Post-Craig Review: Dr. No

 Back to the very beginning.

This is a lie. "The beginning" would surely be a review of Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale. But we can skip that. The books have, for all but the most obsessed of us who pegged the ending of No Time To Die the moment the rumor mill told us the working title was Shatterhand (hi), faded into obscurity. (Besides, it's far too much effort for me to hold the novel open while I type this, as opposed to just having a movie running in a different window.) So too can we skip the "Card Sense Jimmy Bond" 1954 American telemovie Casino Royale, the long strange path that the rights to the Fleming novels took to land in the hands of Mr. Broccoli and Mr. Saltzman, and how director Terence Young and writer Richard Maibaum (who had both worked on a 1958 World War II film called, uh, No Time To Die [oh, and take a gander at that cast list]) were brought in to hurl James Bond onto our screens one October evening in 1962.

It would not be as prudent, however, to skip the point of this episode. Roundabout 2012-14, in the aftermath of everyone else liking Skyfall and me finding it a bit tripe, I put together a list of every James Bond film from best to worst, and it looked something like this (I've included a helpful* Friends-style alternate title for each one to help you job your memory if it's been a while since you've seen them).

1. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969, George Lazenby) - "The One With Emma Peel and Kojak"

2. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977, Roger Moore) - "The One Where They Remake You Only Live Twice, Except Underwater and with Barbara Bach"

3. From Russia With Love (1963, Sean Connery) - "The One Where Bond Gets a Threesome and the Villain Gets Her Kicks"

4. The Living Daylights (1987, Timothy Dalton) - "The One Where Ian Fleming's James Bond Goes Sledding in a Cello Case and Joins the Mujahideen"

5. Casino Royale (2006, Daniel Craig) - "The One Where They Reboot the Entire Franchise and Start Over, by Remaking OHMSS"

6. Thunderball (1965, Sean Connery) - "The One Where They Filmed the Underwater Scenes Too Slowly and the Fight Scenes Too Quickly"

7. GoldenEye (1995, Pierce Brosnan) - "The One Where Sean Bean's Surprise Turn as the Returned-From-The-Dead Villain is Spoiled by the Fact that He Has Second Billing"

8. Goldfinger (1964, Sean Connery) - "The One With the Car, the Golf Game, and the Cathedral of Gold"

9. Dr. No (1962, Sean Connery) - "The One With Ursula Andress"

10. You Only Live Twice (1967, Sean Connery) - "The One Where Blofeld Turns into Dr. Evil and Bond Turns Japanese"

11. Moonraker (1979, Roger Moore) - "The One Where A Wacky Space Adventure is Preceded By a Scene Where a Girl Gets Eaten by Dogs."

12. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997, Pierce Brosnan) - "The One Where They Remake You Only Live Twice, Except Instead of Blofeld, Bond Fights Rupert Murdoch, Except It's Actually Robert Maxwell Dressed Like Steve Jobs"

13. For Your Eyes Only (1981, Roger Moore) - "The One Where Moore Sleeps with Brosnan's Wife After Mourning Lazenby's, In a Film That was Possibly Written for Dalton**"

14. Licence to Kill (1989, Timothy Dalton) - "The One Where They Give OHMSS a Belated Sequel and then Give the Franchise a Vacation"

15. Live and Let Die (1973, Roger Moore) - "The One With Blaxploitation"

16. The World is Not Enough (1999, Pierce Brosnan) - "The One Where Bond Goes Skiing and the Villain Cut Off Their Own Earlobes, But it's the 90s"

17. Skyfall (2012, Daniel Craig) - "The One Where They Take a Break from Ripping Off OHMSS to Instead Rip Off the Brosnan Films and The Dark Knight"

18. Quantum of Solace (2008, Daniel Craig) - "The One Where They Remake Licence to Kill, Albeit in a Much More Timely Manner and with Jittercam"

19. Octopussy (1983, Roger Moore) - "The One With the Clowns and the Faberge Eggs"

20. The Man with the Golden Gun (1974, Roger Moore) - "The One With Dracula's Funhouse"

21. A View to a Kill (1985, Roger Moore) - "The One Where Simon Templar and John Steed fight Christopher Walken and Grace Jones, But It Sucks"

22. Die Another Day (2002, Pierce Brosnan) - "The One Where They Remake Diamonds Are Forever, But With Madonna, and an Invisible Car. And Kite-Surfing."

23. Diamonds Are Forever (1971, Sean Connery) - "The One With a Space-Laser Wielding Diamond-Smuggling Villain Who Will Return to Die Another Day, Only This One Dresses in Drag"

*may not be helpful

**I'm not making any of this up. Cassandra Harris and the OHMSS connections are self-explanatory. As for Dalton (who'd been on the producers' radar since 1968 - more on this if/when we actually get to OHMSS and the Dalton films), he was approached while Roger Moore was waffling about whether to renew his contract, and apparently the For Your Eyes Only script was written at least partially with him in mind. Watch it with this bit of apocrypha in mind and some of Bond's more un-Roger-Moore actions make more sense.

And of course, if you'd asked me even earlier, say, circa 2003, when I'd only recently gotten into the franchise and had just finished watching all then-20 films, the list would look considerably different. (OHMSS would be very, very low, and Licence to Kill would be very, very high, for starters). But I have no record of that list,* so, alas, I cannot reproduce it here.

*This may be a lie told for face-saving purposes.

Now, ten years and two more controversial regurgitations of OHMSS later, on the cusp of another recast and reboot and reimagining, I thought it prudent to do this again. Longtime readers will know, of course, that there was an attempt in 2014 to review every Bond film. It was an earnest but ultimately laughable attempt.

Much like the Brosnan era. 

Which is not meant as a knock on Pierce Brosnan. Amiable fellow, certainly had the requirements* for the role down pat. But as a far better reviewer (who is far crueler towards Brosnan than I care to be) sympathetically observed, "he waited so long to play James Bond and this was the Bond they gave him to play." Anyway, digression over.

*That may sound like faint praise, given that those requirements are, in toto: "Can count to nine in French," "Can wear a suit," "Can say bad puns," "Looks like he can run a mile without breaking a sweat," and "Carries himself like he knows his way around a Pussy Galore or two." And yet there's a case to be made that Pierce is the only one who consistently ticked all five of those boxes in all of his films; Sean got too fat and Roger too old, George whiffed the jokes, Tim bought off the peg and was afraid of polyamory, and Dan was far too working-class to learn French.

Well, if the James of 2014 was coldly overlooking Quantum of Solace as exactly the sort of Bond Film that he said he wanted, perhaps the James of 2023 has soured somewhat on OHMSS as the end-all be-all blueprint for What Bond Should Be. But that's to come.

I haven't sat down and watched the entire franchise in order in quite some time, is what I'm saying.

This is my attempt to remedy it.

Dr. No (1962)

It is impossible for me to cast my mind back to 1962, to a world where Doctor Who didn't exist, the Beatles had yet to record an album, and JFK hadn't yet been shot. May as well have been a different planet. (In my defense, I was born at some point during the Dalton era, which I define as "between 1986 and 1993," so that doesn't narrow it down as much as you might think.) This is the 50s pretending to be the 60s just because the years have ticked over, but there's a far greater difference in tone between Dr. No and Thunderball (1965) than there is between, say, GoldenEye (1994) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997).

I wouldn't go so far as to call it a tropical North By Northwest (1959), insofar as Bond is not a confused everyman thrown into a caper far beyond his understanding, but that may be a decent starting point (especially because if the follow-up is anything to go by, director Terence Young definitely had Hitchcock in mind). The effects are about as crap and the pacing is similar, right down to the abrupt resolution and final bout of lovemaking in a moving vehicle. And, one assumes, that that's the sort of spy caper audiences had in mind when they settled down to watch this sordid sun-drenched tale of murder and seduction, oh my.

Come to think of it, while I like to use November 22-23, 1963, as the true dividing line between the 50s and the 60s - by the end of the 23rd, the US had a new president, the Beatles had a second album, and Britain had a phone-box-copyright-case-in-waiting on its hands - October 1962, giving us Dr. No and the Cuban Missile Crisis (gosh, a plot involving missiles on a tropical island - Bond does have a knack for unfortunately-timed topics, cf. the nanobots in No Time To Die being hastily rewritten from their obvious bioweapon origins) is a fair contender. They'll be making movies like this going forward.

