There is a peculiar restlessness to the films of Nicholas Ray, and a strong, unsettling undercurrent of violence and neurosis, in the style as well as in the characters. The struggles and the anxieties within the people leak out and affect the mise en scène, turning every space into a potential battlefield. And that violence is frequently acted out against objects. Chickamaw crushing Christmas ornaments with his hands in They Live By Night (1949), Jim assaulting an office desk in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Rico Angelo shooting at a photograph of Jean Harlow in Party Girl (1957). His characters are all on dangerous ground, living by night in lonely places, and if they win their victories are bitter. Ray had ten good years, 1949 - 1958 and although he struggled a lot, not least with himself, there is an abundance of truth and beauty there. Films of great sadness and hopelessness but tinged with compassion and poetry; even though love cannot last it was still sweet while it lasted. "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me."
Patrick McGilligan's description of The Lusty Men (1952), my favourite among Ray's films, is apt for most of his work. "Plot and genre conventions had gradually been shaved away in the scripting process; the episodic nature of the story reflected Ray's ruminative personality, its plotting was secondary to the character studies and emotional landscape."
Back in the days when Suede was a great band I saw them at a concert, and I was so overwhelmed by how good it was that I began to cry. Something similar happened as I saw Martha Nabwire and Niki Tsappos dance in this new documentary about them. They are hip hop dancers, among the best in the world, and seeing them on the floor or on the stage, completely disappearing into their acts, letting their bodies move as if the laws of physics do not apply to them, as if they had become one with the music, deadly serious yet bursting with joy, is so mesmerising and so moving that I can think of few things to compare it with. The force, the energy, the technique, the rhythm, it is both raw power and life-affirming exuberance. And unlike how dancers are usually dressed, Martha and Niki dance wearing sneakers, loose-fitting sweatpants and college sweatshirts. They are not sexualised or objectified; it is their control of, and movement of, their bodies that is the focus, not their bodies in themselves.
Martha & Niki, made by Tora Mkandawire Mårtens, begins in 2010 as Niki and Martha are participating in Juste Debout, the world's biggest Street Dance competition. The final is in Paris and they win, becoming the first women to do so. They also become a global sensation. The film then follows them for four years, first from competition to competition, and then with more emphasis on their differences, which become more pronounced, and their partnership begins to crumble.
There are two things to consider here, one is the two dancers and the other is the film. Since they are so good, and such powerful personalities, it might be tempting to overlook the weaknesses of the film. One is the lack of context and specific information about the contests they participate in. It is clear that Juste Debout in Paris is a major thing but later in the film they are at various other competitions, such as one in the Czech Republic, and nothing is said about them, and why they are there and what significance it might have for their careers. There is also very little sense of how much time has passed. If I did not know that the film followed them for four years I would not have been able to tell, it might as well have taken place during a few months.
At one point Martha and Niki are in New York, competing in Brooklyn, but they do not win this time, they only come a close second. They seem to react to this with disproportional disappointment, and afterwards they go on a rather bizarre trip to Cuba, an all-inclusive tour package with a Salsa course included. Why did they do that? It felt like a desperate effort to save their partnership, but it was not spelled out in the film. That whole section instead felt almost like a satire of such tours. I also wondered why the filmmakers included so much of it, but it might be because going there convinced Martha that she needed to get away, and be by herself for a while, and not with Niki.
The last section also raised questions. It seemed as if Martha just left, without telling Niki anything; leaving her high and dry. Then, a year later, they are seen talking in a hotel room in Johannesburg. Why where they there? It first seemed as if Niki had gone there just to talk to Martha about why she left, and to sort out their affairs. If so, that seemed to be a very expensive way of making up (if indeed they had had a real falling-out). Or had they gone there together for a competition? If so, this was not mentioned. They did go to an orphanage in Soweto for a workshop together, but was that the reason why they were in South Africa to begin with? But if they had gone there together, then what had happened after Martha left Niki a year ago? Had they made up and were a team again? But if that was the case why did they now have what seemed like a heartfelt talk about what happened a year ago? I sometimes wondered, with so much left unsaid, if the film was staged, that their conflict was faked to add drama to the film. I do not actually think so, maybe the filmmakers just forgot that just because everything was obvious for them it might not be obvious for those watching it. But it did feel weird to have so many question marks surrounding most of the sequences. Such things would not matter as much in a work of fiction, and not at all in some films, but this is not such a film. This is a documentary and therefore I care about coherence, continuity and context.
