EXCLUSIVE ARTICLE

The depiction of sex and violence in From Russia With Love proved a huge challenge for EON Productions as they sought to ensure an ‘A’ certificate in Britain for the second Bond film. Drawing on archive material from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), LUKE G. WILLIAMS takes an in-depth look at the censorship process surrounding the film and examines how the James Bond films helped push the boundaries of the ‘permissive society’ that was emerging during the 1960s.

The 1960s was a decade in which British society and popular culture underwent a series of fundamental changes. Attitudes towards the depiction of sex and violence within popular culture had been pretty puritanical prior to 1960, but one event largely changed that – the trial of Penguin Books under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act for publishing a full and unedited edition of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. The ‘not guilty’ verdict delivered by a jury of three women and nine men on November 2, 1960 validated the clause in the 1959 Act that ‘obscene’ material could be published if it could be justified on the grounds of the “public good” (i.e. artistic merit).

One man who watched the progress of the ‘Lady Chatterley trial’ with particular interest was John Trevelyan (1903-1986) – then Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors (as the BBFC was then known) since 1958 and a BBFC ‘examiner’ since 1951. In the wake of the trial, Trevelyan, under whose leadership the BBFC had become gradually more liberal, reflected: “The British Board of Film Censors cannot assume responsibility for the guardianship of public morality. It cannot refuse for exhibition to adults films that show behaviour that contravenes the accepted moral code, and it does not demand that ‘the wicked’ should also be punished. It cannot legitimately refuse to pass films which criticise ‘the Establishment’ and films which express minority opinions.”

It was against this more liberal backdrop that the James Bond films entered into public consciousness. Given the moral hand-wringing which had greeted the increasing popularity of Ian Fleming's original Bond novels (most famously expressed by Paul Johnson in his review of DR. NO, appearing in the New Statesman on April 5, 1958 under the headline ‘Sex, snobbery and sadism’), it was inevitable that some measure of moral controversy would surround the Bond movies, based as they were on the exploits of a central character conceived by Fleming as a trained killer with a liking for casual sexual encounters. Producers Albert R. Broccoli & Harry Saltzman were well aware that they would have to carefully gauge and control the representations of violence and sex in the films if they were to avoid a dreaded ‘X’ certificate, which would prevent the films from becoming a mainstream box-office success. To cite a precedent, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom had, in 1960, received an ‘X’ certificate and been greeted with widespread criticism and moral revulsion, effectively ending Powell's hitherto glittering and critically acclaimed career. Such a response to the first Bond movie, Dr. No, could have wrecked Saltzman & Broccoli's plans for a lucrative series of 007 films.

All of which explains why Saltzman met with the BBFC ahead of the classification of Dr. No; as Trevelyan himself later recalled: “I had a discussion with Harry Saltzman and we agreed that since he intended to make a series of these films we should aim to get them all suitable for the ‘A’ category since ‘X’ certificates would reduce his viewing audiences.” A key factor in ensuring an ‘A’ certificate (which allowed children under the age of 16 to watch a film, if accompanied by an adult) was the insertion of humour into the Bond films, an element largely missing from Fleming's original novels. Dr. No director Terence Young is regarded by many Bond scholars as the man who insisted on this change in approach, as he explained in an interview with Richard Schenkman in 1981: “The main thing is that one had to persuade Sean [Connery] and everybody on the first picture that this picture was going to have a certain style… Tongue-in-cheek, but no more than that. You had to play it with a straight face, but the audience had to realise that there was a little sense of humour lying around… An awful lot of funny bits in Dr. No were knocked up on the set.”

Whether such humour was a conscious attempt, from the start, to disarm the censor is unclear, but Young's tongue-in-cheek approach certainly helped placate Trevelyan. “The only reason I used to get away with a lot of it was because I always used to try and make a laugh at the end of a violent scene,” Young later admitted. “That was one of the traditions I set up … He [the censor] giggled and laughed and he let us get away with it.” Editor Peter Hunt recalled a further tactic that was used to sweeten up Trevelyan. “I got to know him very well,” Hunt confessed. “He was a very reasonable man really… a very nice man. I got to be quite friendly with him. He liked to have a couple of martinis, [so] the producers used to say to me: ‘Go on, Peter, you take him out to lunch and [then] show him the picture.’ And I used to enjoy showing him the picture and having lunch with him, putting a few martinis in him and making him mellow!”