"Like this," and I get to get right into it, because this film uniquely does not have a pre-title sequence (cool; they're overrated, sometimes wholly irrelevant - cf. Goldfinger and Octopussy - often stupid - cf. A View to a Kill - and, recently, entirely too long), so it's only hundred or so seconds before the single most important credit of 60s Bondfilm fades into view.

It's not "Starring Sean Connery" (a rarity, actually, given that it's not long before his name gets moved to before the film's title, so the "starring" credit usually goes to the female lead*). It's not "Music by John Barry," and not just because that's not a credit that exists in Dr. No (Monty Norman gets that credit). Likewise, can't be "Bernard Lee as 'M'" because he doesn't get that special credit until the next film (I'm such a nerd to know this). It's not "Production Designer Ken Adam," because Ken Adam also did Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Strangelove didn't rewrite the book on a key aspect of moviemaking. It's not "Main title designed by Maurice Binder," because it barely looks like a Binder title, more like a iPod commercial. We won't have a title sequence devoid of lovely ladies again until Casino Royale. All of those things are, of course, vital components of 60s Bondfilm,** but the glue that holds them all together, that critical sine qua non without which the franchise floundered for multiple installments in the early 70s?

"Editor Peter Hunt."

One wonders what he'd have done with the crop-duster scene. You know, until From Russia With Love rolls around the following year and one-ups it with a helicopter.

*On further reflection, that assumption is untrue: Goldfinger does indeed have a credit saying "Starring Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore." But the "starring" credit is shared among a big list in Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, and with the villain in Diamonds are Forever.

**Well, mostly. With no disrespect intended towards Mr. Binder, Robert Brownjohn did the titles for From Russia and Goldfinger, the latter of which contains the single best (cheekiest) image to ever appear in Bond titles. You'll have to wait for that review, though.

'tis weird and off-putting that the gunbarrel itself (devoid of Connery, by the way; that's stuntman Bob Simmons, whom you'll first spot outside the gunbarrel as Jacques Bouvar in Thunderball, and who will remain with the franchise all the way through A View to a Kill - a recurring theme of Broccoli A's tenure is the finding and promoting of reliable people, which is why there's notably more turnover under Broccoli B) is weird sci-fi sound effects and the Bond theme doesn't actually kick in until after the bullet fires. But I suppose no less weird and off-putting than the mushroom samba flying dots credits movie viewers in 1962 found themselves subjected to.

Dissolve into a reggae cover of "Three Blind Mice" as a means of keeping us on our toes and ready to go on a magical journey. I said before that I wasn't going to delve so much into the novels and the Making Of; I lied. Dr. No is a perfect launch vehicle for the franchise. Casino Royale was unavailable. The second novel, Live and Let Die, probably too racist even for 1962 (even today there are some editions of the book that list the fifth chapter as "[hard-r n-word] Heaven"). Moonraker - the novel Moonraker, Bond mucking about a missile silo on the outskirts of London* - would have been nice and cheap and easy, but hardly a sunny exotic vacation that most of The Early Films are known for (when did that trend stop? The Brosnan era?**) Diamonds Are Forever is Fleming's most forgettable*** novel (a treatise on diamond smuggling more than a Bond adventure, really), and From Russia With Love revolves around a manufactured sex scandal in some Eastern European motel - no, I can't imagine how it made its way onto Jack Kennedy's literary list. 

*I honestly don't recall exactly where in Britain Moonraker is set, but I'm American; everywhere in Britain is "the outskirts of London" as far as I'm concerned.

**GoldenEye: St. Petersburg and Puerto-Rico-Pretending-To-Be-Cuba. Tomorrow Never Dies: Hamburg(?) and Saigon. The World is Not Enough: Baku and Istanbul (been there already). Die Another Day: "Cuba" (again) and whatever studio backlot subbed in for North Korea. 

***Granted, that's only because The Spy Who Loved Me has become something of a trivia entry: "Which book did Fleming not sell the story rights to because he thought it was so bad?"

That brings us, novels-wise, to Dr. No, ably stripped of its giant squid setpiece to bring the budget under control. It is, weirdly, the literary Fleming's turning point from straight spy fiction to more than a bit of pulp. Post, you have Goldfinger (hypnotism), Thunderball (glamorous nuclear terrorism, a la the film), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (hypnotism again), and You Only Live Twice (a Japanese travelogue and rumination on death courtesy of a between-heart-attacks Fleming). And those are the good books.*

*In other words, skipping The Spy Who Loved Me. There is a reason for this.

It would be like adopting the Bond movies for some new medium and starting with The Spy Who Loved Me. If The Spy Who Loved Me (the movie) wasn't a parade of Greatest Hits.

This, on the other hand, while hardly the lofty spectacle of The Spy Who Loved Me or even the breezy grandness of Thunderball, this is exotic and entertaining and, gosh, fun. 

Somewhere in that meandering I'd lost sight of the point about the 50s and the 60s, and the point is this: the filmmakers present to you not one but two sets of potential Spy Heroes before lobbing the Real James Bond at you. First we meet Strangways And Chums at their bridge club - stuffy 50s types, the lot of them, they'd be at home in the first season of Mad Men. And then after Strangways gets relegated to the trivia deck ("name the first character to die on-screen in a Bond film"), and his lovely bebosomed assistant* - they don't make bras like that anymore! - gets gunned down too for good measure (a little bit of the Peter Hunt micro-cutting technique on display right when she gets shot), we go to the Signals Room and get a couple of technicians doing their "Houston, we have a problem" routine (note that the guy trying to reconnect to WX6 isn't actually moving his mouth at the start of the scene. Fancy trick, that). No, it's not the stuffy card players and it's not these scrubby nerds either. Prepare yourselves for the greatest introduction a hero has ever gotten in cinematic history.

*Incidentally, she's dubbed by perennial 60s Bond Girl dubber Nikki van der Zyl, who ultimately did dubbing work in nine films, adding her to a very short list of actors who've performed in more Bond films than anyone who played Bond. The entire list, if you're curious (and not counting stuntmen), is Desmond Llewellyn (Boothroyd/Q, 17), Lois Maxwell (Moneypenny, 14), Bernard Lee (M, 11), Nikki van der Zyl (various, 9), Judi Dench (M, 8); Roger Moore did 7, tying Walter Gotell (Morzeny/General Gogol). She's also the only one on this list who makes her first "appearance" before Bond does. In fact (read on), she makes two of them.

What we have here is a tuxedo-clad man playing a game, watched with awe or envy or admiration by onlookers. (This is, perplexingly, exactly how the SPECTRE goon Kronsteen is introduced in the following film - they've already run out of ideas!) We from our vantage point 25 films on know the score: he'll win because he's James Bond and turning over cards and announcing, in French, that he has exactly one more point that his rivals is what he does. But here it's 1962 and the audience doesn't know what a Sean Connery is, and the focus of the scene appears to be a provocatively-dressed woman trying to out-play the dealer. (Said woman is Sylvia Trench, who also appears in From Russia - making her the first recurring character to appear in the franchise*, trivia fans - and she's also voiced by Nikki van der Zyl. Are you sensing a pattern?)

*Okay. Bond's hands technically appear for a fraction of a second at the start of the shot that pans up to Sylvia's face. But I have no way of confirming that those are Sean Connery's hands, so I stand by my original statement.

Actually, just for fun, the complete list of recurring actors to appear before Connery (as far as I know): Bob Simmons (gunbarrel, although the next two films just re-use the same clip), Anthony Dawson (Professor Dent), Robert Reitti* (voice of Strangways), Nikki van der Zyl (voice of Mary Trueblood and Sylvia Trench), Eunice Gayson (Sylvia Trench).

*Rietti will be back to voice The Greatest Villain Ever (Largo) in Thunderball and Marc-Ange Draco in OHMSS, making him, along with Charles Grey, one of only two actors to play both an ally and an adversary in separate Bond films. 