So as a narrative and as a film Martha & Niki is not particularly impressive, but whenever they start to dance, all such negative thoughts disappear.
I have written about films since 1997, more or less regularly, yet I have never actually considered myself a critic. In the beginning I felt I was not qualified enough to call myself a critic (which was just silly) and the last ten years or so I have, when asked, preferred to called myself a film historian (which I am), but still, for reasons unclear, hesitated to use the word critic. Partly I think because it felt belittling (which is even more silly), and that scholar sounded more serious. But I love criticism and read it more or less every day, and have done so since 1997 as well. (Yes, that was an important year for many reasons. It was also the year I moved out of my parents' house, and, incidentally, the year I first sent an email. I remember it was that year because I had sent my first piece of film criticism to the editor by fax and he suggested I send it again as an email, if I had the means to do so. I had to ask a friend of a friend who had an email account.) So since I am qualified and it is not belittling I will henceforth refer to myself as a critic. Not exactly the Edmund Wilson of our time but a critic just the same.
There are three things by which a critic can be judged: the level of command of the facts, the validity of the opinions and the style of writing. I sometimes feel that the third part, style, is what I personally value the most. But somebody who gets all their facts wrong is of course intolerably, although many seems not to be all that bothered with it for some reason. So I read criticism for the artistry of it, i.e. the style. But also because I want to learn new things and to expand my horizons, and to find new ways of looking at things I am already familiar with. Among critics that I read and re-read are Pankaj Mishra, Edmund Wilson, James Wood, Ruth Halldén, Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling, and they have all enriched my life, influenced me, guided me. In the introduction to his excellent book The Critic in the Modern World, James Ley writes that "[o]ne of the most evident of the various cultural anxieties that have shadowed the practice of literary criticism throughout its modern history is a nagging sense of doubt about its necessity" but I do not have that nagging sense. On the one hand it is not more unnecessary that most other things we humans do. On the other hand, if it really served no purpose it would not exist. Since people write and read criticism it has a purpose and is a necessity.
None of those mentioned above were film critics but one of the contemporary film critics I particularly like is A.O. Scott at the New York Times and his book Better Living Through Criticism, just released, is the reason for this post. I read the book last week and it was a great pleasure, not least because it was written for people such as myself, by which I mean, among other things, that it is a book about people who love Henry James, the Louvre and Howard Hawks and who have had discussions about what art is and what criticism is, and often have had to speak up in defence of both art and criticism. Scott has done it before in a filmed discussion with David Carr in 2012, which can be considered something of a dress rehearsal for this book. After having seen their debate I commented on it in an earlier post (here) which I recommend that you read if you want to know my views on film criticism. Some of the comments about, or rather against, critics that came up in their discussion are also addressed in Scott's book.
Better Living Through Criticism is not just about film criticism; it is about criticism in general. One chapter is about museums, centred on the Louvre in Paris, and another chapter is about taste. Scott analyses poems by Rilke and Keats and does a fine reading of Henry James's novel The American. He discusses the arguments for being kind or for being harsh, and about the difference of being a bad critic and being wrong. Bad is not something to be, but to be wrong is both natural and healthy Scott believes, and I agree with that. It is not an exact science, and when we change, or the context changes, we might feel differently about something we once loved or hated. But some of Scott's examples are perhaps less than obvious. In the chapter about being wrong he writes about Frank S. Nugent's review of Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938). Nugent did not like it whereas today it is considered a classic and one of Hawks's finest, and Scott's point is that this is an example of how tastes change over time. I would like to point out though that there are many today who feel the same way about Baby as Nugent did in 1938, whereas Otis Ferguson, also writing in 1938, thought it was an excellent film. "This film holds together by virtue of constant invention and surprise in the situations; and Howard Hawks' direction, though it could have been less heavy and more supple, is essentially that of film comedy." Ferguson wrote in his review in The New Republic. So where does this leave us in terms of the changing of tastes?
