The picture was directed by Terence Young, produced by Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and written by Richard Maibaum and Johanna Harwood, based on Ian Fleming's 1957 novel From Russia, with Love.
[Notes 1] SPECTRE's chief planner, Czechoslovak chess grandmaster Kronsteen, devises a plan to lure Bond into a trap, using as bait the prospects of procuring a Lektor cryptography device from the Soviet Union's consulate in Istanbul.
SPECTRE operative Rosa Klebb, a former head of SMERSH (Soviet counter-intelligence), is assigned to oversee the mission and chooses trained killer Donald Grant to assassinate Bond at the right moment.
Upon arriving in Istanbul, Bond works alongside the head of MI6's branch in the city, Ali Kerim Bey, while he awaits word from Tatiana.
When the train arrives in Belgrade, Bond informs one of Kerim Bey's sons of his father's death and receives instructions to rendezvous with a British agent named Nash at Zagreb.
He reveals that Tatiana was a pawn in SPECTRE's plan; he intends to kill both her and Bond, staging it as a murder-suicide and leaving behind faked blackmail evidence which will scandalise the British intelligence community.
Taking the Lektor and the film of their night together, Bond and Romanova leave the train in Istria, Yugoslavia and use Grant's escape plan.
Learning of Grant's death and Bond's survival, SPECTRE's enigmatic chairman, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, has Kronsteen executed for his plan's disastrous failure.
Uncredited performances include Michael Culver and Elizabeth Counsell as a couple in a punt, and William Hill as Captain Nash, a British agent killed and impersonated by Grant.
The studio doubled the budget offered to Eon Productions with $2 million, and also approved a bonus for Sean Connery, who would receive $100,000 along with his $54,000 salary.
[5] As President John F. Kennedy had named Fleming's novel From Russia, with Love among his ten favourite books of all time in Life magazine,[6] producers Broccoli and Saltzman chose this as the follow-up to Bond's cinematic debut in Dr. No.
[7] Most of the crew from the first film returned, with major exceptions being production designer Ken Adam, who went to work on Dr. Strangelove and was replaced by Dr. No's uncredited art director Syd Cain.
[9] Ian Fleming's novel was a Cold War thriller but the producers replaced the Soviet undercover agency SMERSH with the crime syndicate SPECTRE so as to avoid controversial political overtones.
[10] The original screenwriter was Len Deighton, who accompanied Harry Saltzman, Syd Cain, and Terence Young to Istanbul,[11] but he was replaced because of a lack of progress.
[6] For the last quarter of the movie, Maibaum added two chase scenes, with a helicopter and speedboats, and changed the location of Bond and Klebb's battle from Paris to Venice.
[6] Peter Burton was unavailable to return as Major Boothroyd, so Desmond Llewelyn, a Welsh actor who was a fan of the Bond comic strip published in the Daily Express, accepted the part.
Bianchi started taking English classes for the role, but the producers ultimately chose to have her lines redubbed by British stage actress Barbara Jefford in the final cut.
[6][18][25] Armendariz's scenes were shot first after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, with Terence Young serving as a stand-in for Kerim Bey for the last two months of the production.
The MI6 office in London, SPECTRE Island, the Venice hotel and the interior scenes of the Orient Express were filmed at Pinewood Studios with some footage of the train.
[19] Cain also later added a promotion to another movie Eon was producing, making Krilencu's death happen inside a billboard for Call Me Bwana.
It had a tear gas bomb that detonated if the case was improperly opened, a folding AR-7 sniper rifle with twenty rounds of ammunition, a throwing knife, and 50 gold sovereigns.
On 6 July 1963, while scouting locations in Argyll, Scotland, for that day's filming of the climactic boat chase, Terence Young's helicopter crashed into the water with art director Michael White and a cameraman aboard.
[54] At the 1965 Laurel Awards, Lotte Lenya stood third for Best Female Supporting Performance, and the film secured second place in the Action-Drama category.
[55] In comparing the film to its predecessor, Dr. No, Richard Roud, writing in The Guardian, wrote that From Russia with Love "didn't seem quite so lively, quite so fresh, or quite so rhythmically fast-moving.
For this mad melodramatization of a desperate adventure of Bond with sinister characters in Istanbul and on the Orient Express is fictional exaggeration on a grand scale and in a dashing style, thoroughly illogical and improbable, but with tongue blithely wedged in cheek.
Its summary states: "The second James Bond film, From Russia with Love, is a razor-sharp, briskly-paced Cold War thriller that features several electrifying action scenes.
From Russia with Love is effectively paced and plotted, features a gallery of detestable rogues (including the ultimate Bond villain, Blofeld), and offers countless thrills".
"[75] Sean Connery,[4] Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli, Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig also consider this their favourite Bond film.
[76][failed verification] Albert Broccoli listed it with Goldfinger and The Spy Who Loved Me as one of his top three favourites,[77] explaining that he felt "it was with this film that the Bond style and formula were perfected".
Featuring a third-person multiplayer deathmatch mode, the game depicts several elements of later Bond films, such as the Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger (1964) and the rocket belt from Thunderball (1965).