Baccarat is, honestly, a remarkably simple game to score; it's the betting that gets unnecessarily complicated (that, and you have to know how to count to nine* in French). But all you do once the cards start getting dealt is try to get the ones column of your score to be as high as possible. Face cards are worth zero. If you have a natural 9, like Bond does here, you automatically win over someone who draws a third card, no matter what they get. Why they felt they needed to replace this with Texas Hold 'Em for Casino Royale is just one more indicator of decline. Alas. Kids these days...

*For dramatic purposes, it seems like you only actually need to know 5-9 in French.

A character is asked their name, and response in the "Last Name. First Name Last Name" manner we've come to associate with this series. Only it's the woman who does it first.

Dealer: "I admire your courage, Miss...?" (This is Bond's first line in the franchise, by the way.)

Woman: "Trench. Sylvia Trench. I admire your luck, Mister...?"

Dealer (and everyone in the audience watching today): "Bond. James Bond."

And there he is. Sean Connery, 32 years old, cool as a cucumber, king of the world.

What are the Quintessentials Of James Bond? I'd say it's some combination of "Car, Tuxedo, Lady, BondJamesBond, Gun, Cards." We get almost all of this in Connery's first two scenes. You'll have to wait for Goldfinger for the car. If I remember (I won't), I'll revisit this and ask what From Russia With Love actually does to improve upon The Formula, because most of it is, actually, already here. (Ah, I've got it: an absolutely killer fight with a henchman. Q.v. the opening scene of OHMSS if you think you know where I'm going with this.)

In the interest of not belaboring the point (the rest of the casino scene is Bond propositioning Sylvia for sex, which goes exactly how it will in future films), let's take the world's fakest elevator to M's office and see some bits that did not become part of the formula. Peter Burton as Major Boothroyd, the yet-undesignated Q. He does a serviceable job giving Bond a new gun. It doesn't read his fingerprints or any nonsense like that, it just jams less than the Beretta did, apparently. (In the novels, Bond is forced to replace the Beretta when it snags in its holster at the end of the previous novel, From Russia With Love, causing him to get stabbed with a certain poison-tipped shoe. But obviously that hasn't happened yet in the films.)

Bond's attachment to his old gun is never explained. Thank Christ the series was rebooted, frankly. We'd have gotten the Beretta's origin story, like they did with Han Solo's dice. (Did you know Han Solo had a pair of dice dangling from some doohickey in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon? And that this was so important a part of his character as to be included in his origin story film?)

Moneypenny and M are present and accounted for, oddball line about M being in charge of MI7 aside (Bond says he never sleeps on the firm's time, which is hilarious given that the first film Bond makes it the entire way through without getting knocked out is... Tomorrow Never Dies, the eighteenth one), and it's off to Jamaica, but not before playing a bit of golf with Ms. Trench.* This is not your 50s spy flick hero - the protagonist of North by Northwest needed his mother to bail him out of jail, for crying out loud!

*She's wearing one of Bond's shirts in this scene, but the original script called for her to be nekkid. Not the last time this film runs into that sort of problem.

Worth pointing out that, despite Bond's license to kill, his only actually objective is to find out what happened to Strangways. Yes, he probably has to go interrogate Dr No to be sure that No had him killed. But by the time he leaves for Crab Key, he must have a pretty solid idea of what's what.

Also M smiles at Bond when he says "best of luck." Clearly they haven't worked out the character quite yet.

Something has got to be said for the timelessness of M's office set. Yes, I know there's lots in Ancient Bondfilm, and this one in particular, that has "aged poorly," but this hasn't. Barb Broccoli has now had the reins for about as long as her dad had them (1995-2023 = 28 years; 1962-1989 = 27 years), and she's gone through how many MI6 buildings and offices?* But this set we'll be seeing off and on until 1989.

*Let's be generous and assume that the Brosnan offices are all the same, which I think broadly works, even though there's really no way of squaring Q's lab as seen in GoldenEye with the one in TWINE (this is hardly a problem unique to the Brosnage - I think the only Q lab set to be used twice was the one in For Your Eyes Only/The Living Daylights - which actually might be the only time the same director has done two films with scenes in Q's lab, come to think of it). Craig goes through three MI6 offices in his first three films and there's a fourth that may or may not count in Spectre. That's a total of four or five, over just nine films. 

Jamaica. We have an air traffic controller telling us the flight has landed, probably to save the money it would have taken to shoot footage of Sean Connery on an airplane. Dr. No's minions woke up this morning and chose violence. Fortunately for Bond they're incompetent and he's not - seriously, the driver has a gun in his glovebox, all he has to do is pop Bond while he's distracted by the tailing car. But he doesn't because he is bad and therefore stupid. This whole thing doesn't make much sense (although the shots of Bond looking back at his pursuers are great - probably stuck them in the trailers. Gives you a nice sense of "Proper Adventure Film"). The guys tailing Bond are Felix Leiter (Jack Lord with an incredibly Kennedyesque haircut) and Quarrel (John Kitzmiller). Felix doesn't bother to say hi at the airport, he just stalks him a bit. I know basically the same thing happens in Thunderball - an early Bond trope I'm glad they got rid of, and easily the weakest part of The Living Daylights* - but this is one of those things that obviously happens only so that Bond can have a couple of punch-ups in case all the investigating is making the audience bored. And they say they had longer attention spans back then! He was macking on Sylvia Trench not five minutes ago!

*Leiter is in The Living Daylights. Yes, really! It's completely pointless, but he's there.

Oh, obligatory: at the end of the fight, Bond rears back one hand only to throw the punch with the other. Peter Hunt hasn't quite entered invented the field of avant-garde editing - that's Thunderball, in my opinion - but we see early signs of it here.

Maybe I'm supposed to ding Bond for not thinking the guy would have cyanide in his cigarettes, but that goes more to Bond's later question about what kind of hold Dr. No has over his underlings that they're willing to die for him. Which is good scriptwork, as far as it goes, only to fall on its face when we learn that the answer is "he has a tank that looks like a dragon, and that apparently scares everyone because they're all kinda dim." (No also has some sort of incredibly good intelligence network, which makes it more than a bit odd that he's so insistent on getting a photograph of Bond.)

Bond checks in on the governor, whose name is Plydell-Smith, which is, let's be honest, exactly the sort of stuffy patrician British name any writer would hand a government big shot (never mind the fact that Jamaica gained independence between when shooting wrapped and when the film premiered). And the only two suspects are General Potter (Harry's great-granddad) and Professor Dent. Go on, guess who's the baddie. It's not the Indian Army veteran. What I'm saying is that the script isn't particularly clever. That's okay - inside of 20 years, we'll be piecing a plot together based on nothing other than the producer's desire to vacay in both Venice and Rio that year. 

Next Bond goes to Strangways' place and confirmed that the secretary's dead because her blood was on the carpet. He's told it's O Rh +, and apparently she's the only person with O Rh + blood on the island, because he's convinced "that's her blood all right." Then there's a funny little cut as Bond asks who the man with Strangways in the photograph is - you can see Sean kind of jump right as the government functionary walks into frame, like it took him (the functionary) too long to find his mark. And yeah, Quarrel's in the picture on the desk in the room where the Three Blind Mice killed the secretary and looted through the files, and nobody thought that he might be another loose end needing tying up. 

Bond does a little countersurveillance trickery - the hair-on-the-closet-door gag on his hotel room - and goes to gather clues from General Potter and Professor Dent. Dent starts talking about the secretary, only to quiet down sheepishly when he's pressed on it. Bond's super detective instincts are not engaged here, because this is still proto-Bond before he can sniff out a badhat by raising his eyebrow and quipping. (Actually not true; in his final confrontation with Dent, Bond says that his suspicions were first aroused here. Played it close to the chest, I guess. Although given all the clues he misses in the next film about "Nash," it's entirely possible that he's just lying to Dent later to save face.) Then it's Potter and the governor who give Bond the lead on Quarrel - but hey, if this was all that Strangways talked about with his bridge group, and Potter certainly seems to suggest so, and Dent is part of the bridge group and knows that Strangways picked up radioactive samples from Crab Key - which he undoubtedly does, if the later scenes are any suggestion - why has he not had Quarrel eliminated?