Bringing Up Baby
Among the film critics of earlier days whom Scott does not mention but that I like to read are C.A. Lejeune and Dilys Powell, but then I would like them considering their unwavering championship of John Ford. Lejeune called him "probably the finest film director now living" ("now" being 1940) and they did not just like the social dramas such as The Informer (1935) or The Grapes of Wrath (1940) but his other films too, including the Westerns. Lejeune wrote a lovely review of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) for example. When Ford's The Sun Shines Bright (1953) came out Powell used it as a test-case in her review the same year, and pointing out how different art forms require different approaches:
To explain to a sophisticated taste why The Sun Shines Bright is so good a film strikes me as nearly impossible. A sophisticated literary taste, that is. In the cinema sophistication wears strange colours, and the most austere judge will admire a piece which to a reading man may appear tearful tosh. Nothing sadder than to watch some devoted film critic trying to explain to a dramatic or a literary critic - or even an art critic, for artists outside their own field are ruled more than they think by literary ideas - that to appreciate a film you have to look at it, not just listen to it. Human desperation can go no further. (From Powell's review in The Sunday Times.)
In the end of her review she points out that the film is not realistic in the sense that it is about the real world, but it does not pretend to be. It is Ford's world, "an artist's abstract of life".
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
It is worth emphasising this because conventional wisdom (and Scott's book is part of that convention) has it that before the critics at Cahiers du cinéma in the mid-1950s nobody took American popular cinema seriously and film directors were not considered artists. I do not know how many times I have read critics and scholars claiming that people such as Ford and Hitchcock were "discovered" by the French. But this is just not true. At best you could argue that the French critics enlarged the group of directors whom was taken seriously; they spoke favourably about, for example, Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich in a way few had done before. But the directors of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s who today are generally considered the elite are pretty much the same as was considered the elite before Cahiers, such as Eisenstein, Murnau, Ford, Wilder, Lang, Welles and Hitchcock. (Ferguson frequently referred to Hitchcock as "a genius", and in his review in The New Republic of The Lady Vanishes (1938) he called him "a one-man show /.../ almost an academy".) Perhaps the only definitive addition the critics at Cahiers made to the pantheon has been Hawks, with the qualification that in the US he had already been celebrated repeatedly by Manny Farber, and several French critics, already in the 1920s, loved his films. "It is a work of Howard Hawks, auteur of A Girl in Every Port, which in itself is a recommendation." Michel Vaucaire wrote about Scarface in Le Crapouillot in 1932, although Hawks's biggest French fan back then might have been Jean George Auriol.
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In High Fidelity (Stephen Frears 2000) Rob's girlfriend Laura is pushing him to start a record label and be a producer. Her argument is something like "It's that you're making something. You the critic, the professional appreciatory, are now putting something new into the world. The second one of those records are sold you're officially a part of it." The implication here is that if you are a critic you are not actually doing anything, and not contributing anything. It is not an unusual view and one of the reasons why Scott wrote his book is to argue against that point, and make the opposite claim. Criticism is creative and an art form in its own right. "That the critic is a craftsman of sorts is obvious enough; I want to insist that the critic is also a creator." (p. 17) In the second chapter he points out that many great artists, such as Jean-Luc Godard, T.S. Eliot and Édouard Manet, are critics not only because they write criticism but because in their art they are commenting on others films, books, poems and paintings. But a work of more traditional criticism, a review, an essay, can also in and of itself be a work of art. Art and criticism go hand in hand.
Scott quotes a lot of critics along the way but there is a quote by Alfred Kazin that he does not use, even though Kazin argues something else that Scott wants to put across, that criticism is "so basic a communication between men", So not only is criticism an art form, or can be, but it is also something we all do almost on a daily basis. It is part of being human. It is also an intellectual endeavour, and this is important for Scott. To think, to question, to criticise, these are things that we should do, and must do, if we are to prosper. And yet... "Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. 'Critical thinking' may be a ubiquitous educational slogan - a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood - but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant." (p. 10) So an important impetus behind the book is clearly that, to emphasise the importance of the free-thinking intellect when such a thing is not necessarily valued. But Scott does not fall into the trap of saying that there was once a golden age and now everything has gone to the dogs; he is more enlightened than that. He does also make fun of all those who have proclaimed the death of the movies and sighed about how they do not make good films any more. "Some of the most respected and shrewdly perceptive critics in the field have shared this view, at moments that would in due course be held up as pinnacles of glory: Agee in 1941, Manny Farber in 1962, Pauline Kael in 1979, David Denby in 2012." (p. 186)
But Better Living Through Criticism is not a history of criticism. It is a defence, and celebration, of criticism, and it does a very fine job of that. Now there are more new books on the subject, with a more strict focus on film criticism, such as Girish Shambu's The New Cinephilia and David Bordwell's forthcoming The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture. Hopefully I will return with posts about them too.
