'The Russia House': love in the time of glasnost

Based on a 1989 novel by John Le Carré, The Russia House was directed by Fred Schepisi and released on Christmas Day, 1990. It was, along with Red Heat, the last film to be shot before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in August 1991. The cast had great names: Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer as the leading couple, and supporting actors like Klaus Maria Brandauer, James Fox, Michael Kitchen and Nicholas Woodeson.

It deals heavily with politics, ideals and (of course) espionage, all in the brink of the glasnost led by Mikhail Gorbachov's government in the Soviet Union. Barley Scott Blair (Sean Connery), a British rusophile editor, meets with Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer) during a writers reunion in Russia, where both agree on the same ideals for world peace, openness and discontent for governments. Some time later, a woman known as Katya Orlova (Michelle Pfeiffer), tries to find Barley to deliver him one of three manuscripts containing sensitive information including nuclear secrets from the USSR. She fails to meet Barley, but hands it in to an associate of him, who -also unable to find him and concerned about the content of the papers- resorts to the British Intelligence. The British find Barley exiled in Lisbon. They convince him to travel to Russia and make contact with Katya in order to get to Dante, verify the information and get the other manuscripts. Barley reluctantly agrees, however things will turn dangerous when he begins to fall in love with Katya.

However, the key of the story relies heavily on love. "Unselfish love, grown up love. Mature, absolute, thrilling love," in the words Barley uses to declare his feelings to Katya. Their story is beautifully written and their love really feels natural, without a sense of adventure or the usual oversexualization that movies have nowadays. In fact, their only sex scene is shown offscreen and both are dressed when they get horizontal. Despite the 28-year difference between Connery and Pfeiffer and not taking advantage of the fact that the Scottish actor was looking impressively good at 60, all the scenes between Barley and Katya have this sense of warmness and caring which gives a sense of authenticity to everything.

Sean Connery convincingly plays the bohemian Barley, an idealist, somewhat anarchist intellectual and jazz lover. The kind of man you would find in a literary club or a library, who enjoys a simple and modest life and has complete disregard for politics or money: "If there is to be hope, we must all betray our countries. We have to save each other, because all victims are equal. And none is more equal than others." Michelle Pfeiffer also did a perfect job portraying a working-class Russian woman, with three children to care for, discreetly dressed and with more sweetness than sex appeal. Likewise, her Russian accent is incredibly convincing and there are a good number of scenes where she talks (dialogue is a big part of the film), so that's an effort deserving a proper recognition. Richard Macdonald's sets for Katya's home showcase how modest her life is: a rather urbane flat with a shower that isn't working properly and she has to fix with a hammer. Those little details also sum up to give a good reflection of the late 1980s Russia which was starting to slowly leave Communism behind. "They just want to be like us," Barley admits to the British agents controlling him.

The Palace Square in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), was one of the scenarios of the film, and director of photography Ian Baker takes full advantage of the wideness of the square and the details of the monuments and statues surrounding the place as Barley meets Dante, another role brilliantly played by Klaus Maria Brandauer who reunites with Connery seven years after the unofficial Bond film Never Say Never Again. "You are wearing grey today, Barley. My father was sent to prison by grey men. He was murdered by men who wore grey uniforms. Grey men ruined my beautiful profession, and take care, or they will ruin you too," the hopeless Dante tells Barley concerned that he might been used by politicians and civil servants, which he doesn't trust at all when it comes to delivering the manuscript, and hopes that Barley can make this information be published on his own without spies and governments in the middle.

Composed by Jerry Goldsmith, the film's soundtrack is a character on itself. A beautiful mix of piano, strings, floute and saxophone which gives the story a special gravitas. In fact, given that there is much talking going on the movie and that at times the pace is quite slow, it is Goldsmith's score that saves it. The main motif of the score, which in the soundtrack album serves for "Alone In The World", performed by Patti Austin (lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman), works beautifully during a scene where Barley takes a train from Moscow to Leningrad and different panoramas of Russia are shown through the window, from the city itself to rural regions and other sights. 

The biggest flaw in The Russia House is perhaps the pacing and structure. There is too much talking and so many words generate confussion. Other things aren't quite clear: the "Russia House" is the informal name of the section of the British Secret Service devoted to watch the actions taking place in the country, basically to spy them, but there is never a satisfactory explaination of this. However, considering the overall beauty of the movie, this can be forgiven. If you want to watch a meaningful romantic movie with elements of espionage and Russian politics involved, this one is certainly recommended.

Nicolás Suszczyk 

The Beauty and Ugliness of James Bond

Promotional artwork for Dr. No, the first James Bond film, showcasing the attributes of 007's female interests

The Oxford Living Dictionary defines beauty as "a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight" and ugliness as "the quality of being unpleasant or repulsive in appearance." Without a doubt, in over 55 years of history the cinematic James Bond franchise has played with beauty and ugliness in 24 official movies. Even the two unofficial films, Casino Royale from 1967 and Never Say Never Again in 1983 have echoed these topics, the first one prominently teasing audiences with a tattooed woman holding two guns. 