Anyway, the bridge group points Bond at Quarrel, who then facilitates a needlessly violent introduction to a) Felix Leiter and b) the song "Underneath the Mango Tree," which is apparently the only song anyone in Jamaica knows. Get used to it, because it probably features more than the Bond theme in this film. Oh, and we also learn that Puss-feller wrestles alligators, which is an absolutely pointless change from the book (I promise to not do this often) where he wrestles, as his name might suggest, octopi.

And on that note we need to step back and talk about the script here. Because this is still Early Bond, before anybody knows what a James Bond film is, it's being presented to us as something of a mystery. Bond must follow a trail of breadcrumbs to Dr. No's base in Crab Key. (Note that, with very few exceptions, they never do this again; Bond is told who the villain is at the beginning of basically every film - or the villain is conveniently wearing a big SPECTRE ring for his first meeting with Bond.) Only, Dr. No couldn't be more obvious about him being the villain if he tried. Okay, he had Strangways killed because Strangways was poking around Crab Key, and he had the files specific to him and Crab Key removed from Strangways' office. (Weird that nobody follows up on this.) But did this elaborate spy network that included the governor's own secretary somehow miss the fact that Strangways had an accomplice in the form of Quarrel? Oh yes, kill the guy who's poking around, but leave the guy who actually took him out in the boat, and remembers exactly where they went and where they placed their rock samples, etc., leave him alone. That's just great.

Speaking of the whole thing not making sense from the villains' perspective, one of the bad doctor's henchmen* is a photographer who keeps trying (and failing) to take pictures of Bond. Why she needs to do this is never made clear, given that the fake driver and the Three Blind Mice already know who they should be trying to kill. 

*Voiced by, you guessed it, Nikki van der Zyl

Let's talk about Jack Lord's Felix Leiter. Dry, bad trigger discipline, slick but in an unBond American way so as to not detract from the star. I have now talked about Jack Lord's Felix Leiter. 

Anyway, in this scene with the photographer, the band is singing a song called "Jump Up," which would appear to contradict my earlier statement that there's only one song in Jamaica. Ah, but you see, "Jump Up" is practically just a lively version of "Underneath the Mango Tree." So I'm not wrong.

And one of the guys in the crowd here is the film's location manager, Chris Blackwell, who went on to found Island Records. I love random trivia.

Photographer lady breaks what I think is meant to be a flashbulb and scrapes it across Quarrel's cheek - Quarrel doesn't react because he's just that badass - but that cheek is facing almost away from the camera and is poorly lit. Not sure if that's censorship or just a cheap directing choice. If you pay close attention, it looks like Terence Young shot most of the scenes here with only two or three camera setups (this lack of coverage will rather infamously come into play at the beginning of the Bond/Dent showdown). I get it: the film's budget was barely over a million dollars (it made its budget back 56 times over, which in that respect makes it the most successful Bond film of all time), and for the most part it does (somehow) manage to avoid looking as cheap as Licence to Kill (budget: $32 million. No I haven't adjusted for inflation), but sometimes the cracks are undeniably visible.

The received wisdom is that Connery doesn't really get comfortable in the role until Goldfinger, and, being the sort of person who only really notices the acting if it's exceptionally good (see Dalton, Timothy) or exceptionally bad (see Roberts, Tanya), I couldn't tell you if that's true. What I can tell you is that his reading of "that's the second time nothing's come out. Okay Quarrel, give her her arm back" is note perfect. And also that the brief cutaway to Jack Lord having a chuckle is also note perfect. Shame his ego got in the way of him coming back, because he is one of the better Leiters, despite having little to do here.

Felix namedrops the film's title and the Three Blind Mice fail to kill Bond on his way back to the hotel thanks to a fortunately-timed car. That sort of thing doesn't happen anymore. (No, wait, there was that stupid stunt in Skyfall where the villain tried to drop a Tube train on Bond's head.)

Bond goes over to Professor Dent, who continues to look incredibly suspicious. This is, essentially, the first "Bond goes to meet the bad guy, talks to him for three minutes, and thanks him for letting Bond take up 'so much' of his time" scene (cf. The Spy Who Loved Me for probably the most implausible example of this). Gosh, there's more of The Formula here than I thought!

Dent is spooked enough to go to Dr No's island and report in, so he's not entirely stupid. But he did disobey No's "strictest" rule and go there in daylight (the living daylights, if you will). I feel like if he'd tried this a few years later he would have been fed to the seagulls or something. Also we get our first look at that "sign of the times" 60s racial trope wherein the mooks tend to be minorities* (in this case local minorities, so it's at least somewhat justified - although note that No's henchmen are Jamaican in the location shots and then suddenly Asian as soon as we get to the studio. Hrm).

*Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice also do this (although it's somewhat justifiable in YOLT's case as half the cast is Japanese), and From Russia might, depending on whether you count Bulgarians as "white." Then there's a head-fake in OHMSS where Bond has a few early punch-ups with a big black guy, but he turns out to be a henchman of Bond's soon-to-be-ally. Aaaaand then there's Live and Let Die (1973).

Now, we can complain about Joseph Wiseman (Dr. No) being a white actor in yellowface, but my God the voice is just perfect. Conventional wisdom is that he doesn't get enough screentime, and that's true compared to the 60s "greats" like Blofeld or Goldfinger, but it's not clear to me that he needs it. Bond villains actually aren't all that interesting, and giving them more screentime than they need is always a mistake* (cf. Scaramanga and Oberhauser, two characters who are at their best when they're not talking). Anyway, Dent is treated to the first bonkers Ken Adam set - an oddly-shaped room (seriously look at the corner on the far-right side of the screen) with a circular window in the ceiling and a single chair all the way in the corner for Dent to sit in like a schoolboy who's been naughty. I love that Dr. No just has this room in his base. "Yes, Darlene, tell Professor Dent I shall receive him in the Chastisement Room."

*There is one exception to this rule. I will get to him in just a few films.

No knows that Bond came to see Dent - somehow, despite his minions failing to get a picture of Bond. Let's not think too hard about what No does and does not know. Anyway, No tells Dent to attack Bond with a spider. Because apparently the "Three Blind Mice" assassins that are currently 2-for-3 are just not any good at this. 

Bond comes back to his hotel room and finds that it's been searched in his absence. Again, the modern stuff is just missing scenes like this. Bond's smart enough to realize that his drink was tampered with here, but will forget to be so paranoid later on (once the girl shows up). Interesting. That night, Bond is attacked by Dent's spider, which probably would have been more successful had there not be an extremely obvious pane of glass between the spider and Bond (this is my first time watching this in HD courtesy of Amazon Prime, and it's not like the glass was hard to miss on the DVD, but it's even more obvious here). Bond whacks the spider with a shoe* a couple times, and that's as scared as you'll ever see him outside of his flirtations with Antipodeanism or the RSC. (Seriously, dude looks more shaken by this than he does by Goldfinger's laser. There's a point to be made here about Connery and animals, and I'll pick it up in Thunderball.) Monty Norman comes in for some flack for overdoing it on the soundtrack here, but I honestly wonder how Barry would have handled it. The Mickey-Mousing is just so memorable that I can't imagine it any other way.

*There are some synopses that say he pistol-whips it, but no, it's clearly not a gun. You can see him grab it from the foot of the bed.

Bond goes back to the governor's office and gets some bad news and a Geiger counter. Now, by my count, Bond's been on the island for at least two nights, and he's only just now finding out that the government files on Dr. No and Crab Key have gone missing. Well, the plot can't unfold too fast or the movie'd be over in an hour.

But now take another step back and consider what we're watching. This isn't Sean Connery Wandering Around Some Exotic Location In A Suit Looking Bored. The filmmakers don't know that Sean Connery Wandering Around Some Exotic Location In A Suit Looking Bored is such a key aspect of Bondfilm that they'll have multiple elephantine panic attacks vis a vis replacing him in the late 60s and early 70s. The mystery-by-numbers plot I've bemoaned earlier is what we have because "James Bond Movie" is not a thing yet and nobody knows how to make one. (For further proof, consider that Bond is neither the first to use the "Last name, First name Last name" introduction nor the first to utter the "shaken, not stirred" line.)

