Catching Up With 007 in 1971
If I seem to go on about From Russia With Love, it may be because it’s the Bond film I’ve viewed more times than any other, being the first one I ever owned.
Shortly after the birth of our first child, back when various companies were trotting out competing home video formats, we bought an affordable RCA CED video player and two discs. The first titles in our small collection were King Kong and From Russia With Love.
Whenever there was nothing interesting to watch on cable or on either of the two indoor movie screens in our midsize Kansas town, we’d flip a coin and decide which of our discs to slide into the machine. Fortunately, either choice was eminently re-watchable. Before long we could also choose Casablanca or the 1951 version of The Thing From Another World.
By the time our son was two, old enough to load a disc on his own, we had bought a copy of the original Star Wars which we remember him watching about 300 days straight. It may have been only 200, but that's still a lot. Before turning three he had taught himself to read after becoming aware that although there were only three Star Wars movies, there was a galaxy full of Star Wars books out there. Let’s not talk about the toys.
My first viewing of From Russia With Love had come a full decade before there was such a thing as home video, when it played at a drive-in as part of a Bond triple-feature ahead of the premiere of Diamonds Are Forever. In those days films re-released on the drive-in circuit were notorious for having sizable chunks missing, scars left by rickety film projectors in dozens of one-horse towns.
Dr. No clearly showed the most wear that evening, with numerous vertical grooves etched into the celluloid and brutal jump-cuts that were not the result of Peter Hunt’s signature editing style for action sequences. From Russia With Love was at least sufficiently intact to make sense throughout.
I was immediately caught up in the fairy-tale milieu of From Russia With Love, even though I had never seen the specific Disney films Fleming tweaks in his story. The gypsy camp, the grotto with a horde of rats, an “enchanted” mirror, a sleeping potion, and the setting of Istanbul on the Golden Horn, all fed into the notion that I was watching something from a fabled past.
After the fade-out of From Russia With Love it was almost time for Goldfinger, the one film on that night’s program which several in the audience had viewed years before, though perhaps only once. It had not yet made its debut on network television. During the intermission, when a few sleepy girls suggested bailing early, their dates were insistent. “No, you’ve really gotta see this one.”
It was like being a grad student on an archaeological dig to discover the origins of the Bond phenomenon. I felt pleased about making the connection between Dr. No’s gauntlet and the gun barrel motif, watching the development of the art of the title sequence, smiling with approval at the addition of the prototype for a pre-credit teaser, and hearing the musical accompaniment gradually find its footing before settling comfortably into John Barry’s slinky, brash, London-big-band sound.
By the time Goldfinger finally exploded onto the screen that night we all understood that the film hadn’t burst forth fully-formed six years earlier like Venus rising from the sea. The film series had naturally evolved and would continue to do so.
The series of books had gotten off to a similarly promising start, but one that endured its ups and downs (according to Fleming’s mentor Raymond Chandler, it was a downhill slide most of the way).
However, after the publication of From Russia, With Love in 1957, Ian Fleming’s quaint cottage industry of curated espionage-adventure stories would soon be taken public, and the stock price was about to soar.