00 Week: Spelled like Yes?

DR. NO

1962

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, and Berkeley Mather (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

Note: runs a bit longer than I'd have preferred, mostly thanks to the inefficiencies of getting a retrospective of a film series of this magnitude started

I'm sure that I can assume that I don't need to tell you who James Bond is.  Nor do I need to stress—too much—the importance of the film series about James Bond, adapted from Ian Fleming's already somewhat important series of novels, though it's well to note that this series began in 1962 and, with a few shuddering halts here and there, only ended (if we may agree that it has ended) in 2021, altogether amounting to either twenty-five feature films, or as many as twenty-seven, depending on your accounting.  This made it the longest-running English-language film series in history, and (again, depending on your accounting) one the three biggest film franchises of all time.  (Disney has made more Marvel movies, but they obviously have a whole lot more characters to spread them between, so they are in a sense "cheating"; in the brutish terms of box office comparison, it's only the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as a whole, and Stars Wars, as a whole, that beat Bond for dollars earned.*)

Nevertheless, it is incumbent on anyone preparing to embark on a journey through those twenty-seven films to give their reasons, even if they're obvious enough, and we've already touched on one—the fact that Bond is an enormous pop cultural juggernaut (interestingly, unlike those other two franchises, not one Bond film has ever lost money)—and if that weren't enough, there is the immense influence it's had over the years, so that to some degree the series' emphasis upon stunts, setpieces, and spectacle "invented" action cinema, or at least its first twelve or so entries did more to codify "action" as a recognizable genre unto itself than anything else had done before.  In this respect and others, it is hard to overstate their cultural impact.  (It is certainly the chief cinematic product of Great Britain—created right around the time its Great Power status had come into question, so perhaps as a salve—and even the other alternative, the Harry Potters, may not count, the Hollywood contribution to them being too significant.)  They are also (and this more subjective, but it sure is important to anybody reviewing them) enjoyable and entertaining movies, for the most part.  I've probably sneered at Bond every now and again on this blog, and while there are a few abjectly terrible Bond movies, I happily recant any negativity I've conveyed about the series as a whole—it has a surprisingly high standard of quality, considering its reputation as glittering (and sometimes alarmingly retrograde) junk.

So I should probably mention, somewhere upfront, what it is about it that appeals to me, given its numerous shifts over the years, though I would daresay those shifts are not as salient as they're sometimes made out to be until, at last, the final phase of the series, where it becomes almost a different beast entirely.  I do, for starters, largely approve of the "emotional pornography for men" quality that's arguably as much of a fundamental goal of the series as "advancing the cause of action cinema," even if this has led to some blatant and grotesque excesses, and has even more frequently resulted in Bond films that simply aren't as good as it seems like they should have been, and easily could have been, with just a bit less sexism.  (Yet the phrase "emotional pornography for men," of course, entails more than just the parade of Bond Girls found all up and down the spectrum of objectification and disposability; it also includes fine suits, fine spirits, and the spy's general affect of effortless mastery, which includes over pussy, but is by no means limited to just that.)

What I dig about the Bond series, however, is the way it largely untethered itself to reality as anyone has ever known it, thereby transcending to its best self, which is a bunch of virtually-inhuman cartoon superheroics in the micron-thin guise of a heightened spy thriller.  In other words, my favorite Bond and favorite "Bond era" belongs to Roger Moore—let's just get that out there immediately, so you can know where we stand—and you will notice that never have I bothered reviewing here even one Daniel Craig Bond, despite their currency, which is purposeful, because they exceeded my patience for their dour self-referential pretentiousness pretty quickly.  There is, finally, the matter of timing: why now?  Because, as you likely know, Eon Productions—the family business (more or less) that produced every "official" Bond film from 1962 to 2021, and boasted creative control over the super-spy's adventures—finally sold out to MGM, which actually means Amazon.  And I herald this as the definitive end, even moreso than what my information tells me happened at the end of Eon Productions' last Bond film, No Time To Die; the future of Bond is content, which I suppose its past always was, too, but the Bond content of old was still the product of a more genteel age.  It was artisanal content, made by people who cared about the content of their content, and who in many cases cared about one another—there is a closely-knit quality to the Eon Bonds' craftsmen, at least through the end of the 1980s, that I suspect is one of the reasons that it encompasses my favorite Bond era—so what I'd predict from here on out, were I to take the fate of Bond's peer franchises as my guide, is nothing besides maximally-exploitative slop, made less by enthusiastic filmmakers ("filmmakers enmeshed in a multigenerational community" is of course entirely out of the question), but by bored executives; I further predict that this process shall, with a rapidity that I bet will surprise everybody, leave behind nothing but a husk.