Looping back to Dr. No's minions constantly throwing themselves in Bond's path, we now have the double-agent government secretary, Miss Taro* (not to be confused with tarot, which features prominently in another Bond's sun-drenched debut squaring off against an island dictator who uses parlor tricks and special effects to scare away the superstitious local minorities/women). Bond accuses her of snooping on the boss before the door is even closed. Fortunately the governor is kinda dim. Anyway Bond flirts with her and asks her to an early dinner, and she says "maybe" not "yes," not because it's Current Year and girls being too eager to jump on the good foot and do the bad thing is Problematic, but because it's 1962 and James Bond isn't a sex symbol, yet.

*Ladies and gentlemen, only the second woman in this film after Lois Maxwell to supply her own voice. Not making this up.

Bond goes to Quarrel's boat with the Geiger counter and determines that the samples from Crab Key were radioactive. Since Dent told him they were worthless, that makes him, as Leiter says, either a bad professor or a bad liar. Bond says he intends to find out which, but he's not in any hurry (something something rocket toppling, right? Ring any bells?) - he's got a date with Miss Taro. 

Fine: Is Quarrel a racist caricature here? Clearly the most superstitious of the group, and probably the dimmest, and "I gets my navigational directions from my nose, my ears, from my instincts" could be interpreted poorly. But he's explicitly told he doesn't need to tag along if he doesn't want to, and volunteers anyway. The 60s Bonds have a wonderful gallery of non-Leiter allies; their regular absence in later films punctuated by mere flashes of brilliance (hi, Columbo, Zukovsky*). Quarrel - superstitious, sure, but also suicidally brave, and, as mentioned above, takes a glass shard to the face without complaint - sets the bar rather high.

*The other obvious candidate would be Jack Wade, but he's obviously a Leiter replacement so he doesn't count. Kamran Shah in The Living Daylights tries, but with the benefit of hindsight, his role (he's not a bin Laden stand-in, but it'd be easy to mistake him for one) is even more awkward today than Quarrel's.

And if you really want to criticize him for being "superstitious muscle," consider that Bond gets points on the board anyway given that it would take its fellow 60s British cultural juggernaut Doctor Who three years* to give any person of color** any lines.

*Three years of production; bear in mind that Who started a year after Bond did, so it's more like four years. Almost exactly four years, in fact; Dr. No premiered on October 5, 1962, and the Who serial "The Tenth Planet" started on October 8, 1966.

**The actor in question, Earl Cameron, also appears in Thunderball (1965). 

Now this is a bit wonky. Bond brought two suits with him: he wears a grey suit on the first day (through the scene with Quarrel and Leiter at the nightclub) and a dark navy suit on the second (his meeting with Professor Dent). But on Day 3 he wears the grey suit in the morning to Plydell-Smith's office, and then switches to the navy one for his date with Miss Taro. When sartorial continuity falls apart, I tend to assume editing booth shenanigans (q.v. Thunderball, where the scenes leading up to Bond's first conversation with Leiter were clearly rearranged), but I don't see how that could work here, given that his morning conversation with Miss Taro clearly sets up a date later that very day. And he clearly ends two nights in the navy suit; first at the end of Day 2, returning to his hotel room before the spider attack (initiated by Professor Dent), and second here at the end of what I presume is still Day 3, where he'll lie in wait for, and ultimately kill, Dent.

Oh, right, the Three Blind Mice ambush him and he runs them off the road and over a cliff and they die by exploding, making them Bond's first on-screen victims (remember, Mr. Jones, the fake driver, committed suicide; Bond didn't kill him). Or are they? Note that they're never actually shown at all in this scene; we just assume it's them because they're driving the same hearse we saw at the beginning, when they killed Strangways. The rear projection is not super (we just have to accept this all the way through Licence to Kill) and the driving choreography will be better next time there's a car chase (which will be Goldfinger - in fact, Terence Young really doesn't do another car chase in his Bond films; note how Thunderball cuts to the opening titles right after Bond starts the engine).

We get a few bars of the Bond Theme as Miss Taro steps out of the shower and discovers that Bond is alive. Can't blame her for being surprised; she's never had the opportunity to see one of his movies. Someone calls her and tells her to distract him. There's a cliche that the 60s Bond Girls can't act, and there are certainly reasons for that cliche, but here you can see the exact moment she realizes that she's gonna have to sleep with this hulking Scottish brute... and in the time it's taken me to type that, he's smooched her and she's liking it (he is Bond, after all), so I guess I shouldn't sympathize that much. Besides, she's a bad'un.

Post-coitus, Miss Taro would rather stay in for dinner, but Bond wants to eat out (if this film had been made a decade later, that joke would have made it into the script). And there's a sudden flash of brilliance in camera placement here, with Bond reflected in the mirror while Miss Taro does her nails. Bondfilm directors by and large are fairly workmanlike - it's when they call attention to themselves Cary that it becomes a problem - but every once in a while you get some subtle brilliance like this. The scene ends with Bond smooching her again, but checking his watch when she can't see. An inverse Hitchcock Traitor Shot, if you will. 

The "taxi" comes and lo and behold it's the authorities. Weird audio edit right after she spits at Bond (the taxi engine appears to cut out for a moment), but that's nothing compared to the edit we're about to see, where, after Bond sets up the trap for Dent and settles in for the night, we get a flipped shot of Bond walking up to Taro's house again (they obviously didn't remember to shoot the scene of Dent's arrival. But Bond's wearing the dark suit and Dent's wearing a much lighter one, so it's very obvious what they did).

Oh, hang about. I missed the trivia for the gun nuts. We see Bond affix a silencer to a gun we were told at the start of the film was a Walther PPK. It is in fact an FN Browning M1910, because the props department couldn't find a silencer for the Walther. Not that they came up with a real silencer for the Browning either, but I can't be bothered just read this if you care.

After the mirrored shot of Bond walking up to the house to ambush himself, we see that Bond is playing Solitaire. (Again, the connections between this one and Live and Let Die are both unintentional and hilarious.) 

And then we get what's probably the second most famous scene in the film (assuming you don't count the "Bond, James Bond" intro). The editing here is clever, lingering on Dent's attempts to retrieve his gun for only a few short seconds, but it's enough to build tension. Bond's got his hand off his gun for most of the scene - but of course Bond knows that Dent's out of bullets, so he doesn't care. (Never mind that he's misidentified Dent's gun, and that it has a capacity of at least seven rounds, and that the slide locks after Dent fires his sixth shot, only to be back to normal in the close-up of it on the ground.) Anyway, Dent's had his six (insert obligatory joke about Connery playing Bond in six films), that's the end of him,* Bond thumping an extra bullet into an already-dying man's back in an act of sadism we only rarely see again. (I count three: Dominic Greene's fate-worse-than-death in Quantum; Moonraker of all films features a gratuitously sadistic execution; and while I'm on the subject of Avuncular Gentleman Roger Moore, Stromberg gets many more holes put in him than are strictly necessary. )

*That's the end of Dent. His actor, Anthony Dawson, will be back in From Russia and Thunderball, but you won't see his face...

At pretty much the halfway point of the film, Bond and Quarrel head out for Crab Key. Felix goes halfway with them primarily to make a joke about Quarrel's drinking and reiterate that he can come back with the Marines at the end of the film (Bond says to bring them if he's not back in 12 hours, but Bond spends two nights on the island. Oops). 

Under the cover of moonlight so bright it looks like they just shot it in daytime and put a filter over the lens (because that's what they did), Bond and Quarrel arrive on Crab Key. First thing Quarrel does on the island is take a big drink of what I assume is not water. The music lets us know this is a comedy beat. 