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I thought I end by mentioning some of my favourite film critics. One of the best, and for me personally most influential, is Tom Milne. Among other things he has written a great book about Rouben Mamoulian, been assistant editor of Sight & Sound, and he wrote reviews for various newspapers and in Time OutFilm Guide (which he founded). He also translated French books and articles into English. My favourite of working critics today is Glenn Kenny, especially when he writes at his blog Some Came Running. Kenny, like Scott, also writes for the New York Times, as does another of the great ones, Manohla Dargis.
Awake in the Dark, edited by David Denby, is a fine collection of reviews and articles by a number of film critics, including many of those mentioned in this post.
Here, finally, is a video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz, also among the best critics today. (There is a lot more to Boetticher than the five films that are discussed in this video essay but it still captures the essence of the filmmaker.)
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Scott does on one page write about Dr Mabuse's island when I suspect he means Dr Moreau's, but I will not hold it against him. In any event the astute invocation of Monty Python's The Life of Brian (1979) at another point makes up for any mistake he might have made.
For more reviews by Otis Ferguson: The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson (1971)
For more reviews of Dilys Powell: The Golden Screen (1989) and The Dilys Powell Film Reader (1991)
For more reviews by C.A. Lejeune: The C.A. Lejeune Film Reader (1991)
Here is my homage to Andrew Sarris. Here is my post about Robert Warshow. Here is a post I wrote about by thoughts about art, and how I define it.
In 2012 I founded an online film journal, Frames Cinema Journal, and Catherine Grant was my guest-editor for the first issue. It has many articles on criticism in an age of open access.
Some suggested, non-film related, readings:
Irving Howe's 1969 essay about the New York Intellectuals.
Pankaj Mishra's wonderful essayEdmund Wilson in Benares.
Amit Chaudhuri's review of James Wood's latest book.
Alfred Kazin's book On Native Ground (1942).
The title of this post is of course inspired by John Locke.
The superlative act of the critic is to find in a work of art for the delight of modern temperaments some previously unsuspected implication of beauty. (Lewis E. Gates)
I have long had a soft spot for the films of Walter Hill. He has been doing his thing since the 1970s, although it was a long time since he was fashionable, and his films are tense, terse and focused. But they are also very stylised and often they have a ballad-like quality as if they were inspired by songs by Woody Guthrie. Often they are set in the past and often in the American south, and they are always filled with music. Local music, depending on where they are set, and in about half of the films he worked with composer Ry Cooder. He has one weakness and that is the role of women. They are hardly ever more than prostitutes, often they get beaten up, and while they are not necessarily different from the men in that respect they have no agency. It is only the men who act, most often single-minded but they do act.
Yet Hill was also a driving force, as writer and producer, behind Alien (Ridley Scott 1979), which has a very powerful female lead, and the subsequent films with Ripley as well. Hill was also a producer to Prometheus (Ridley Scott 2012). But that just shows how Scott made Alien his, and set the tone. It is a better film than any of those that Hill directed himself.
Before Hill began directing his own scripts he first wrote a couple of scripts for others, such as The Mackintosh Man (John Huston 1973), The Drowning Pool (Stuart Rosenberg 1975), a belated sequel to Harper (Jack Smigth 1966), written by William Goldman. Best though was The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah 1972). Then Hill made his directing début, Hard Times (1975), set in the past and in the south (New Orleans).
Charles Bronson plays Chaney, a bare-knuckle fighter who happens to come into town on a freight train. After arriving he meets "Speed", played by James Coburn, who organises prize fights. The two become a team until Chaney has to move on, leaving on another train. It is cool and crisp, as it should be. He followed it with The Driver (1978), as lean and pared-down.
But Hill's best film might be Southern Comfort (1981), an incredibly intense and terrifying film set in a Louisiana swamp where a group of national guardsmen on training duty encounter the local population. Due to their stupidity and racism the guardsmen enrage the locals and are killed, one by one. The men deal with this is very different ways, some going crazy, others growing with the challenge, and part of the appeal of the film is to see who will survive and how. That, together with the wonderful cinematography and the music, is what makes it such a great film. The last ten minutes or so in particular are really remarkable.
