When Roger Moore died a few years ago, I felt obligated to watch one of his Bond movies. That was The Spy Who Loved Me, which epitomizes that actor's films. It was absurdly over the top, but also enormous fun. It also gave us Jaws, arguably the best henchman ever (however badly he was handled in the awful Moonraker).
So when Sean Connery died recently, I wanted to watch one of his Bond films. (I also want to watch Connery's best ever films--The Wind and the Lion and The Man Who Would be King.) But which one? Goldfinger and Thunderball are my favorites and I will undoubtably watch them soon, but I decided to watch Dr. No (1962), Connery's first Bond movie.
I know most of my readers are likely to be members of the global Nerd Herd, so a lot of you probably already know this: Connery actually isn't the first person to play James Bond. In 1954, the TV series Climax! produced a live adaptation of Casino Royale, the first Bond novel. Peter Lorre was the villain and and Barry Nelson played the American spy Jimmy Bond.
But Dr. No took Bond back to his appropriate British roots. The movie also gives us the iconic Bond theme music, though we don't yet get to hear a title song unique to this particular movie. That's a tradition that would begin two movies later with Goldfinger.
There's also no spy gadgets--we wait another movie (From Russia, With Love) to meet gadgeteer Q and watch him explain how a booby-trapped briefcase works. In Dr. No, we meet the an armorer who (at M's orders) takes away Bond's .25 caliber Berreta and gives him the Walther PPK the character would carry for decades.
By the time we get to the end of Connery's run, the films were mixing self-aware parody into the plots, but with Dr. No, the elements that create a Bond film were just being introduced. There was nothing to parody yet and, though there is humor injected via Bond's dry sense of humor, the movie takes itself seriously. Dr. No is a well-constructed spy thriller with a strong hero, one of the most memorable Bond girls and a great villain.
It does take us awhile to actually meet the villain, though. Bond spends most of his time in Jamaica, investigating the disappearance of another British agent. It's relatively late in the film that the case takes him to Crab Key, a remote island on which the Chinese/German mad scientist Dr. No has set up shop. In addition to a small army of guards, he also has an atomic-powered Macguffin that he's using to electronically knock down American rockets.
Joseph Wiseman gives a great performance as Dr. No, exuding just the right mixture of brilliance and insanity. I wish he had been given more of a presence in the movie, but it can also be argued that his late introduction gives the character more dramatic punch.
Connery, in the meantime, humanizes Bond. He is capable and professional. He can also be ruthless, as we see when he rather casually assassinates one of No's agents. But he can also be hurt (he's pretty disheveled after being brutally beaten by Dr. No's men). And he can be frightened. When he awakes at night to find a tarantula has been put in his bed, he's very near panic.
The movie has its flaws. Bad rear projection during a car chase spoils the tension of that scene. Dr. No's lair doesn't look anywhere near as impressive as lairs we'll see in later movies and his atomic reactor is absurdly easy to sabotage.
In the book, Bond kills Dr. No in a very original way, while the movie ends with a so-so and far-too-short fight between the two before the doctor bites it. Also, Bond's escape through a booby-trapped air vent was a lot more epic in the book. (I include a clip of that scene here, though, because it does show us a disheveled and bloodied Bond we'll rarely see again.)
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