I confess to not really understanding Quarrel's motivations for going along. Sure, Strangways paid him well, but it didn't sound like he really thought Crab Key was worth the money. It's possible that he and Strangways were good friends (no, not like that, it's 1962 - social mores would never have allowed such a thing, and besides they're both men), and he's out to avenge Strangways' death, but that doesn't really come across in either the script or the performance. I harp on this because there actually aren't that many Bond allies whose motivations are unclear - they're usually on the MI6 or CIA payroll - so on the rare occasion that this situation rears its head, I'm gonna call attention to it. (Come to think of it, the other obvious example of this is, erm, Quarrel Jr. in Live and Let Die. I can imagine that conversation: "Yeah, I know I made your dad sail to an island and fetch my shoes, and it got him killed... you wanna sail me to an island?")

Morning. Bond is awoken to the dulcet tones of someone singing "Underneath the Mango Tree." I know that someone isn't Ursula Andress (since her spoken dialogue was dubbed by, wait for it, Nikki van der Zyl), but I'm pretty sure it isn't van der Zyl singing either (it is in fact Diana Coupland... maybe. Some sources say Coupland, some say van der Zyl). Even more curious, she's been singing for quite a long time when the camera finally cuts to her, and she's still waist-deep in the sea. How long as she been wading towards the shore? A final bit of curiosity: her lips most certainly aren't moving in time with the song. It may have taken me multiple rewinds to notice this.

Bond pervs on her for a moment (he's robbed in this version; she's nekkid in the book), before he sings for the first and (thank God) only time in the franchise.

"Looking for shells?"

"No. I'm just looking."

Cheeky.

Honey Ryder doesn't actually accomplish anything in this film; she might in fact be the single most useless Bond Girl in the franchise. At least Mary Goodnight propels the plot forward through her stupidity and Stacey Sutton offers some important information. Going off the Amazon time-o-meter, Miss Taro makes her exit at 55:14, and Honey comes out of the water at 1:02:21 (007 minutes and 007 seconds later!) - maybe there was a girl quota that needed filling.* But there's not a beat here that would be different if Honey wasn't around, save for Bond would have got out of Dr. No's lair a bit faster and wouldn't have had anyone to smooch on the boat trip back.

Wait, I lie: because Honey had her sail up all the way over, the guards are alerted to their presence, so we're treated to a scene where they show up in a patrol boat to shoot a few sand dunes. This literally exists to pad out the film, and also give me a funny mental image of Dr. No's goons sailing out to shoot at the beach every few days regardless of whether anyone's there.

*Oh what the hell, I'm bored. Dr. No's longest Girl Drought is almost 15 minutes long and occurs during the climax of the film: Honey Ryder is manhandled away by Dr. No's guards at 1:30:50, and a female secretary runs down a smoky corridor at 1:45:33 (if you only count girls with lines, it's slightly longer - you're looking for the secretary that appears at 1:45:55). The second-longest Girl Drought is eight minutes and 42 seconds: we see the Camera Girl talking to Mr. Jones at 18:08, and then there's not another girl on screen until Bond asks a local where Quarrel is at 26:50. There would be a longer one between Camera Girl walking away at the nightclub at 34:29 and Miss Taro's appearance at 45:04, but fortunately Dent's receptionist and the hotel clerk are both female. In fact, with the exception of Bond killing the one guy in the swamp and the "dragon" encounter a few minutes later, it seems like the film uses girls or fights to get your attention, but not both at the same time.

Megaphone Guy on the boat says that they'll be back with the dogs, lowers the megaphone, and tells the crew "full speed ahead" with the megaphone effect still going. It's like that gag in Spaceballs, except it's not deliberate. 

Speaking of goofs, as Quarrel crawls over to discuss the existence of dragons with Honey and Bond, we get our first good look at Connery's not-particularly-well-concealed arm tattoo. It'll be making recurring appearances throughout the rest of this film, but I believe they found better makeup people for the sequels. (Er, nope: it's still noticeable in his hotel scene with Tania in From Russia.)

Oh, right, Quarrel's been doing the "superstitious native" thing for a while, insisting that there's a dragon on Crab Key. Now Honey chimes in and says she's seen it. The novel features a giant squid, so this isn't completely out of the realm of the possible. But I do have to wonder: the "dragon" patrols a radioactive swamp, so I'm not sure how Honey's encountered the thing without also encountering a nasty case of cancer. (It's possibly not limited to the swamp, but Honey's hiding place certainly is past the "DANGER, do not pass this point" sign.) (Surely there actually was a radioactive swamp, and not just an excuse Dr. No's goons invented to make Honey strip for them...)

Speaking of titillation, as they wade through the river we get our first look at a pair of nipples through a wet t-shirt. They belong to Quarrel.

(Okay, look, Honey's turn is coming up in a few minutes and I haven't decided how prurient I want to be here - in addition to Ursula's wet t-shirt and a handful of topless pinups scattered around various backgrounds, you can definitely see the bare nips of at least two later Bond Girls with some judicious freeze-framing. I'll hedge for now - Ursula's wet t-shirt moment was noticeable even on the old DVDs, so you shouldn't need me to point out when it happens. Though given what I've just said in this paragraph, I do wonder why they were so concerned about the censors vis a vis "Pussy Galore.")

The guards come back while they're in the river, and we see Bond have to get out of a jam with nothing more high-tech than a knife and some reeds. If this was any other Connery film, this is when he'd pull some Q tech out of his pocket and make a clever getaway. See why I call this half of the film a proto-Indiana Jones adventure flick? 

This scene also highlights the limitations of Monty Norman's compositional abilities. (It may be unfair to judge him on the basis of one film, but this is the one Bond film he did, so I'm doing it.) When Bond kills the straggling guard, note that Norman just recycles his cue from the fight with Mr. Jones earlier in the film. It's serviceable and chances are the audience watching this once in a theater in 1962 - "my word, that woman's almost naked!" - wouldn't notice. But I did.*

*This is me being petty, of course. James Horner used the same cue for both of Aliens' climaxes - and so did every action or horror movie trailer for the next twenty years. 

Next we learn that Honey dealt with a rapey landlord by putting a black widow spider in his bed, or so she says - since widow venom (generally) doesn't kill humans, it's probably that she's just telling a lie to warn off the hulking Scotsman from getting any funny ideas. No, wait, she just asked if Bond has a woman of his own, so she's obviously sounding him out for a quickie. Alas, Quarrel interrupts them before we get an answer (probably for the best, given that the plan at this point was for Sylvia Trench to be Bond's recurring "girl at home.") Bond points out that there are "less than 12 hours to go," which I'm afraid isn't going to make much sense of the upcoming timetable.

(Oh, by the way, Honey's suddenly wearing shoes, which is interesting because she was neither wearing nor carrying any when they left the beach.)

The universe's brightest moon comes out for another night of well-lit adventuring (although how much light it shines seems to vary from shot to shot - weird). The "dragon" emerges, and it's a tank with a flamethrower. Naturally Bond and Quarrel take cover behind some bushes, because bushes are known to be flame-resistant. This goes about as well as you could expect - hang on, I'm no gun nut, but there's no way Bond's gun is a Walther PPK in this scene. That moment of levity behind us, Quarrel gives us the second-most-horrifying burning-alive scream the 60s produced,* and Bond and Honey are arrested. Bond starts walking back towards Quarrel's corpse for no apparent reason. The guards fire a warning shot next to his foot with a degree of accuracy no-one will ever exhibit when shooting at Bond again for the next 23 films. 

*This is a sincere warning: the Apollo 1 tape is easy to find online. Do not listen to it.

The decontamination scene appears to exist to make us think we're getting Ursula Andress and Sean Connery naked, but it was obvious even on the DVD at the end of the sequence when the technician brandishes a towel at her that she's wearing a flesh-colored swimsuit (otherwise that'd be an X-rated shot). Doctor No may be the only bona fide evil genius Bond faces, but he apparently things radiation can just be washed off. Though at least he has put an airlock between the decontamination room and the rest of the facility.