Nevertheless, when Dr. No was released in the UK in October 1962, several critics were unimpressed by its ‘A’ certificate classification and by the BBFC's perceived leniency and liberal attitude towards cinema's newest ‘hero’. Richard Whitehall, writing in influential monthly magazine Films and Filming, was particularly vituperative: “Oh, Trevelyan, art thou sleeping in Soho?” he complained. “This is surely one of the X'iest films imaginable, a monstrously over-blown sex fantasy of nightmarish proportions. Morally the film is indefensible with its lovingly detailed excesses, the contemporary equivalent of watching Christians being fed to lions, and yet its lascivious dedication to violence is genuinely hypnotic.” Whitehall went on to call Dr. No “the perfect film for a sadomasochist society" although he admitted that it lacked “the unrestrained nastiness of that other British mutation, Peeping Tom”.

Several other critics echoed Whitehall's analysis; Penelope Gilliat, in The Observer, called Bond “a vile man to be given as a hero”, while Thomas Wiseman, in the Sunday Express, found it “disturbing that we should be offered as a hero – as someone we are supposed to admire – a man whose methods and morals are indistinguishable from those of the villains”. Nina Hibbin, in the communist Daily Worker, advanced a more sophisticated point, taking issue with the ‘humorous’ approach advocated by Young by arguing that Dr. No “doesn't wallow, as horror films do, in blood and torture and slow death. It goes a stage further – by asking you to take such things for granted, playing for a laugh whenever the sardonic Mr. Bond makes a new joke”.

Despite the moral reservations of some critics, Dr. No was a smash hit in the UK, securing the continuation of the 007 series and ensuring that the cocktail of fantasy, humour, sex and violence, which secured an ‘A’ certificate, would remain in place for the second film in the series – From Russia With Love. Interestingly, Trevelyan later recalled that the violence in the Bond films was more of a concern to him than the sex. “These films were essentially fantasies,” he argued. “Bond being the ‘Superman’ of the 1960s who could not only get all the girls to bed without any difficulty but could escape from any perilous situation, using violence and being quite callous about it even to the point of joking about it. The agreement [reached with Saltzman] resulted in keeping the sex to a reasonable level, but we had some problems with the violence and in most of the films we asked for some modifications.” This recollection does not, however, square with the BBFC file for From Russia With Love, which details that of the “thirteen cuts” required to ensure the film received an ‘A’ certificate, the majority concerned sexual imagery and sexually charged dialogue rather than violence, including seven cuts of “double entendre dialogue”. For example, as early as the second reel, dialogue had to be removed from a scene which referred to “lovers” and “physical enjoyment”. The Tatiana/Klebb scene in reel 2 of the From Russia With Love cutting continuity script in which Klebb quizzes the young Russian woman about her romantic past, clearly shows additional lines were present when the film was originally edited.

Other sequences examined in forensic detail by the BBFC were the belly dancing and gypsy girl fight scenes during reel 5, as Hunt recalled: “We had a great censor problem with the gypsy fight, with the two girls fighting. It was considered to be rather amoral … I had to appease the British censors certainly, and I think various other censors, because they thought it was far too sexy and amoral, the whole fight. And at one point, I remember the British censor telling me that he could see the girls’ pubic hairs. I said to him, ‘I've been watching it frame by frame on the Moviola and I can't! If you like I'll show it to you on the Moviola frame by frame and if you can see anything like that anywhere, I'll cut it out right in front of you!’”

Ultimately, the BBFC insisted that the gypsy belly dance was shortened “removing as many of the shots as possible where she is wriggling her stomach or bending backwards” and also specified that the fight between Zora (Martine Beswicke) and Vida (Aliza Gur) was shortened “very considerably”. Hunt later recalled that the cuts made little difference to the sequence as a whole. “There were a great deal of problems about the gypsy girls fighting, there was a certain amount of displeasure over that. They thought it was very near the knuckle. We had to play around with it. But in the end it resolved itself, I took a few frames out here and there but it didn't make any difference really.” Interestingly, Young recollected that the sequence ended up disappointing its originator, Ian Fleming, who found it too mild! “Ian was very disappointed because in the book I believe they're stark naked or very nearly naked and one of them bites the other's breast, her nipple or something. I said: ‘Ian what kind of a picture do you think we're making? How did you think we'd get away with that?’”

The love scene between Bond and Tatiana in an Istanbul hotel room was another scene to be trimmed to satisfy the BBFC. The shot of Tatiana walking towards the bed nude was removed. This shot (actually not of Daniela Bianchi herself, but of a double clad in a body stocking), was later restored to video and DVD editions – the only original cut to be restored to From Russia With Love in the 49 years since the film's original classification. Also excised were references in the scene's dialogue [present in the cutting continuity script] to Bond “searching” her and Tatiana's line “I hope I came up to expectations”. Additionally, the BBFC insisted that the shots of Bond and Tatiana kissing should be shortened and that the shot of cameramen behind the double mirror secretly filming Bond and Tatiana's love-making should be “shortened and darkened”.

