From Russia with Love (1963)

The second installment to the James Bond series

Summary

-The famed British agent gets involved in an assassination plot involving a Russian beauty and retrieving a stolen Soviet encryption device stolen by S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

Cast

-Sean Connery: James Bond

-Daniela Bianchi: Tatiana Romanova

-Pedro Armendariz: Ali Kerim Bey

-Lotte Lenya: Rosa Klebb

-Robert Shaw: Donald 'Red' Grant

-Bernard Lee: M

-Eunice Gayson: Sylvia Trench

Did You Know?

-The knife shoe weapon Rosa Klebb uses is an actual weapon used by the KGB

-Sir Sean Connery had eight specially made Saville Row suits for this film. Each one cost $2,000

-Pedro Armendariz was terminally ill with cancer during filming. It's possible he contracted cancer from filming near a US nuclear test site during The Conqueror (1956). He accepted the role in this film to provide financial security for his wife. The schedule for shooting was modified to film his scenes while he was able to. Towards the end, director Terence Young had to have a stand in film the longer shots. One month after all his scenes were completed, it was discovered Armendariz had shot himself inside a Los Angeles hospital

-Vladek Sheybal, a highly respected Polish actor and good friend of Sean Connery, was hesitant to take his role in this movie because he thought it wouldn't be a good career move. His good friend Sean Connery convinced him to take it and the risk paid off. It helped his career big time

-When filming scenes with Sean Connery, Robert Shaw revealed on The Tonight Show that he had to stand on wooden crates because he was four inches shorter than Connery

-Daniela Bianchi, at 21, was the youngest actress to play a leading Bond girl

-Sean Connery was introduced to the game of golf during this movie by Robert Shaw

-Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig, two actors who would play James Bond themselves later on, cited this as their favorite Bond movie

-In the novels, Bond often drives his favorite car, a Bentley. The car appears in this movie for only time in the series

-Col. Rosa Klebb was based on a real-life Russian Colonel that Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond stories, once wrote about in The Sunday Times