The good looks of Sean Connery in 1962:
Dana Broccoli's female instincts told
her she was the right man for the job.

In Ian Fleming's novels, Bond was described as a handsome man resembling musician Hoagy Carmichael. The beauty of his women were thoroughly described by the author (their hair, skin, eyes and body shape) as -by opposition- the ugliness of the villains with their bad plastic surgeries or swollen heads. The first cinematic Bond adventure Dr. No, rather faithful to the source material, has respected the Fleming standards for beauty with a handsome and virile protagonist like Sean Connery and three handsome girls coming from different parts of the world: British gambler and playgirl Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson), the exotic and deadly oriental secretary Miss Taro (Zena Marshall) and the Jamaican native Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress). The film's nemesis were represented by the "three blind mice" assassins, corrupt Professor Dent (Anthony Dawson) and the evil mastermind Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman), who of course couldn't match the elegance and physical traits of Sean Connery's 007. Something different, tough, could be said of his future opponents Red Grant (Robert Shaw) and Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi) in From Russia With Love and Thunderball, who could perfectly match Bond's poise and looks. 

An interesting insight on how beauty was of the essence for producers Albert R "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for their shaping of the long-lasting 007 series was the way Sean Connery and Ursula Andress landed in their roles. Cubby and his wife Dana were watching Darby O' Gill and The Little People and when Connery had appeared in the film Dana thought he was an incredible handsome man. The producer followed the female instincts of his wife and on November 3rd, 1961, the then little-known Sean Connery was announced as the star of the adaptation of Ian Fleming's Dr. No. In the case of Andress, it was producer Harry Saltzman who felt absolutely stunned by a photo of the girl in a wet shirt (taken by her husband John Derek) and that eased her way into the role of the native woman Bond meets in Crab Key who doesn't become his love interest until the very last seconds of the film. 

Claudine Auger in a photoshoot for
Thunderball, showing the deadly
side of her character Domino.

Flash forward 55 years later and it looks as if beauty was an uncomfortable word when promoting the Bond films. Since the late 1980s and particularly in the 2010s, probably because of the resurgence of feminist movements, the intelligence of the Bond girls (sorry, Bond women) is emphasized to the point every one of the female leads in the series has become "Bond's equal": a cliché that now feels as a publicity tactic more than an actual definition of the new generation of Bond's ladies. Maybe only Camille Montes of Quantum of Solace can fit the description and only Anya Amasova from The Spy Who Loved Me or Wai Lin from Tomorrow Never Dies can more faithfully fulfill that definition. The other Bond women could be an intellectual or emotional match or even have some knowledge of handguns. But that doesn't make them "Bond's equal" for sure. 

Probably some people would think Bond girls are mere sexual objects when they're not. They never really were and the James Bond saga has empowered much more than other action films. Take into account Honey Ryder wielding her knife and trying to defend herself of No's guards, or Domino Derval (Claudine Auger) saving Bond's life at the end of Thunderball. In You Only Live Twice, all three girls were far more than a pretty body or face: two skilled Japanese secret agents (Akiko Wakabayashi and Mie Hama) and a deadly redhead vixen (Karin Dor) who pretends to commit to Bond's charm only to attempt against his life shortly later. Don't forget how Andrea Anders (Maud Adams) and Lupe Lamora (Talisa Soto) dared to betray their dangerous lovers in The Man With The Golden Gun and Licence To Kill, risking their lives to help Bond (Andrea is ultimately terminated by a golden bullet). A good example is also given in The Living Daylights, where Kamran Shah (Art Malik) and his Afghan men look astonished as Kara Milovy (Maryam d'Abo) rides her horse in the desert with an AK-47 rifle in hand to help Bond, surrounded by the Russian army. Needless to say the Afghan troops weren't used to a woman in their troops and -much less- a woman disobeying a man and going on her own. 

Prelude of an all-girl fight: Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike)
threatens Jinx (Halle Berry) in Die Another Day.

Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) from The World Is Not Enough is a proof that female leads in the Bond films have been empowered by the James Bond series: she used both men for fools: her former kidnapper terrorist Renard (Robert Carlyle) and Bond himself, who believed her to be Renard's target for a second time and a woman who lost her in a terrorist attack, when she was actually the mastermind who employed and seduced Renard to kill her father in revenge for not paying her ransom. The following film, Die Another Day, is the first 007 film to feature a well-choreographed fight between the good and the evil Bond girl, and Pierce Brosnan's 007 debut in GoldenEye had an action scene only with the leading lady Natalya (Izabella Scorupco) escaping from all kind of explosions and finding her way out of the doomed workplace attacked by General Ourumov (Gottfried John) and Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen). 

