From Russia with Love

Essential, and the best Bond film if what you want is a spy film rather than a spectacle. There is no lair, no doomsday device and almost no technology beyond a briefcase. The plot is a defection that is obviously a trap, which Bond walks into anyway because the prize is worth the risk, and the tension comes from watching a set of professionals work.

The structural innovation is that the audience knows more than Bond does. The film opens with his murder being rehearsed on a training ground, then spends its first half following the people arranging it, so that every apparently lucky break is visibly a step into the trap. SPECTRE playing both superpowers against each other for profit is the idea that let the series survive the end of the Cold War forty years later.

Robert Shaw's Red Grant is the best henchman in the series and the closest thing to Bond's equal: silent for most of his screen time, physically larger, and finally undone by ordering the wrong wine. The fight in the train compartment is cramped, ugly and almost entirely without music, and every brawl in the Craig films is descended from it.

It is also the last film before the formula hardened. There is a pre-title sequence, the first of its kind, and a gadget, and after this both became obligations. Watch it second.