***

From the standpoint of 1962, the foregoing is all unfathomably deep into the future, so let's not trouble any more about it, and henceforth consider only today's subject, Dr. No, which came by its historical importance somewhat by accident.  The short version is that Fleming, who created Bond in his 1953 novel Casino Royale, was never terribly precious about the possibility of their being adapted to film—if he was, he got over it, considering the differences between Eon's Dr. No and his novel, despite much of the shooting being so proximate to Fleming's "Goldeneye" house in Jamaica that most days found him sauntering over to the sets to socialize with the cast and crew—so by the time he sold the rights for $50,000 to one Harry Saltzman, there were a couple of books already spoken for, including Casino Royale (hence its adaptation for TV's Climax! in 1954), though oddly enough it was the other book Fleming couldn't sell the rights to, Thunderball, that Saltzman had wanted to make his movie out of first, even though it came way later.  Saltzman, anyway, teamed up with Albert "Cubby" Broccoli—a man ideally suited to the role of Bond's cinematic impresario, in the sense that I don't see how a "Cubby Broccoli" could even recognize a stupid and implausible character name when he heard it; but until then he had been mainly a fixture in Britain's kitchen sink drama movement—and, in the form of Eon Productions (owned by Broccoli and Saltzman's holding company bearing a portmanteau of their wives' names, Danjaq S.A.), our two producers teamed up with United Artists (eventually to be succeeded in their rights and obligations by MGM).  They determined to film Dr. No, the sixth Bond book; then they ran through a list of possible directors and eventually had to settle for Terence Young; then they ran through a list of possible James Bonds, and eventually had to settle—though I think the principals soon perceived they had not settled—for Sean Connery.

The story they selected for Bond's first theatrical adventure does not, naturally, preclude the possibility of a rich tapestry of adventures to have preceded it—at the risk of saying something profoundly obvious, Bond is surely the most fiercely episodic of all major film series—though it's certainly likelier than not that Bond, that is, Connery's film character, had never confronted an antagonist as pulpy as the one he does here; and it is explicit that he's never heard of SPECTRE, or the SPecial Executive For Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion ("the four pillars of power" barely diguising what an improbably dumb name it is), which is dropped into villainous monologue with such proto-MCU gracelessness that you have to admit that a Marvel film would've at least made its fan-tease more tantalizing on the merits rather than a drab promise that only the books' fans would comprehend.  (Though I do enjoy Bond quipping that, if he had to choose, he'd seek a position in the "Revenge" department.)