Bond and Honey then meet two receptionists, who are the third and fourth (and last) women in this film not dubbed by van der Zyl, probably to save her the trouble of having to talk to herself. One of the receptionists tells him that "breakfast is already ordered, and then you'll want to sleep," suggesting that it's near dawn and Bond, Honey, and the late Quarrel have been chasing the dragon tank all night. Bond said that there was less than twelve hours to go while the sun was still up last night. Sunset in Jamaica is no later than 6:47 pm. Hrm. (There's a deleted scene, apparently, where Dr. No somehow forces Bond to tell Felix not to come. Followed by another scene later on where Bond gets his hands on a radio and tells Felix that he actually should come. But No's cutting it pretty close to the twelve-hour mark to begin with. What I'm saying is they probably should have just cut the line about the 12-hour limit.)

The other thing about the "you'll want to sleep after breakfast" line, it really should have tipped him off that some of his food might have been drugged. I don't think Bond is as perceptive as he told Dent he was.

Anyway, in addition to a Chastisement Room, Dr. No's also set up a Prison Hotel for any captive he wants to treat as a guest. Remarkable foresight from a guy whose m.o. up to this point has been "kill everyone who gets in my way." 

Bond observes that the whole place is probably wired for sound, but doesn't think that the tea might be drugged. I wouldn't keep harping on this except that he did think about his drink being drugged earlier on in his hotel room. Anyway, Bond's been knocked out for the first of many, many times in his career (he's actually not very good at his job), and Dr. No comes in to check on him after some other henchman has, um, undressed Bond and put him in bed. You think it was one of the receptionists that did that? (Two films from now, Bond expresses surprise that a member of the Fairer Sex knows judo, so I'm guessing no.)

Some time later - really, the passage of time from here on out is totally borked - Honey's getting dressed and looking at a mirror, and she can clearly see Bond in it, but she jumps when he asks her how she feels as though somehow his presence is surprising her. We're told it's "almost time for dinner," but that doesn't seem to make sense, as we'll see. Meanwhile, Honey's managed to get her shirt on and fully buttoned in the five-ish seconds the camera was off her, which is probably her most impressive talent demonstrated on-screen in this film. Like I said, she doesn't do anything.

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that the second half of that corridor is a matte painting, which means I'll look stupid if a minion runs down it later, I guess. But I know what the film's budget was - Dr. No himself will tell us in just a few moments - and I'm impressed at how far they stretched it.

They're put in an elevator by themselves, with the controls inside with them. Bond doesn't think to mash the buttons and try to get off on another floor (yeah there'd be bad guys but he's Bond and they're not, so it wouldn't be that much of a problem). Pretty sure the girl's scrambling his brains.

Dr. No's dining room is pretty tacky as far as interior design goes, although I have to admit it's probably meant to have a "looks like a bit of home carved out of the rock" feel to it, and it does that. Problem is, the rest of the base looks far less... like a cave. So this room is a bit incongruous with the rest of the set design. Not helped by the rear-projected fish in the "aquarium." On top of the usual rear-projection-looking-really-bad-by-today's-standards problem, all the footage they had of the fish was super close-up, so they look a lot bigger than they should. No problem: just add in a line of dialogue about how the aquarium glass acts as a magnifying lens. Clever!

Anyway, Dr. No tells Bond that the entire setup cost $1 million, which also happens to be the film's official budget (it was a little higher than that thanks to some overrunning post-production costs, but not by much). After ably trading barbs with Bond, he offers him a drink:

Dr. No: A medium-dry martini, lemon peel, shaken, not stirred.

Bond: Vodka?

Dr. No: Of course.

So if you've been paying attention, Bond's not the first to use either his classic introduction or his famous drink order. Don't worry, Sean: unlike Roger, they will actually let you say the line at some point.*

*Not making this up: Roger Moore never gets to say "shaken, not stirred" as Bond.

Each of the three Terence Young-helmed Bond films has a badly dated reference in it that goes over the heads of modern audiences, and here's this one's: Bond stops and has a gander at a painting in Dr. No's lair. It's a replica of Francisco de Goya's painting of the Duke of Wellington, which had been stolen a year before the film was released, but was recovered in 1965. Ken Adam got the idea to include it in the set decor and painted up a replica over a weekend.

Dr. No enjoys a cigar (neat trick with the claw-hands he's got) and gives Bond his backstory, or at least part of it; in the book, the Tongs cut his hands off when he stole their money, but in the film, it's heavily implied he lost them in a radiation accident. (Again worth pointing out that Dr. No is actually the only Bond villain who has an advanced degree - what, he spent 6 years at Evil Medical School and never learned to not touch the Demon Core?) 

Bond tries to bluff Dr. No about having sent a "complete report" back to London, and Dr. No calls it - again, his intelligence operation is a hell of a lot better than his assassination operation. Dr. No tells Bond that he's the one man No's met capable of appreciating what No has done. Well, yeah, you did make your island as unwelcoming as possible. Bond should put him in touch with Q. 

Dr. No points out that Honey is expendable. Bond tries to bargain for her release, but Honey, being a moron, says she's staying with Bond. She's hauled away, and Dr. No observes that Bond tried to hide a knife on his person. 

Dr. No: The successful criminal brain is always superior. It has to be. (Yeah, buddy, but you're the one with no hands.)

No says that he respects Bond because Bond crippled his organization and kept flustering his minions, but a) his minions were pretty stupid and b) Bond was ultimately captured, suggesting that he's actually not an ideal candidate for the job offer he's about to get.

Dr. No explains that he is a member of SPECTRE - the SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion - and invites Bond to join. So there's a bit of unbuilt formula: while Badhats Yet To Come might wine and dine Bond for no reason other than He's Bond And They're The Badhat And That's Just How These Movies Go, Darling, this time there's at least a quantum of sense behind it: Dr. No wants to recruit Bond. Bond, being a spy, and theoretically familiar with the idea of infiltrating an organization to take it down from within, declines. 

No calls him a "stupid policeman whose luck has run out," which is half-right - if No's goons didn't lock him in a cell with an easily-accessible air vent, that'd be game - and then a minion tells No that "they" are waiting for him in the control room, suggesting that the film's climax is about to happen. I bring this up because we're about to have another time skip; Bond is beat up to laughably poorly dubbed-in sound effects (it's not as bad as Sonny Corleone beating up Carlo Rizzi, but it's close), and then wakes up "some time later" in a cell.

The gate to the air vent is electrified but fortunately the guards were kind enough to leave Bond a pair of shoes. Shortly thereafter it also transpires that the air vent conveys the occasional flood of water - was No planning to waterboard him?

Bond clambers down a pipe. Meanwhile, in an identical pipe, an identically-dressed man who otherwise does not resemble Sean Connery in the slightest slips and falls. Was this this noticeable on the DVD? Don't recall; either way, I'm going to count it as the first obvious stuntman of the franchise. 

Next the aforementioned flood of water comes rushing in. By this point, Bond has torn his shirt* to make makeshift gloves because the metal of the pipe is so hot. But he lies flat on the ground to survive the water. Surely he's burning his arms here. Anyway, props to the makeup team for keeping Connery's toupee on during this scene. 

*Aside from Licence to Kill, we won't see Bond get this messy again until he's played by Daniel Craig.

Bond gets to the other end of the pipe and kicks in the gate - hang on, we never saw him put his shoes back on after he opened the gate in his cell! Well, as already established with Honey's footwear, Crab Key is clearly the Island of the Helpfully Reappearing Shoes. (Actually, come to think of it, the folks who say Bond doesn't use any gadgets in this film have it wrong. He uses a shoe to kill the spider and to open the electrified gate! Q wishes he could come up with something so versatile.)

One benefit to Dr. No playing around with radiation is that everyone needs to wear radiation suits (except for No himself, and the two other guys at his console, who are all wearing plastic bags instead), so Bond knocks out a henchman and dresses at the enemy. They should bring this trope back. It's been 40 years since Raiders of the Lost Ark parodied it.

It's all a bit rote to notice that the Asian Dr. No is played by a British actor in yellowface, or that he's only really in two scenes, or that the climax comes and goes far too quickly. That's the perspective of Current Year, with twenty-four (Christ!) Bond films between now and then. What matters is that Joseph Wiseman knocked it out of the park, the script soared, not a moment was wasted... and yeah, those are Doctor Who sound effects being made by the first piece of equipment Bond walks past. Sorry. I can't get past that. 

