Michael Armstrong vs. James Bond
That Arresting Rhythm:
"You may know the right wines, but you're the one on your knees. How does it feel, old man?"
In From Russia with Love, Bond battles SPECTRE agent Red Grant, a man with little personality and only a single goal of killing James Bond, a task SPECTRE has trained him specifically to carry out. Grant is occasionally seen lurking and following Bond but he has no personality and is clearly the evil to Bond’s good within the reductively binary worldview the films present 54. Since the film’s pre-credit sequence shows that Grant’s goal is to kill the hero, the audeince does not worry about Grant’s death but in fact desires it. In Torn Curtain, though, because the audience does not identify with Bond as deeply as it does with Michael, the murder of Grant does not make the audience feel connected or at all responsible, the way the murder of the sympathetic Gromek does 55.
Rosa Klebb hits Grant with her brass knuckles to test if he's ready for his mission to kill James Bond