In any case, I've really sprinted ahead, and if we can't do Casino Royale, we can still begin with Bond in some swanky gambling house or another, where he brusquely flirts with a Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson) over cards, exits to receive his assignment from his boss in the British secret service, M (Bernard Lee), more gingerly flirt with M's secretary Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), only to stop over at his apartment whereupon he discovers Trench sexily practicing her putting in one of his shirts (and in only one of his shirts), having broken into his house, not for any extrinsically nefarious purpose, but so she can fuck him; Bond chivalrously delays his departure to oblige.  This isn't by any means the best first few minutes of a Bond movie or even anywhere close—it is mostly actionless, and the closest we get to that with Bond himself is M and a quartermaster who is not yet Q hectoring Bond about his choice of firearms ("Beretta 418s are for receptive homosexuals" is barely not a verbatim quote), thus establishing the Walther PPK as the "Bond Gun" from the outset in a way Fleming apparently had not—but it is almost as flawless as an introductory scene for the series could be.  I appreciate how fully it seems to understand what kind and what tenor of fantasy Bond movies are meant to be, right out of the gate, as well as the way it shows us that M's gruffness and especially Moneypenny's half-desperate, half-mocking sexual banter—in fact the whole "Bond visits the office" expository sequence—shall serve their small function in the Bond machine, important enough that you'd miss them if they weren't there, even though that would probably be one of the easier ways to have kept basically every single Bond movie from being ten minutes longer than it needs to be.  Meanwhile, it also struck me like a diamond bullet earlier today that the hat thing Bond so often does in Moneypenny's reception room is damnably strange for a man who, with very few exceptions, most of them I believe in this first film, has emerged fully into the early 1960s (and will remain there, precisely in 1962, for more-or-less the next three decades), and so accordingly no longer wears a fucking hat.

I am still sprinting ahead, and indeed I've skipped over the actual very first thing in the movie, which is even more important than any of what we've already discussed: because that "first thing" is Maurice Binder's pop art opening credits, inaugurating a grand tradition of Bond film credits sequences even if some the tradition's most characteristic aspects haven't been pinned down yet.  The most characteristic thing about Bond movies has been, however, though in subsequent installments it would be separated from Binder's other contributions: that's composer Monty Norman's "James Bond Theme"***—which might be the single most recognizable character theme in film history, and is somehow ecstatically fit to its purpose of describing Bond's character, despite my suspicion that James Bond would not, himself, listen to a lot of surf rock, however hard-edged—and this theme is, now and forevermore, wedded to Binder's nearly-abstract impression of "spy violence," the "gun barrel opening" that I'm sure I needn't even describe, though I'll idly ask how blood gets into the barrel, what kind of gun is that?  The Bond figure seen down the op arty series of rifled spirals is not yet the actor playing Bond in the film (it's his stuntman, Bob Simmons, who is, furthermore, wearing a fucking hat), but let's not hold that against it.  This initiates Binder's credits sequence, which lacks for silhouetted nude women (that almost too "characteristic aspect") but is an incredibly fun little piece of animation riffing on the concept of indicator lights and then-modern electronics with so much abstraction that it's really just about circles, rounded squares, color, and sheer flickering; though it does, in the end, swerve into actual narrative material, something I'm not sure a Bond film would do again till Die Another Day all the way out in 2002, though its narrative value is a bit more marginal, as it deigns only to introduce a trio of "blind" assassins via silhouette.  It's also a slight bummer that, having exceeded the limits of the "James Bond Theme," the sequence now takes recourse to a calypso version of "Three Blind Mice."  (You'll notice that there's no original song for this first Bond movie's credits sequence; so the franchise's traditions are not fully-formed yet.)

But now that we've exhaustively excavated the first maybe-not-even-ten-minutes of Dr. No, we can actually summarize its plot: those three assassins fulfill their task, killing a pair of British intelligence operatives in Jamaica, and Bond is sent to investigate (the film's M is substantially less blithe than in the novel, by the way, in that he recognizes that Britain has suffered an actual attack here).  Bond pokes around, finding friends in CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jack Lord) and local fisherman Quarrel (John Kitzmiller), and finding adversaries all over the place, the latter all in the service of a certain Dr. Julius No (Joseph Wiseman), the enigmatic owner of a private island dubbed Crab Key.  Bond and Quarrel head on over to scope out the island, and initially they only find a nubile shell collector named Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), who's there out of mostly coincidence (the screenplay seems to consider offering a motivation beyond her shell business, but it forgets about it practically within the same dialogue exchange).

