From Russia With Love (1963)

The unveiling of the SPECTRE agent playing James Bond in the teaser had to be reshot when Young felt that the extra playing the part looked a bit too much like Connery for comfort. Afraid that audiences might be confused by the unveiling, he reshot the scene with the extra now sporting a moustache.

Muhammat Kohen, who appears briefly as the tour guide at Saint Sophis is a genuine tour guide at the mosque. Shooting was frequently interrupted when genuine tour groups invaded the location!

Speaking to Robert Osborne of the Hollywood Reporter (12 April 1982), Broccoli named From Russia With Love one of his favourite Bond films, alongside Goldfinger (1964) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).

Anthony Dawson, playing the unseen Blofeld, had previously played Professor Dent in Dr No (1962).

The Lektor device (Spektor in the novel) was inspired by Ian Fleming's wartime work for the top secret Ultra Network, the group that cracked the German Enigma code during World War II.

SPECTRE's headquarters is 'played' by the main admin building at Pinewood Studios.

Bond shoots Krilencu though a giant poster advertising the film Call Me Bwana which had previously been produced by Broccoli and Saltzman.

The manner of Bond's escape from the pursuing boats is similar to that which featured in an earlier Maibaum script, The Red Beret - in that film, a platoon of soldiers escape from a minefield by firing a rocket across the ground to clear a path through the mines. Here, Bond does something similar with a flare gun and barrels of gasoline.

A scene was cut just before Bond meets Romanova on the ferry. Bond tries to lose his mysterious pursuer and hops into a taxi. Bond takes control of the taxi's brakes, causing the following Bulgarian to run into the back of the taxi as a third car joins the pile-up. The driver of the third car turns out to be Kerim Bey. When the angry Bulgarian protests to Bey, he is told "My friend, this is life" while Bond makes good his escape in the British Embassy's Rolls Royce. Young shot the scene ten times to get the long ash on Bey's cigar that actor Pedro Armendariz insisted on. It wasn't until a private screening week before the film's release that Young's twelve year old son spotted that the Bulgarian had in fact already been killed by Grant in the mosque! Exit one carefully crafted sequence...

The budget was $2,000,000, double that for Dr No (1962).

Daniela Bianchi's voice was dubbed.

Martine Beswick (Zora the gypsy) was the very first Bond girl, seen in the credit sequence of Dr No (1962).

There was alleged to be some real friction between Beswick and on-screen adversary Aliza Gur. Young was apparently quite enamoured of Beswick which didn't sit too well with Gur - some of that gypsy fighting may not be as pretend as one might imagine!

During the climactic gondola ride through Venice, a woman in a red dress can be seen standing on a bridge. This was the wife of director Terence Young.

As an in-joke, title designer Robert Brownjohn and his cinematographer Frank Tidy plastered main unit director of photography Ted Moore's name all over the gyrating backside of Julie Mendez in the title sequence.

Editor Peter Hunt assembled a preliminary version of the film for screening to executives at United Artists and decided that the film needed spicing up a bit - when Bond opens the briefcase supplied to him by Q, Hunt spliced in a dramatic shot of Dr No's base exploding from the previous film! Young was so amused by the trickery that he took a copy of Hunt's version and kept it. Happily, the sequence survived and was included in the Inside From Russia With Love (2000) documentary.

Last Updated: 1 January, 2009