Young, speaking in the early 1990s in typically candid and forthright fashion, remembered this sequence as a particular challenge to get past the BBFC. “We had a lot of censorship problems with this sequence. She was naked and they said: ‘oh, you can't do that!’ In those days they didn't like the idea of people screwing on the screen. You'd normally be expected to pan away to the fireplace to the embers [of a fire] or to something else. There were a lot of nice clichés we used to have in the cinema… waves breaking, white stallions… Today you could show it in a Sunday school! When you analyse it, it's only in the last five years that the floodgates have opened. I mean, take a film like White Palace [a 1990 erotic drama, starring Susan Sarandon and James Spader], I mean [in that film] the physical act is performed about four or five times!” Young also recalled that the censor interpreted the shot of the cameraman mopping his forehead as a witty comment on the lovemaking (“They laughed and said that's not dirty”) and that was the reason why they let the shot through, albeit in the aforementioned “shortened and darkened” form.

One of the more subtle changes requested by the BBFC occurred during the Orient Express sequence when Tatiana asks Bond: “Am I as exciting as all those western girls?” Originally, she asked: “Was I as exciting as all those western girls?” The change of the verb from the past to present tense served to change the implication of the line from Tania asking about her sexual technique to a more general comment about her looks and personality. Another line to hit the cutting room floor due to its sexual connotation was Connery's comment “two hours should straighten this out” as he lowered the blind in the train carriage.

Perhaps the most violent section in the film, and the one that you would have thought would cause the BBFC most concern, was the vicious and jarringly realistic fight between Robert Shaw's Donald ‘Red’ Grant and Connery's Bond. Brilliantly choreographed by stunt arranger Peter Perkins, the sequence stands alone as easily the best fight scene in 007 history – and one of the few times in the series that you feel Bond is in serious jeopardy. Frustratingly, the BBFC files are short of detail concerning exactly what footage (and how much!) was cut from this scene, only stating that EON should “shorten the fight between Bond and Grant”. However, Young's recollection was that only one minor cut was made to the scene: “We got away with this fight because of one thing,” he explained. “And it was a pure fluke. I added it at the end of the scene, [Grant] has made him cough up his money at one stage and Sean says to him: ‘You won't be needing this, old man,’ and he takes it. The censor laughed and, on the strength of that, they only made one cut in the fight. In those days it was considered a very violent fight.”

The final cuts made to From Russia With Love are the most noticeable and jarring. Originally, during the Orient Express sequence, Grant was meant to remark “what a performance!” when referring to the filmed footage of Bond and Tatiana having sex in the Istanbul hotel room. However, the BBFC insisted on removing this line. Similarly, at the end of the film when Bond is in a gondola with Tatiana he was meant to say to her “He was right, you know. What a performance!” while examining the film reel before disposing of it overboard. However, the BBFC also insisted on removing Bond's repetition of Grant's line, leaving the line “He was right, you know” isolated and making little sense. This cut also created an uncomfortable jump in the film's soundtrack and visuals that still looks clumsy and unsatisfactory even to this day, ensuring one of the best Bond films ends on something of a sour note.

Despite the 13 cuts made to the film by the BBFC, several critics still slammed the organisation for granting From Russia With Love an ‘A’ certificate. “What I find extraordinary,” complained Philip Oakes in the Sunday Telegraph, “is that quasi-pornography (which seems to me a fairly clinical description of the Bond dossier) can now be presented as run-of-the-mill entertainment”. Films and Filming also maintained their opposition to the Bond films, with Peter G. Baker writing: “I dislike the hypocrisy in British cinema today. A few weeks ago John Davis, the chairman of ODEON, on which circuit From Russia With Love is generally released, complained that producers are making too many ‘X’ certificate pictures because cinemas need more pictures that are ‘family entertainment’. (I don't know what vice – or virtue? – has to be filmed for the British Board of Film Censors to give such pictures an ‘X’.) If ODEON cinemas really think the new Bond film is nice clean fun for all the family, then Britain has some pretty kinky families… or soon will have.”

Throughout the 1970s, the Bond films were granted ‘A’ certificates, ensuring that families could attend them as a whole, with only the occasional minor cut requested by the BBFC to avoid an ‘AA’ certification. In 1982, the ‘A’ certificate was replaced by ‘PG’ (“some scenes may be unsuitable for young children”), while ‘AA’ was replaced by ‘15’ (“no person under the age of 15 to be admitted”). Although the Bond films were now established in the public's eyes as ‘family entertainment’, in private, at the BBFC's Soho Square headquarters, several examiners believed the Bond movies were not ‘A’ or ‘PG’ material and that the BBFC were wrong to routinely classify them as such. This argument was regularly re-hashed with the release of each new James Bond movie and the anti-Bond BBFC contingent termed this perceived leniency towards the series the ‘Bond allowance’.