Pretty shortly, however, they receive Dr. No's welcoming committee, which is to say a fusillade of heavy machine gun fire, men chasing them through the swamps, and finally a flamethrower-equipped "Dragon" vehicle that roasts Quarrel alive, prompting Bond and Honey's surrender.  Dr. No receives them for dinner and boasts of his great work here on Crab Key—he's using a nuclear-powered radio to "topple" American rockets in mid-flight, and he's graduated from military missiles to an impending Mercury launch, intending to bring down America's entire space program with his technology.  He offers Bond the opportunity to join SPECTRE, which is obviously rebuffed, and Bond is thrown into a cell from which he promptly escapes so as to foil Dr. No's scheme, blowing up his nuclear reactor and I guess the whole island in the process (No has already been dispatched, Bond kicking him into a tank of roiling reactor coolant).  Our hero rescues Honey on the way out, so as to provide an ending—Bond and Honey rescued at sea by Leiter, whereupon Bond deliberately unties the tow rope from their small rowboat, so as to continue banging his new friend—that's as marvelously on-point for this franchise as its opening scenes had been.

Some of the film's weaknesses may be apparent from the sections of that summary where I got glib without also seeming giddily complimentary (if I was glib about "having dinner with the villain," I did not intend to be), and Dr. No, taken either as a film amongst many others, or as a James Bond film that we know in hindsight shall be surpassed, rather than as a remarkably-complete first try for a film franchise or—as its contemporaries must've found it to make it such an enormous hit—a stunning new form of action cinema, is ultimately only "pretty okay."  I will refrain from saying anything too precipitous like "it's the only James Bond movie that's obviously worse than the novel it's based on" (I get an inkling I might regret reading them in movie order, but I don't see any way around this that isn't onerous), but I do feel reasonably confident in asserting that it's got to be the James Bond movie that's not as wonderfully ridiculous as the novel it's based on, the kind of book where I could declare its most exciting passages are the ones that most resemble a treatise on the socio-industrial history of guano and not remotely mean that as a slam.  (Crab Key's stated purpose in the movie is... bauxite mining.  Fascinating.)  It only wouldn't be true because the most exciting passage involves an assassin centipede in Bond's bed; it's a tarantula here, which is a huge downgrade determined by the reality that centipedes are more difficult to corral, but it's still a pretty squirmy scene, even if you can see the glass between Connery and the arachnid, and the editing seams between Connery and poor Simmons, if you're trying.

The choice to do Dr. No for the first Bond film makes sense in some ways—even as a matter of narrative, there's a feeling that Fleming's letting his hero reset, and reading it I had to second-guess my knowledge that it wasn't Bond's first book; whereas looking at it from a producer's perspective, the most obvious appeal to Eon was surely that this Bond book takes place entirely within one polity after leaving England, and required no trotting about the globe—but on the other hand the novel can feel like Fleming was deliberately making it impossible to adapt to film, not in some hifalutin literary way, but just as a matter of content: Honey[chile] Ryder isn't in a bikini in the novel when Bond meets her, while her nose is disfigured in ways that I'm unsure if 1962-vintage makeup effects could satisfy (the rest of her is hot and Bond even comes to like her fucked-up honker); Dr. No doesn't have ambiguously robotic hands, he has giant steel pincers and he's also like seven feet tall; and if I had read the novel first, you cannot know how dispirited I would be to watch the movie and discover Bond does not do battle with a giant fucking squid.

With few exceptions, it's weaker stuff all around, probably most especially with Honey, whose text version would exceed all but the most superlative Bond Girls to come—it's naggingly true that she does nothing that affects the novel's plot, but she does "nothing" in some of the coolest and most self-determining ways imaginable—whereas the film version's Honey completely flubs Fleming's conception of her as a half-feral woman who lives in the ruins of her family's Jamaican estate, and still doesn't give her anything to do, so that unlike in the book she's never not a distractingly random element tossed into the story, here to be looked at, I guess, though even with the iconic emergence of Andress from the surf in her white bikiki, I'd probably quibble that it's not very obvious that Young and cinematographer Ted Moore knew ahead of time it was going to be iconic.  Andress herself is just awful, barely integrating her performance sufficiently to even say she's actually in the movie, though it probably doesn't help that she's being dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl (a recurring Bond film helper), thanks to Andress's accent belying any "Jamaicanness" though they'd already abandoned Honey's Jamaican backstory anyway.