Daniel Craig in a publicity still for 2015's
SPECTRE. His muscular body was displayed
prominently in his James Bond films.

"I wonder why I'm not seeing people comparing six different actors who played James Bond," said an Alicia Vikander fan Twitter account lately complaining on the fuzz provoked by those who preferred Angelina Jolie over the Swedish actress as Lara Croft in the recent Tomb Raider reboot. However, the six men who played James Bond were compared through their looks and acting skills ever since Sean Connery was replaced by George Lazenby in his one shot 007 flick On Her Majesty's Secret Service, released in 1969, almost half a century ago. Some said Lazenby was handsome but not in the scale of Connery, others that he was a complete failure and talked in retrospect of a "forgotten Bond". Roger Moore was labelled as attractive, but it was always pointed out his lack of virility and strength in comparison to Connery, particularly in his last three films where -despite looking very good at 57- he was "too old to play Bond". Then came Timothy Dalton, who received the tag of being too tight for the role and some humour was needed for Bond. Lately, Dalton was very much vindicated by the fans, but there were those who considered his second and last appearance Licence To Kill killed the franchise. The opposite happened with Pierce Brosnan: applauded and admired during his four films where he reinvigorated Bond as an action hero for the 1990s and the new millennium, but now slammed as being too cheesy, soft-spoken and slim built for a man of action as his replacement, the muscular Daniel Craig, who even tolerated the dishonour of a web site boycotting his choice as the rebooted 007 of Casino Royale. 

Ian Fleming's James Bond always had thoughts for appearances and looks: Donovan Grant's Windsor knot on his tie gives him bad feelings in From Russia, With Love and he suggests Honeychile Ryder not to fix her broken nose with plastic surgery in Dr. No. Moreover, in the John Gardner novel For Special Services, he comforts Nena Bismaquer after learning she had one breast removed. For Bond, reason is not always the answer and a lot is given to intuition, that's why someone's look, attitude, beauty or ugliness can tell him something. 

In the case of the EON Production's franchise, despite their political correct production notes, they always knew a reason why men go to watch James Bond films are the attractive women like Ursula Andress, Jill St. John or Britt Ekland. And a reason why women watched them is because they also felt attracted for the physique of Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Daniel Craig, not forgetting the bon mots of Pierce Brosnan and Roger Moore and the virility of Timothy Dalton. 

Never judge a book for its cover, they say. But it's always better when a good book has a great looking cover indeed. 

Nicolás Suszczyk 

The Swinging Bonds of 1967 - Too much (in common) for one James Bond!

The “Swinging London” waves threw barrels of color to the grey streets and society 50 years ago, in 1967. During that year, as Pink Floyd, Jimmy Hendrix and The Beatles were heard loud in music stores and Twiggy was photographed everywhere, the regular moviegoer had not only James Bond film offered to him, but two.

For the first time –sixteen years prior to 1983’s “Battle of Bonds”– two different adaptation of Ian Fleming’s character would face each other, both bearing big discrepancies but a few things in common.

On June 12, You Only Live Twice was released. For the first time in the official 007 series produced by Albert R Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, a great departure has been made between the script and Fleming’s original novel, consisting in a dark and dramatic story where a depressed Bond was out of revenge for the death of his wife against Ernst Stavro Blofeld, leader of SPECTRE. In the 1964 book, the secret agent follows the lead to one Dr. Shatterhand, owner of a suicide garden in Japan. The doctor is revealed as Blofeld in the last chapters, and his plan doesn’t go beyond attracting “dishonoured” Japanese citizens to commit suicide.

Two months before this film, Columbia Pictures released Casino Royale, an adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel. American producer Charles K Feldman acquired the rights of this novel some time before Broccoli and Saltzman. Since the duo refused to join forces to produce the movie, Feldman went solo and opted to satirize the contents of the novel. The 1953 book was a dramatic story that included a horrid torture scene and a tragic ending, where the girl whom the protagonist falls for reveals to be an enemy agent and commits suicide afterwards.

You Only Live Twice poster artwork by Frank McCarthy, depicting 007 walking upside down the villain's lair inside a volcano. A image that promises limitless andventures and thrills.

As the Space Race was at its height, with astronaut Ed White performing the first US spacewalk in the Gemini 4 mission, You Only Live Twice screenwriters Roald Dahl and Harold Jack Bloom oriented Blofeld’s plan to a blackmail that included the hijacking of space rockets in order to “inaugurate a little war” between the US and the Soviet Union, both powers challenging each other for the Space Race since the late 1950s.

Dahl was known for his children stories like Matilda or Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, Bloom for TV series like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Bonanza. Scribes with this kind of background lightened the story in a significant way, providing the SPECTRE organization with an enormous lair hidden in a volcano (it costed one million dollars, the budget of the first Bond film Dr. No), explosive action sequences, and lots of humoristic situations for Sean Connery’s Bond.

