Colonel Rosa Klebb is a fictional character and the main antagonist from the James Bond 1963 film and 1957 novel From Russia with Love. She was played by Lotte Lenya in the film version. Her name is a pun on the popular Soviet phrase for women’s rights, khleb i rozy, which in turn was a direct Russian translation of the internationally used labour union slogan “bread and roses”. (More from Wikipedia)
On the following album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, the targets are even more diffuse. The structure of “When the Ship Comes In” was inspired – by way of the cultural tastes of Dylan’s former girlfriend Suze Rotolo – by a Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill song “Pirate Jenny”; the song comes from their play, The Threepenny Opera. The song is closely associated with Weill’s wife, the Austrian singer Lotte Lenya, and her breakout role was in a 1928 production of The Threepenny Opera. The most famous song from that play is “Mack the Knife”, which was an unexpectedly huge hit for Bobby Darin in 1959. The lyrics in his version of the song even reference “Miss Lotte Lenya”. Lenya is best known to Americans for her role as the villainous Rosa Klebb in the 1963 James Bond movie, From Russia with Love.
(May 2013)