It was against this context that From Russia With Love had to be reclassified for video release in 1984. The Video Recording Act of that year (a response to the ‘video nasties’ controversy in the UK) was the first piece of legislation to make it mandatory for all video releases to receive a BBFC certification. As such, all films in circulation, even those that had been classified already for cinema release, had to be re-viewed and re-certified. The BBFC files concerning the 1984 re-certification of From Russia With Love for its Warner Home Video release make for fascinating reading and show how, since the 1960s, the level of violence and sexual references that were considered ‘acceptable’ for a family audience had dramatically changed.

The first BBFC examiner who viewed the video version of From Russia With Love wrote: “Passed ‘A’ in 1963 with some thirteen cuts, this video tape appears to be the cut version, although most of the cuts – seven of them were in dialogue – could be reinstated. Although my memory of the film, particularly of the opening strangling and the fight on the train, was that it was fairly strong, it now appears to be quite acceptable for the ‘PG’.”

A second BBFC examiner concurred with this assessment, stating: “It surprised me, looking at the file, that this second Bond movie was subject to thirteen cuts, mostly removing sexual innuendo… These cuts look very silly now and the last one is very clear as the line “what a performance” is practically the last line of the film… These cuts could now be reinstated and it is a little disappointing that Warner should have sent in the cut version on video.” In truth, it is unlikely that Warner Home Video, or EON Productions, possessed an uncut print of the film. However, despite their desire to see the sexual innuendo reinstated, the second BBFC examiner did harbour some reservations about the violence in From Russia With Love, assessing that it was on the ‘PG’/‘15’ certificate boundary, while also dryly noting, “the main issue, though apparently less of a problem than belly dancing in 1963, is violence”. Of particular concern to this examiner were the following moments in the film:

“1. 2 mins 50 secs. Man in James Bond mask is garrotted.
2. 28 1/3 mins. Close-up of corpse with bloody face in back of car.
3. 39.58 Knife is thrown into man in long shot.
4. 1 hr 26 mins. Lengthy fight in train between Shaw and Connery includes kicks, and a stomp on back. Shaw attempts to garrotte Connery and Connery garrottes him. Unlike the later Bonds, this is played earnestly and is all the more exciting for that.
5. 1 hr 41 1/2 mins. Close up of Rosa Klebb's knife coming out of her shoe.”

This examiner went on to refer to the ‘Bond allowance’ debate within the BBFC, writing: “Whether this violence would be acceptable in another context is one of those imponderables about which we regularly ponder at the Board. In this context, a very famous film shown repeatedly in the early evening (and during bank holiday afternoons by the ITV network in an attempt to get their money back for the Bond series), I would judge this [violence] acceptable. To up the category now would make us look punitive towards video and, in any case, this is a far less sadistic movie than Diamonds Are Forever. It's just a pity we couldn't reinstate the film cuts.”

In hindsight, perhaps the most important role the Bond movies played within the context of screen censorship was establishing a new barometer of what level of sex and violence was and wasn't acceptable within a ‘family’ movie. Had Saltzman & Broccoli not had an understanding and liberal advocate for their work in the form of John Trevelyan then the early Bond movies, and From Russia With Love in particular, might have been far less violent and sexually adventurous, and possibly far less successful than they ultimately were. One of the factors that attracted a younger audience to the early Bond films was that their attitudes to sex and violence seemed so much more modern than in their stuffy and mild contemporary competitors. Although the cuts Trevelyan insisted on being made to From Russia With Love might appear pernickety and inexplicable to a post-millennial audience, his refusal to bow to the self-appointed moralists of his day helped the Bond series gain crucial commercial momentum. As critic Alexander Walker once wrote, Trevelyan “was the super go-between… generous to the artists and patient with the businessmen”.

By the 1980s, with ultra-violent American action thrillers such as Rambo, Beverley Hills Cop and Lethal Weapon breaking box-office records, Bond movies were no longer seen as boundary-pushing cinema but as ‘safe’ family entertainment. When the Bond series next caused a censorship furore, with 1989's Licence To Kill, it was because the filmmakers decided to consciously increase the level of violence in response to their more violent American competitors. But that's a whole other story…

©007 MAGAZINE 13/04/2024

From Russia With Love 60th Anniversary

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