The film is also set in the past, 1973, and is easy to read as a comment about the war in Vietnam. It also revisits the same story as in The Warriors (1979); a small group of men in a hostile area must, after having lost their leader, fight their way back to safety. After Southern Comfort Hill made one of the key buddy films, 48 Hrs. (1982), with Nick Nolte as a cop and Eddie Murphy as a convict working together in the search for a vicious killer. It is good (Janet Maslin was a fan) although more gritty and less stylised than many of his other films. That stylisation, by the way, might have reached its peak in Streets of Fire (1984).
Many seem to think that the 1970s and early 1980s were Hill's only good years but I like his later work too. There were a number of weak years with minor work such as Red Heat (1987), and a few films are rather nasty, such as Another 48 HRS. (1990), but in the mid-1990s he was back in form. Films such as Wild Bill (1995), Last Man Standing (1996) and Undisputed (2002) are almost as good as the best of the early ones, and they stay true to his style, themes and influences (such as Raoul Walsh, Jena-Pierre Melville, Sam Peckinpah and Akira Kurosawa). The good ones outnumber the bad with a large margin.
"The Cold War in Istanbul will not remain cold very much longer."
Last year at least two major films about the Cold War were released, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Guy Ritchie 2015) and Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg 2015). Since the Cold War ended some 25 years ago they were of course set in the past, whereas once cold war stories were very much part of the present. One fine example is the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love (Terence Young 1963).
It is often said, regarding the new-found strength of the four recent Bond films with Daniel Craig, that they are a symptom of England's wish to imagine herself as a global power and proof that she still misses the days of the empire. I do not think it is a particularly convincing argument. For one thing, that empire was lost even before the first Bond film, Dr. No (Terence Young 1962), so it would be more plausible to argue that the Bond series began is a reflection on that loss, rather than it being a factor today, especially since Dr. No takes place in Jamaica the year it gained its independence from Britain. Also, Bond has never been a defender of the Empire, his business has been to protect the homeland and its allies against contemporary foes. There is still a Britain and a MI6 so there is no reason why there should not be an agent working for them, even if the Empire is gone and the Cold War over. And neither have the makers of the Bond films pretended that things have not changed, quite the opposite. The films usually rather aptly follow with the times and deals with what the British consider their biggest threat of the day. (In the last films the threat has been a combination of global terrorism and enemies within MI6 and the government, but it is interesting to note that Islamic jihadists have not yet appeared.)
Films about the Cold War often invoke the game of chess, and From Russia With Love is no exception. The master plan to outwit the British and the Russians is concocted by the world's greatest chess master, Kronsteen, working for SPECTRE. His idea is to trick Bond into stealing a Lektor decoding machine at the Russian consulate in Istanbul, and then steal it from him in turn whilst killing him under humiliating circumstances as a revenge for Bond having killed Dr No in the previous film. A hitman, Grant, is assigned by SPECTRE to watch over Bond, keep him out of harm's way until he has stolen the Lektor, and then strike against him. Two other participants in the game are Tatiana Romanova, called Tania, a Russian woman who works at the consulate with the Lektor, and Rosa Klebb, another operative for SPECTRE.
Klebb and Grant
It is a game on several levels. First there is Kronsteen's game, who handles everyone as just a pawn, and all moves and counter-moves have been anticipated by him. Another layer is the game between the British and the Russians. "The game with the Russians is played differently here." Kerim Bey, MI6's man in Turkey, says to Bond at one point. "For day-to-day routine matters, we make it easy to keep a tab on each other." But when Bond arrives in Istanbul that relaxed atmosphere is soon gone and people begin to die. One game, where the participants knew that they were playing, have been replaced by another in which the participants are unaware of them being played, and played out against each other. There is also another allegory for the Cold War; an aquarium with Siamese fighting fish who are always at each other's throats, fighting with each other for no apparent reason, ("Brave, but on the whole stupid. Yes, they're stupid." as Blofeld says.) Touches like these add to the richness of the film.
