael C. here fresh from a four hour romp through Lars von Trier's sexual subconscious. First a review, then a hot shower. Or five.

It’s tough to think of a recent film more resistant to review than Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Not only to does it vacillate wildly in quality between brilliant and dreadful, but it also feels redundant to review a movie so thoroughly engaged in the act of reviewing itself.  

We are first introduced to Charlotte Gainsborg’s Joe laying beaten and unconscious in an alley. When Stellan Skarsgård’s Seligman picks her up off the ground and gives her a place to rest, she narrates her lifelong saga of sexual exploration to him by way of lengthy explanation for her current state. [More]

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April Showers: Home Alone 2

waterworks each weeknight at 11 as we turn on the cinematic shower. Here's Andrew Kendall on Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

No, it’s not December, but I'm taking a trip down memory lane to ubiqutious Christmas film. The Macaulay Culkin Home Alone films were ubiqutious during my childhood and I was obsessed with them. Kevin McCallister is just the kind of precocious child that children would be enamoured with. And, still, for all the obsession for some odd reason I never saw the first five minutes of the New York based sequel until a few years ago, which robbed me of some essential information regarding one of two important showers in it. As the family prepares to go out to a Christmas shower Kevin laments that his Uncle Frank is keeping him from getting dressed.

“My tie’s in the bathroom. I can’t go in there ‘cause Uncle Frank is taking a shower. He says if I walked in there and saw him naked I’d grow up never feeling like a real man. Whatever that means.”

Whatever that means - I wonder how many children left the movie asking their parents what that meant? Kevin's Dad just brushes him off and tells him to go get his tie. And, so he does.

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Stage Door: Michelle Williams in "Cabaret"

Jose here. I have a confession to make that might make me very unpopular around here: I don’t get Michelle Williams. I understand the reasons why she’s beloved and acclaimed and why she’s earned three Academy Award nominations so far, but I can’t bring myself to declare myself as part of her fanclub. The reason behind this is that I can’t fully fathom her as a true sexual being, yet time after time she’s asked to portray characters for whom sex is an essential trait. For instance, as much as she aced the moves, comedic timing and picaresque tone of Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, she played the most famous sexual icon of all time as a timid porcelain doll, whose internal turmoils kept her from having an emotional life. What is the point of having Marilyn onscreen if you’re not having at least mildly naughty thoughts about her?

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One From the Heart to Francis Ford Coppola

Glenn here. As Jason already established, today is Francis Ford Coppola's 75th birthday today. Talia's brother, Sofia and Roman's dad, Nicolas and Jason's uncle, and Gia's grandfather presides over a clearly very talented family that keep kicking artistic goals. We're only four months into this new year and Sofia has (apparently) been hired for her first big studio film, Jason Schwartzman has appeared on screen in indie box office hit The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Gia's directorial debut, Palo Alto, is about to hit cinema screens. What's Frances up to? Well the five-time Oscar winner is laying low it seems after none of his ultra-arty projects - Twixt, Youth Without Youth, Tetro - took off the way he likely expected his artistic return to.

It's then a perfect opportunity to dig a bit deeper into his extensive filmography and find something you've never seen. I know it's perhaps the smallest minority in cinema history, much to the derision of everyone I have admitted it to, but my personal favourite Coppola title is not any of The Godfather films, or The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, or even Bram Stoker's Dracula. No, rather, it's the man's 1982 musical oddity One from the Heart. Yes, the film that sent him bankrupt and forced him into a director-for-hire for two decades (pro: The Rainmaker; con: Jack) is actually my favourite. One of many weird, high-concept musical follies from the era that I unequivocally love more than I probably ought to. My love isn't some misguided contratianism, but rather One From the Heart just has many things that I love in movies: a knowing artificiality, a beautiful messiness, and Teri Garr. Who doesn't love Teri Garr?

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