Dr. No does a dress rehearsal, showing us how the radioactive pool works. One of his goons doesn't report in. A tech helpfully tells him that said goon - "Chang," how original - is standing right behind him. It's actually Bond in, presumably, Chang's suit, and Dr. No doesn't notice this despite being less than ten feet away and looking him straight in the face. (Turns out Connery doesn't need pancake makeup to look Asian. Take that, You Only Live Twice!)

As Bond gets up on the gantry, the broadcast informs us that the rocket Dr. No is trying to topple is "MA-7," presumably Mercury-Atlas 7, which in the real world flew on May 24, 1962, with astronaut Scott Carpenter aboard. (The Mercury spacecraft is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois.) However, at the beginning of this scene, the techs were watching footage of a Vanguard launch, and the voiceover said that the rocket weighed 240 tons (it was closer to 100). Hrmph. Nevertheless, I'm going to use the presence of MA-7 to state that this is one of only a handful of Bond films that definitively takes place in the year it came out. (The other contenders, as far as I know, are OHMSS and Casino Royale.* TWINE might be in that group too. Will have to check.)

*Graves of characters who die in those films turn up in later films with the year of death helpfully listed - although in OHMSS's case, it's probably wrong. I'll explain when we get to those films.

We have about four minutes to go to launch, so before everything goes to hell, I'm just going to point out that the next time we see a reactor in a Bond film,* it's going to a) look surprisingly cheaper, and b) be run by a single guy. Again, Dr. No is the cheapest Bond film ever made, but wow did they stretch that budget as far as they could.

*The Man With the Golden Gun

There's an almost-convincing model shot of the radio dish coming out of its casing. Basically the reason why it doesn't quite work is the same reason why so much of the model work in The Spy Who Loved Me is obvious model work: water in close-up never looks like anything other than water in close-up. I do give them points for building the little model dinghy though - it's a nice feature, bobbing up and down, nearly distracting me from noticing that the scale of the waves is all wrong.

Bond overloads the reactor and punches the other tech off the gantry when he tries to stop him. This prompts mass panic and chaos. It'll be something of a staple in the 70s films for one of the henchmen to try to kill Bond after he's already thwarted the Evil Plan and killed the main villain, but the only candidate for that role here would be Camera Girl (one of only two* henchpeople I can name whose fate isn't shown), and this is a boys-only climax. 

*The other is Irma Bunt in OHMSS, who was clearly meant to return for the sequel-that-never-was, which wound up being a moot point when her actress died of a heart attack four days after the film premiered.

The upshot of this is that all the other lab techs run away and Dr. No is left to fight Bond by himself. There's a shot of Dr. No running towards Bond with his arms at his sides, hunched over - it's a weird-looking gait, gorilla-like, and it took me the longest time (i.e., however many years since I first saw it until right now typing these words) that Joseph Wiseman was acting as though his metal hands were unusually heavy. And that makes sense considering how he throws his punches in the fistfight here. They end up on - oh dear - an unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism, and Bond is able to gain the upper hand and escape. Dr. No can't get a grip on the metal girder (why he doesn't just crush it with his superhuman strength is a mystery to me) and melts(?) in the radiation pool.

The Bond films (at least under the pre-CGI tenureship of Broccoli A) had this thing about doing stunts for real (q.v. Moonraker's opening skydive). Makes me wonder if that's really Connery and Wiseman under the suits here (this is, as far as I know, the only climactic tussle in which Bond's face is obscured. Might have wanted to repeat this idea as Uncle Rog creaked into middle age).

Meanwhile, the "Mercury-Atlas" rocket has changed from a Vanguard to a Titan. Which is still, you know, not an Atlas. (You think this is weird, wait until the Russians start launching Titans in You Only Live Twice.)

Bond goes back to the Prison Hotel room looking for Honey (neat trick, knowing where that is). He accosts a receptionist (voiced by... oh you know the drill by now) and learns that she's in a... drainage room or something? She's just been left there to either be eaten by crabs or drown when the tide comes in. As death traps go, it's a disappointment. Anyway, they escape in the confusion and hijack a dinghy. 

John Stears blows up the fortress model - he'll go on to be the only person to win Oscars for both Bond (for Thunderball's effects) and Star Wars. Bond and Honey run out of fuel and Felix arrives to tow them, it being far too late to be of any actual use. For whatever reason, Felix is commanding a boat that's flying the Union Jack. Not wanting an early end to his vacation, Bond lets go the line so he can have another round of sex with Honey. Roll credits.

Overall thoughts

It's hard to judge this on its merits because - sorry, this is becoming repetitive - the formula, the concept of Bondfilm just doesn't exist yet. What we're left with is a half-familiar song, played by a band that'll hit it big in a few years. (This film predates Please Please Me by about five months, and there will be plenty of Bond-Beatles comparisons to come.) On its own merits, it's pretty decent. Good hero, good (if totally useless) girl, good villain. Lacks in the henchmen department, with the most notable one in this film being Bond's, i.e., Quarrel. The climax comes and goes too quickly, but this is preferable in that it's over before you get bored. (Yes, I know what I just wrote. It's Bond, of course there's a sex joke in there somewhere.)

Now, okay, "the names are a bit naff and the villain's a bit dim" is criticism that would sink basically any good Bond film. But there wouldn't be any good Bond films if this one didn't perform well. What makes Bondfilm good? It ain't the script - Purvis & Wade wrote or co-wrote every film since TWINE, and while Die Another Day and Spectre are both terrible, they're terrible in very different ways. Really the script is just a vehicle for James Bond hijinks. There are exceptions to this! Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and No Time To Die all spring to mind for various different reasons. But for the most part, see, e.g., Moonraker, the script is just a method of transporting Bond from Card Game A to Shag B to Fight Scene C. And that's definitely the case here. 

So what made Bond work? Or more accurately, what in this film made people want to come back for more? "Peter Hunt's editing" may answer the first question in the eyes of nerds (hi), but certainly doesn't answer the second. I suspect that the "real" answer is Sean Connery, at least judging by how much they were paying him by the end of his tenure. But conventional wisdom says that Connery didn't really settle into the role until Goldfinger, and apparently he even tried to pull a British accent somewhere in Dr. No. (I can't find it, not being a driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road subject of the Crown.) Fortunately I don't have to worry about Sean's future performances here, and can just focus on his first attempt to play the character. And, not being a student of the art of acting, all I can say is that he did a pretty good job. He seemed pretty comfortable in the character from the word "go," a master of the art of Standing Around Just Being James Bond that perpetually eluded the otherwise-unfairly-maligned George Lazenby.* He's not aloof and quippy like Roger Moore - sure, toss off a one-liner here or there, but don't treat the entire thing like a joke. There's more emotion in his reaction to Quarrel's immolation than there is in entire Moore films. There's more smoldering sexuality than Dalton and more of a raw human being (as opposed to a collection of tropes and pharmacology) than Brosnan. And - although this won't always be the case - there's clearly a sense of fun in his Bond that is sorely lacking in Craig's. God, imagine Craig sitting down to dinner with Dr. No. He'd be all eye-bulging jaw-twitching barely-contained rage. Would have been an abject disaster. Good thing he hadn't even been born yet.

*Hell, the only actor who was Sean's equal in this regard was Roger Moore. Suspect I'd give Lazenby less flack on that score if he'd been a tad older; my criticism of his inability to Stand Around Just Being James Bond stems mainly from his second scene in OHMSS, where he shows up in the hotel lobby like a boy who just inherited his dad's empire.

Anyway, Dr. No's had a small tumble down the rankings, from 9th place last time I did this to 11th now. Not its fault - my opinion of this film hasn't changed much, but my opinion of others has. But take a moment to consider the fact that there are 25 of the things, and the first one's in 11th place.

That means that, on average, the franchise gets slightly worse after this.

Most ridiculous foreign title(s)

Japan translated the title without any context and wound up with We Don't Want a Doctor! (Once they got the memo, they changed it to Dr. No: 007 is the Killing Number.) Meanwhile Italy called it Agent 007: Licence to Kill, and Sweden called it Agent 007 With a Licence to Kill. You can imagine that those titles caused some problems 27 years later.