Ian Fleming's novel on which the film is based is at times rather racist in its depiction of Turks and Turkey but that is not the case with the film. Turkey is not exoticised, nor is it treated in a racist way, and neither are the Turks that appear in the film, Kerim Bey is clearly Bond's equal, unlike, say, Quarrel in Dr. No. It is different with a sequence in which Bond and Kerim Bey pay a visit to a camp where a group of Roma are living. The Roma are friends and allies but their life in the camp is treated as an exotic fantasy, albeit not mean-spirited and they are neither criticised nor made fun of. Compared to the depiction of Africa, or "Africa", in plenty of contemporary films it is surprisingly benign.
Terence Young once said that he made the first Bond film (Dr. No), the best (From Russia With Love), and the most successful (Thunderball 1965), and this is still true. He was unusually inspired during the making of this one, taking inspiration from both Alain Resnais and Alfred Hitchcock. Young is generally seen as the one who created the cinematic James Bond (as opposed to Fleming's literary version). When making Dr. No he taught Sean Connery how to talk, move and dress, and insisted on putting the style and the look, and a slightly mischievous touch, at the centre of things. The clothes that Bond was wearing had to be just right, even the sleeves had to be approved by Young. (The first two films were written by Johanna Harwood and Richard Maibaum, but Harwood quit after From Russia With Love because of Young's interferences and the changes he made to their scripts.) But although style and fashion were important to him, Young also wanted to keep the films grounded in real life, and one reason From Russia With Love is so good is because it is rather serious, an actual spy thriller which can stand alone as such, and not just as another instalment in the Bond series. The Cold War was not just a backdrop here but is at the core of the film. The location footage also helps. A sequence when three different agents are spying on each other and Tania Romanova, and which is set in Hagia Sophia, is a particular highlight, partly for the location and partly for the confusion as to what exactly is going on. Another highlight is the long sequence on board the Orient Express from Istanbul to Trieste, where so many people, agents and double agents appear as to be enough for two more films. This is also where Grant and Bond have their fight in a compartment while the train is moving, a scene which is a rather spectacular accomplishment, both for the editing and framing and for the tension. (Here, besides Young, the editor Peter Hunt must be praised.)
"The first one won't kill you. Not the second, not even the third. Not until you crawl over here and you kiss my foot." Grant says, and Robert Shaw's steely delivery of his lines is superb, with the right combination of madness, ruthlessness and contempt.
The film is not all serious, there are plenty of jokes, some obvious and some subtle, in keeping with the Bond tradition. One particular favourite is when Tania asks about Western girls and Bond says "Well, once when I was with M in Tokyo..." As it is being recorded, M and Miss Moneypenny is listening in and M, highly embarrassed, turns of the recording. (The relationship between Bond and M has usually been interesting. Perhaps not when Robert Brown played the part, in four films, but when played by Bernard Lee in the first 11 films and later by Judi Dench in 8 films. These two have been like Bond's parents, fiercely protective when speaking about him with others and partly amused, partly exasperated when having to deal with him in person, and they are among the very few that Bond have always respected, and never mocked.)
The chemistry between Connery and Pedro Armendariz who plays Kerim Bey is another strength of the film. He and Bond become friends; a genuine bond is formed between them, which is also unusual in Bond films. Tania Romanova is also unusually humane; shy, hesitant and sweet, and these are strengths, not weaknesses. She is unusually real for a woman in a Bond film, a believable human being. There is real affection between her and Bond, and the chemistry between Daniela Bianchi and Connery works well too. (Despite the fact that Bianchi's English was not good enough so she was dubbed by Barbara Jefford.) And in the end, it is not Bond who saves her but she who saves Bond. She has to make a choice, to step out of the game and choose between her duty to her country (as she is led to believe) and her duty to her love. She chooses love, and Rosa Klebb dies instead of Bond.
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For an interesting analysis of the differences between the original version of the novel From Russia, With Love and two different Turkish translations, see "Lost in Translation: James Bond's Istanbul"
by Sean R. Singer in The American Interest 8.3 (Jan/Feb 2013): 90-96.
Pedro Armendariz had previously worked with Luis Buñuel and John Ford, among others, and it was apparently Ford's suggestion that Armendariz play the part of Kerim Bey. He was dying of cancer during the making of the film and he killed himself shortly after.
Thunderball has made more money than any other Bond film, with Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton 1964) in second place. Skyfall (Sam Mendes 2012) comes third, bringing in only half as much as Thunderball. (Adjusted for inflation of course.)