Casino Royale poster artwork by Robert McGinnis. The
psychodelic tatooed lady invited the audience to a
world of extravagant action and beautiful ladies

The usual quota of beautiful women was also exploited with three main female characters (the good girl who dies, the bad girl who also dies, and the one that remains with the hero, according to Dahl’s formula) opposing the romantic Kissy Suzuki from the book, who tries to retain Bond in the last chapter when he loses his memory after a fiery battle with the villain.

Unlike the Lewis Gilbert film, whose only big problem was Sean Connery getting tired of the James Bond image and the Japanese fans and reporters stalking him even in the bathroom (literally), the production of Casino Royale was far more complicated.

Five directors helmed the film: John Houston, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, Ken Hughes and Joe McGrath. None of them knew what the other was shooting. The stars had a volatile relationship with each other, namely Peter Sellers who refused to work with Orson Welles, kept making a change after another in his scenes, and had some arguments with his co-star and fiction lover Ursula Andress.

All the dramatism of Ian Fleming’s novel was of course left aside to make a spy spoof. The story, written by Wolf Mankowitz, had the retired Sir James Bond played by David Niven (one of Fleming’s favourite actors for the role of his creation) visited by the head of the world’s biggest intelligence services, begging him to return to active field after a mysterious enemy has killed most of their agents. The fun starts as Sir James differentiates himself and criticizes “the bounder” who got his name and number and complains of the overuse of gadgets in the service. This is of course an indirect to Connery’s official Bond, who is “an impostor” in this world.

David Niven as Sir James Bond in Charles K Feldman's
Casino Royale. Niven was Ian Fleming's idea of an
onscreen Bond, but this clearily wasn't the version
he expected.

Suddenly, Sir James’ house is blown away and M dies on the attack (actually, it was M’s plan to blow James house away, to force him to return). After meeting M’s widow Lady Fiona and a number of teenage girls trying to seduce him –whom, unlike what the official Bond would have done, he rejects– he plans to train a number of male and female agents and name them all “James Bond 007”, to distract the enemy. The big threat was none other than Sir James’ nephew Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen), plotting to kill all men over 1.60 mt and make all women beautiful with a bacillus he created.

Only the name of a few characters and the card game (held between Le Chiffre and Evelyn Tremble, a baccarat expert recruited by Sir James) remain from the book. Instead, Casino Royale preferred to take full advantage of the colourful era with its ravishing cinematography, over developed costumes and bombastic music by Burt Bacharach, all in a film made with the spirit of the Pink Panther saga and almost following the structure of What’s New Pussycat, a prior Feldman production also starring Sellers and Andress.

Casino Royale should be remembered more as the testimony of a funny 1960s film than a James Bond film, but You Only Live Twice stands out as a solid James Bond movie as produced by EON and tied up to the official franchise. The difference is very clear in that aspect, with only reading a plot summary of both flicks.

However, the Lewis Gilbert movie also stands out in comparison of the first four official Bond films. Far from the simplicity of Dr No and From Russia with Love, closer to Goldfinger’s escapism and taking one step ahead of Thunderball’s lavishness, this movie broke new ground as the fantastic comic book-like situations in the series (three girls, action scenes, gadgets, villain and henchmen in underground lair) began to soar from this film on in the series.

"The things I do for England!" - Bond is seduced by the deadly SPECTRE agent Number 11 aka Helga Brandt (played by the late Karin Dor). Following Robert Dalh's Bond scripting formula, she was "the bad girl who dies".

This production would also be the template for other Bond stories as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979), both also directed by Lewis Gilbert. Even another cinematic secret agent, Harry Palmer, would have a more extravagant movie in 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain, opposed to the rather urbane-looking films The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral in Berlin (1966).

Freddy Young’s lens captured the neon lights of Tokyo and the orange sunsets of Kyushu Bay, while John Barry added some oriental sounds to his fifth Bond soundtrack, besides his grandiloquent percussion that included interpolations of Nancy Sinatra’s title theme.

These two –rogue and official– Bond productions meet each other as representative of the time they were released. Artist Robert McGinnis worked in the poster campaign of both movies delivering extravagant and colourful designs: Casino Royale got a lady with her body tattooed with scenes of the film, while You Only Live Twice presented our hero walking upside down Blofeld’s volcano in an impeccable black tuxedo (in a poster variation done by artist Frank McCarthy) or smiling as he piloted his Little Nellie autogyro. None of them could beat the other in terms of visual style, the cinematography being very innovative and sharp in both productions. And the two provided a large amount of extravagant fight, chases and explosions.

Everything in 1967 seemed to be extravagant, colourful, surrealist and bombastic. James Bond wasn’t going to be an exception.

Nicolas Suszczyk