From Russia with Love/Trivia


 * Fake Russian
 * Hey, It's That Guy!: Rosa Klebb is played by singer Lotte Lenya.
 * A very young Robert Shaw plays Red Grant.
 * I Am Not Spock: For the rest of Lotte Lenya's life, new people tended to look at her shoes.
 * The Other Darrin: Major Boothroyd, aka "Q," goes from being played by Peter Burton to the much more familiar Desmond Llewelyn.
 * Serendipity Writes the Plot: Rosa Klebb was fighting James Bond using a poisoned shoe knife. The script called for her to be accidentally killed by her own weapon, but the director couldn't figure out a way to film it that didn't look ridiculous. Then someone realized that a) there was a gun on the floor from when Bond had disarmed Klebb and b) the heroine, who had been an enemy agent recruited by Klebb before falling in love with Bond, was just standing there watching the fight. So the director changed the script to have the heroine pick up the gun, and after some hesitation, shoot Klebb.
 * Troubled Production: Pedro Armendariz (playing Kerim Bey) was critically ill and had to shoot all his scenes within two weeks. The script was constantly being rewritten all the way through. Major special effects (such as the wall of fire in the boat scene) failed putting the production desperately behind schedule. Director Terence Young and art director Michael White were nearly in a helicopter that could've killed them both. It's a tribute to the professionalism of the cast and some extremely clever filming by editor Peter Hunt (a lot of Rosa Klebb's dialogue was rewritten and refilmed simply by having Lotte Lenya perform against a back projection) that the film survived and became so successful.
 * Specially because they had to work against the clock to finish the film by the scheduled release in October.
 * What Could Have Been:
 * Reportedly, Alfred Hitchcock was at one point interested in directing.
 * A tragic variant: like it says on the main page, From Russia with Love was chosen as the next film after John F. Kennedy said it was his favorite Bond book. The advance print arrived at the White House on November 21, 1963. Advisers thought that Kennedy would enjoy the film, after he returned from his trip to Texas....
 * Most sources say he did get to see it; he'd had a private screening the night before departing for Texas.