Which one is this? The first one!
Who’s who in this one? Connery (Bond); Lee (M); Maxwell (Moneypenny); Lord (Leiter).
Where did you first encounter this one? I’m not convinced I saw this before it was released on DVD in 2001, aside from clips in highlight reels which made it feel like I’d seen it already.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Joseph Wiseman in yellowface as the titular Dr. No, our first representative of SPECTRE. He wants to seize control of American rockets headed to the moon.
Who are the Bond girls? Iconic Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, who emerges from the sea like a goddess, to much imitation and/or masturbation. Also, Eunice Gayson as Sylvia Trench – the actual very first Bond girl.
Opening number? No prologue, just straight into Maurice Binder’s prototype title montage, set to Monty Norman and John Barry’s dirty-bass-guitar James Bond theme. Polka dot visuals give way to rainbow-coloured dancing silhouettes which give way silhouettes of the “Three Blind Mice,” who continue into the film proper to do mischief.
What’s memorable about this one? Connery. The beach scene. “No, I’m just looking.” Jamaica. “Bond. James Bond.”
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 7. I’ve always been impressed by how well this one holds up as a stand-alone thriller.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? I’d up it to an 8, nearly a 9. Dr. No is simple and a tad rudimentary, but completely effective.
From the bloat of Die Another Day I’ve traveled 40 years back in time to the film whose release DAD was commemorating, 1962’s Dr. No. The inaugural Bond movie couldn’t be more of a bracing antidote to the other. The speed of it! There’s no bloat here. Dr. No does no fucking around – it’s just whipcrack fast and breezily focused, from the opening setup (a double assassination in Jamaica by three “blind” old men) onward.
As Bond, Sean Connery is so good in Dr. No that he earns all the retroactive plaudits he would accumulate year after year once he’d left the franchise. His introduction at the head of the picture is absolutely delicious – living the night life in London, dressed in his tuxedo, called into MI6 at three in the morning on a matter of some urgency, which of course interrupts his efforts at bedding Ms. Sylvia Trench. The scenes at the MI6 office are capped off by a dawn visit to Bond’s home (!), where, naturally, he discovers Ms. Trench playing mini-golf in his bedroom, wearing nothing but a mens’ tuxedo shirt. He’d only talked to her at the club for a minute – but he’s Bond. James Bond.
It’s often forgotten that James’ standard “Bond, James Bond” was, in its first appearance, a tongue-in-cheek response to Sylvia’s “Trench, Sylvia Trench” in Bond’s first scene; this is one of a dozen ways the leonine secret agent subtly, to the point of invisibility, uses words to get under womens’ skins repeatedly in Dr. No. As should be requirement #1 of any actor playing Bond, Connery in Dr. No is just so unbelievably watchable – lithe, loathsome, electrically charming, and a walking icon of earthy masculinity and scornful sexual pleasure. He wanders around the film lazily investigating its central mystery; he comes out on top in half a dozen sharply-staged fistfights; and he fucks everyone – which must have been scandalous enough in 1962, the number of times in this film that a slow dissolve off Bond kissing a woman to Bond recomposing himself later denotes a lost hour in between.
Remember when Bond movies were tight and unaffected? The makers of Quantum of Solace could have saved us all a load of trouble if they’d just watched Dr. No six times before starting production. I enjoy the daytime scenes in Jamaica best – shot for real on the island by director Terence Young, and concerned with able-minded gumshoeing more than space lasers and blowing up the world. There are less quips, and no bullshit; “It’s a Smith & Wesson – and you’ve had your six” is about as cold a death line as the franchise has produced, and far more satisfying than the punnier ones. Dr. No is a clean, easily entertaining, adventure story, which moves smartly and delivers “like a brick through a plate-glass window,” as MI6’s pre-Q quartermaster describes Bond’s Walther PPK.
Of course, it does become a bit silly that the “James Bond theme” plays constantly throughout the movie – underscoring Bond walking around, sending telegrams, checking into his hotel room, etc. The film does a better job with “Underneath the Mango Tree,” which I always think of as its unofficial theme song, and which gets carried from character to character like a plastic bag blowing in the wind. The orchestral score is not above some tongue-in-cheek humour, too, like the repeated orchestral slams that accompany Bond beating a tarantula to death with his shoe.
It’s a very strange transition from the naturalism of the Jamaica sequences to the surrealism of Dr. No’s lair and Dr. No himself, all of which could have come out of Star Trek; in its third act, Dr. No becomes a different kind of picture, and a less successful one. This somehow fits the overall model of the movie nevertheless, though, given the heightened queerness of Dr. No’s legend around the island and among the characters before his milieu and his means make themselves known. He is spoken of in the first half of Dr. No almost as a spectral figure – outfitted with a “dragon,” to boot, which roves his island torching insurgents – and Ken Adam’s production design for the lair, particularly the room in which Dent speaks to the offscreen doctor, a gargantuan grated skylight above his head, sets up the tonal offset nicely.
Compared to the complex gourmet meals that the franchise would be serving up just a few years later and for most of the rest of its life, Dr. No is a cold, clear glass of water – and all the more enjoyable for it.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, a beautifully restored copy of Dr. No is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on October 27, November 25, and January 20. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.
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