I could complain about most of the deviations from the book: Fleming's Dr. No is, yes, basically and pretty consciously Fu Manchu, but he's a bit more fearsomely magnetic than Wiseman's "sure, man, half-Chinese, whatever you say" cold functionary; the common ground is that Wiseman, on occasion, does do real justice to Fleming's description of No's unpleasant smile, and I rather love the movie's contemporary-as-hell insinuation that it was Dr. No who undertook the (real-life) theft of Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington the previous year.  (I suppose the movie's No's vinyl-covered robotic hands are cool in their own right, and rather more functional, but I sure wish he got to do more cool things with them—they aren't even invoked in the fight scene.)  It is flabbergasting how they just left stuff out while reconceiving the climax: it's obvious (I guess) why Dr. No doesn't die under a torrent of guano, but they legitimately forgot to motivate the ease of Bond's escape from his cell; book-No put Bond through a torturous labyrinth for science and giggles (he had an even gnarlier fate in store for book-Honey, extremely vaguely referred to here, but which book-Honey solved herself); but movie-No?  He just comes off careless.  I'll spare a word for Quarrel, too: Fleming's novel's evil plot revolves around a rather detailed racial hierarchy that Fleming, I think, pretty clearly believed in himself, and the movie softens that stark racialization somewhat; on the other hand, the movie effectively strips Quarrel of everything interesting about him and his relationship to Bond—even interposing Leiter, who isn't in the book, to pick up that slack—and kind of just half-assedly gestures at the charred remains of Bond's black ally as if to say, "sad, I suppose."  And lest I forget No's native-terrifying "Dragon," always a pretty dumb idea (and another vector for racism), it at least had a credible purpose in the novel, when Crab Key's economic resource was birdshit rather than bauxite, and No was obliged to protect his guanays from rival avian species as well as those species' Audubon Society patrons.  (It's actually more neutral, but the "health spa" front No puts up in the novel is just pure inexplicable weirdness here.)

But I can say nice things about the film: it's not a fully sufficient replacement for "James Bond versus a squid" and "death by guano," but I do appreciate that the climax is not only a burly thing that quite plausibly results in the irradiation of a significant stretch of the Caribbean, but is also embiggened in concept—the novel didn't let us see Dr. No at work—with Bond racing against a right proper countdown to stop No from killing American astronauts, and while there's some creditable thrillmaking throughout (editor Peter Hunt more-or-less claims he invented fast-and-loose cutting that didn't sweat continuity in action cinema, which isn't accurate, but he certainly popularized it), Young and Hunt's pairing of No's downfall against the now-successful Mercury launch really is the right kind of nail-biting stuff.  It benefits, too, from the biggest and most modernist set of the film, an airy pop-science facility where everyone wears plastic spacesuits because I guess that is literally the atomic reactor, right there in the open pool in the middle of it; and we of course must mention production designer Ken Adam, as key a figure in the ascent of Bond as any of the principals previously mentioned.  My favorite detail of the big set is the way Adam imposes suspense-building procedure upon his director—I guess it could be the other way around—with the camera moving from technician to technician, each attending their individual part of the process; but it's not even my favorite set in the movie.  There are good sets all over: even the tiki bar-like house of the sinister secretary Taro (Zena Marshall, fulfilling the function of the duplicitous woman that Bond beds then kills or, in this case, only arrests) is a pretty neat set, well-built for its purpose of inveigling equally-sinister geologist Dent (Anthony Dawson) into an ambush; but the coolest set—rather atypically for Adam as we'll see!—was the cheapest, the Bond films not yet bearing world-beating budgets, but the cheapness of this set being a real boon, necessitating a downright Expressionist vision of angles and curves defining an enormous empty room where Dent "meets" his benefactor No.

