Amazon.com Essentials:
Directed with consummate skill by Terence Young, the second
James Bond spy thriller is considered by many fans to be the best of
them all. Certainly Sean Connery was never better as the dashing Agent
007, whose latest mission takes him to Istanbul to retrieve a
top-secret Russian decoding machine. His efforts are thwarted when he
gets romantically distracted by a sexy Russian double agent (Daniela
Bianchi), and is tracked by a lovely assassin (Lotte Lenya) with
switchblade shoes, and by a crazed killer (Robert Shaw), who clashes
with Bond during the film's dazzling climax aboard the Orient
Express. From Russia with Love is classic James Bond, before
the gadgets, pyrotechnics, and Roger Moore steered the movies away
from the more realistic tone of the books by Ian Fleming.
--Jeff Shannon
Amazon.com video review:
Sean Connery casts a long shadow over the James Bond legacy. He created the movie persona
and starred in six of the first seven features, all but establishing the cool cold warrior as the
world's most suave secret agent. The six titles in MGM's third collection celebrate the Connery Bond
with three of his classics, including From Russia with Love, 007's second and perhaps finest
outing. A blond, buff Robert Shaw plays Bond's most ruthless nemesis, and Lotte Lenya and the great
Pedro Armindáriz costar in this sleek, high-energy trip through the Iron Curtain. Connery
travels to the Far East in You Only Live Twice, which introduces the international criminal
conspiracy SPECTRE and its cat-loving mastermind, Blofeld (Donald Pleasence). After a brief
retirement, Connery returned for Diamonds Are Forever, his final "official" appearance in the
Bond series (15 years later he played Bond for a rival studio's Never Say Never Again). This
more tongue-in-cheek adventure takes 007 to Las Vegas, where he battles Blofeld (this time played by
Charles Gray) and his minions--namely, a pair of fey, sardonic henchmen and a team of bikini-clad
karate killers.
Octopussy, a colorful cold war thriller and one of Roger Moore's better Bond outings, stars
Louis Jourdan as a corrupt Afghan prince and Maud Adams (making her second Bond appearance) as the
ringmaster of an all-babe traveling circus team that unknowingly carries a nuclear bomb. Christopher
Walken hams it up under a platinum-blond hairdo while his Amazon bodyguard, Grace Jones, growls
through A View to a Kill, a silly but often visually impressive adventure that made it
obvious Moore was too old and stiff to carry on the Bond legacy. The torch was passed to Timothy
Dalton in The Living Daylights, an attempt to clear away the camp elements of Moore's
portrayal and return to a lean, hard-edged spy thriller for the post-cold war era. It lacks the
larger-than-life characters and spectacle of previous Bond pictures, but Dalton was a tough,
ruthless 007 and a worthy inheritor of the legacy, which was then passed on to Pierce Brosnan.
The DVD editions of the films each feature audio commentary by the director and key members of the
crew, "making of" documentaries, and a host of stills, TV spots, trailers, and other supplements.
--Sean Axmaker
