Headscratchers / From Russia with Love

• Remember when those two Gypsy girls are having a Cat Fight over who gets to marry the Prince? All Fanservice aside, why didn't they just have THE PRINCE decided which girl to marry?!
  • Maybe he was the one who suggested the fight?
  • In the book it's explained as "There's so much bad blood here that whichever one he picks, the other one will try to Murder the Hypotenuse anyway, so might as well have the fight open and aboveboard and over with as quickly as possible".
• Why did Grant decide to shoot Bond several times? The entire plan relied on it looking like he had committed suicide.
  • Because Grant was a psycho which was the reason Kronsteen's elaborate plan failed.
  • Besides, he can always make it look like Tatiana was the suicide. Or have Bond's "suicide" be so messy (like jumping off the train into the water or something) that no one gets a good look at the body.
  • Actually, given Blofeld ordered Klebb specifically to make sure Bond's death was painful and humiliating, Grant might just be following orders.
• Are we ever told which of the Gypsy girls get to marry the Prince?
  • Nope.
  • They both spend the night with Bond. Win-win-win! Except for the prince, that is.
  • My guess is, since the green-clothed one sees Bond off right at the car while the other watches from the porch, it was her.
• Why is Kronsteen such a chessmaster? Does it take a member of Mensa to come up with the idea of having a hot girl lure Bond?
  • That wasn't the plan. The plan was to have a staged defection which the British would suspect as a trap but not suspect that SPECTRE was behind and to ratchet up the tensions between Russian and British intelligence to the point that SPECTRE would never be suspected. This depended on a whole host of people including Tatania, Bond and the various intelligence services being deceived and people acting in exactly the right way, hence why a chessmaster's mind was needed.
  • Because Hollywood thinks chess players alone are automatically super clever at all other types of thinking.
• If MI6 can so easily get the plans to the Soviet embassy, lay a bomb under its foundations, and walk in on the pretense of wanting a visa...why do they need Tatiana's help to get the LEKTOR at all?
  • Aside from Tatiana first alerting MI6 to the presence of the Lektor, conforming it is what she says it is and pointing MI6 to its location within the Embassy, there is also the fact that for the Lektor to be any use, they'll need a cypher clerk to help work it. And of course they’ve also got a defecting KGB officer as a bonus.
• Why not just have Klebb order Tania to hand over the decoding device? As far as she knows, Klebb is still with SMERSH. And remember that in the movie, SPECTRE's main goal is to get the decoding device, the killing of Bond is a bonus (and Kronsteen doesn't bring it up until the end of the briefing). Or at the very least, Blofeld asking why not? (I know I know, "there wouldn't be a movie if they did" but in-universe, this doesn't make sense)
  • The Lektor is a piece of high grade cryptographic equipment. As such the security regulations are almost bound to be such that NO-ONE would be allowed just to pick up it up and take it away by themselves. At the very least, removing the Lektor from the premises would be a two person job, one more person for SPECTRE to have to fool. It would also have to be very carefully accounted for, even if Tania does take it out of the building, once it doesn’t reach its supposed destination or Tania innocently says ‘oh, Rosa Klebb wanted it’ a widespread security alert will be raised, security codes changed and the Lektor becomes worthless. Sure SPECTRE could maybe come up with a way round this..but why not just let the British do the hard work of planning?
• What did Bond think happened to Kerim on the train? If he believed that the Russian spy and Karim did indeed kill each other and didn't suspect a third party on the train, why did he go off on Tanya afterwards? Sure, he believed she was in on the conspiracy that had ultimately gotten Karim killed, but the Russian agent getting captured, then killing his captor in an escape attempt wouldn't have been part of the plan (if the Russians wanted them dead, they could have easily shot them in their rooms), so it seems out of character for even grief-stricken Bond to be furious at a hot chick for that. Plus, what could Tanya really have told him that he didn't already know? "Yes, I was ordered by the Russians to seduce you and cross the border with you and the decoder. I was meant to meet with a contact on the train, who might have had orders to kill you, but he's dead now and obviously I'm not ordered to or aren't willing to kill you or I'd have done so already."
• So Grant stalked Bond on the train, overheard the sign-countersign, and used it to first impersonate Bond to his contact across the border, then kill the contact and impersonate him to Bond. But how did Grant know what the contact looked like if Bond didn't? And how was the contact supposed to know who to say the sign to if he didn't know what Bond looked like?
  • The "sign" is an innocent phrase ("can you spare a match") which can lead to any number of responses, only one of which is the correct one which reveals the person saying it to be an ally; presumably the contact has a vague description and can approach anyone matching that description until he gets the right response. In the book, Grant explains that SMERSH always knows MI6's "code of the month" because they routinely kidnap an agent and get the relevant information from him. Since Bond (just about) survives, he will presumably mention this during his debrief.
  • Because the contact did a really, REALLY bad job of blending in. They're in Croatia (Zagreb), late at night, and the contact is pretty much the ONLY white, well-dressed Englishman watching the train waiting for somebody. He stuck out like a sore thumb, it didn't take a galaxy brain for Grant to identify him.
  • Grant tells Bond on the train "We sweated your recognition code out of one of your men in Tokyo before he died".

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