That leaves the big unaddressed strength of Dr. No: Connery himself.  We need not belabor that, by dint of priority, Connery is the definitive James Bond, the one by which all others are measured, and from which all others are even, to some degree, but variations upon a theme.  Well, he is really good, and it's no mistake that the minor actor made himself a star with this very film, and one of the biggest stars in film history on the basis of this character (an achievement not, it turns out, to be replicated by any of his successors, even by Daniel Craig, the only one of whom likely to be compared against Connery as an actual actor).  I'm not certain he's Fleming's Bond, at least not from the evidence of Fleming's Dr. No (perhaps merely as a function of filling pages, perhaps because of the minor triumph of Honey, the book's Bond is much more humane, and of the actors to have played Bond, I had the easiest time visualizing Timothy Dalton).  But he does fit Fleming's archetype perfectly for the purposes of cinema, even if I prefer, as I said, the modifications made by George Lazenby and then Moore—starting with his physicality, Connery was the most capable of action for ages, which pays off in small ways (like beating the crap out of a fake driver) and in ways that should have been bigger (nearly taking his own head off in the coolest beat of a car chase that otherwise is pretty much just rear-projected mush, complicating that whole "inventing action cinema" thing, more like a promissory note that, in the future, Bond films would have awesome car chases).

He's got immense swagger, and while he might not look the very "best" in a tailored suit, he arguably looks the most like the blunt instrument of Bond should look like in a tailored suit, with his broad-shouldered body and triangular torso and the modest hunch of his neck (though his shirtless scenes here suggest some of this is the suits) giving him a bit of a, how to put this, ape-like quality.  In a dangerously sexy way, I mean.  He's a masculine cartoon, if that sounds more complimentary.  He sneers and leers well, a force that has willed itself into the shape of a gentleman, and there is a more than predatory cast to him sometimes.  (For a detailed example, take Connery clearly considering on Bond's behalf whether he should continue the farce of seducing Taro, or just strangle her with her own towel, or possibly finish the one then do the other.)  There's a cruelty to his face—I assume Fleming did like that, even if his sketches of Bond suggest he thought he looked like a Holmesian-style nerd—and it's sort of hard to believe, watching Connery, they ever could've wanted David Niven.  He's cocky and mean here, maybe moreso than Bond quite needs, but what Connery has already absolutely nailed—and I would describe this as a very fully-formed performance—is the very essence of Bond, a man who's way too cool to ever give a shit.

Dr. No is often muddled, and sometimes slow, and its Bond Girl is just altogether bad (to mention it somewhere, that "nudity" during the decontamination scene, with Andress in a skin-colored bathing suit, is outrageously clumsy), and even when it at last gets "big" I'm not sure it fully understands that blowing up a nuclear reactor is big, even if the distinegration of the island is handled with an admirable sense of scale; but this first Bond movie is also already so much closer to what it's supposed to be than I think you'd ever rightfully expect from a franchise kicking off in 1962.

Score: 6/10

*And because nobody but me has (I'll be annoyed if a breakdown is out there**) calculated inflation for the two series on a film-by-film basis, it's seemingly gone entirely unrecognized that between Star Wars and Bond, it's actually neck-and-neck, for if you count the "unofficial" films, and maybe even if you don't, Bond's lifetime take of $20.032 billion in 2025 dollars across all twenty-seven films ($19.124 if we're sticking to the "canonical" twenty-five) likely exceeds Star Wars' take across twelve—a claim I can't unambiguously prove only because I've already spent enough time on this without disentangling the Star Wars films' lucrative and sometimes decades-later re-releases from a number that, even being overvalued, still only puts that franchise a few hundred million ahead, at $20.321 billion.  (Spider-Man as a whole—and between two companies, Disney and Sony—is, however, also pretty close.)

**It turns out it was.  However, mine is more current.

***I'd say "Monty Norman and John Barry's 'James Bond Theme,'" but Norman's ghost would apparently sue my ass, because his millions of dollars in royalties for the song weren't enough.