Top film, a bit dated but still great to see again. Connery at his best and Robert Shaw superb.
I had just read the book again and wanted to see what the film looked like.
Excellent.
The second Bond film, bigger, bolder and arguably Connery's best outing, it was certainly his favourite apparently. One of the great things here is it's a good, solid action spy film, the franchise not yet teetering into comic book stylings. The basic story is close to the original novel and it has espionage with action set pieces including a brutal and quite violent fight sequence on a train. 007 is sent to Istanbul to recover a Russian decoding machine coveted by MI6 and offered by a beautiful soviet agent, Tatania (Daniela Bianchi) who claims she'll only hand it over to James Bond. He knows its a trap but the machine is tempting bait. There's plenty of double cross as the nasty SPECTRE organisation is behind everything in the form of the loathsome Rosa Klebb (Lotte Kenya). The great Robert Shaw plays a tough henchman, one of Bond's toughest adversaries, that he must battle and there's a great boat chase. Viewed today the casual violence against women may jar a tad and there's a quite uncomfortable fight between two women that is unnecessary and even Bond himself eventually stops. Overall this is one of the very best of the Bond series and worthy of rediscovery as modern day audiences who only know the Daniel Craig films can see the influences this film had on those.