James Bond: Dr. No

Well, it's the first one, obviously. So it's the first time we see the gun barrel sequence (that's a stuntman, not Sean Connery), the first time someone introduces themselves using the "Last name, first name last name" formula (it's Sylvia Trench), the first time someone uses the words "shaken, not stirred" (it's the film's villain). First gimmicky henchmen, the "Three Blind Mice." We have the first appearance of, obviously, Bernard Lee's M, Lois Maxwell's Moneypenny, and Sean Connery's Bond. First appearance of Felix Leiter, and the only time he's played by Jack Lord. First Bond One-Liner: after an informant commits suicide, Bond leaves him in the backseat of a car, and tells the valet to "make sure he doesn't go anywhere." (Later, and with a shorter time lapse, after the Three Blind Mice drive a hearse over a cliff and explode: "I think they were on their way to a funeral.") Surprisingly early in the series, we have an evil female character - in fact we have two, but Bond only sleeps with one, and even James Bond's magic lovemaking abilities are not enough to make her defect to the forces of good (cf. Goldfinger). Neither die; the photographer just disappears after failing to take Bond's picture twice, and the evil secretary Miss Taro is arrested. Miss Taro is, incidentally, Bond's first non-European conquest. First silly name for a Bond Girl: Honey Ryder. First staple of the 60s and 70s Bond flicks, the Villain With a Disability: Dr. No has mechanical hands. First truly bad special effect (not counting the shoddy rear-screen that the series will suffer from up through at least The Spy Who Loved Me): it's impossible to watch the tarantula sequence without noticing that there's a pane of glass separating Connery from the spider. First time a black person has a significant role: Quarrel is (mostly) brave and resourceful (though both he and Honey are presented as being superstitious enough to believe there's a dragon on Dr. No's island), but this being 1962, Bond tells him to "fetch my shoes" at one point. For the first and last time, James Bond sings. Only appearance of Peter Burton as "Major Boothroyd," the armorer.

After an agent named Strangways is killed, Bond is sent to Jamaica to investigate. Dr. No has absolutely no idea how to make a trail run cold, so Bond, with the help of Quarrel and Leiter, follows a series of fairly straightforward clues to Crab Key. Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder comes up out of the water, Quarrel gets incinerated by a tank with a flamethrower, and Dr. No explains that he's been toppling American space-missiles for fun and profit. Bond escapes from his prison, climbs through a water tunnel (not an air vent, although it leads to one for some reason), and defeats Dr. No. He and Honey end up making out on a boat.

Devoid of the gadgets and with only a few passing references to the Cold War, this feels more like an adventure film than a secret-agent film. It was made for just over a million dollars and holds up reasonably well compared to its big-budget successors. "Reasonably" being the key word. When I went through and ranked every single film from best to worst, the only ones that wound up coming after Dr. No are the ones with really glaring problems. There's nothing wrong with Dr. No per se, but aside from it being the first one, there's nothing in it to make it stand out either.

I'm grading all the Bond films on a very strict curve (meaning that C is average), and so Dr. No gets a C-.