Dr No

Where it all began! After apparently every actor to ever appear on screen being offered the role, Sean Connery eventually steps into the tux and brings British secret agent James Bond to life for the very first time, in the role that will go on to define his entire career .

Pre-existing Prejudices
Surprisingly few. I’ve seen this film, but I doubt I’ve seen it in… thirty years maybe? Longer? I definitely saw it as a kid, and probably I even liked it, but beyond a few random images I have almost no memory of this at all.

The Actual Movie
Ok let’s start with the obvious – the title sequence here is truly bizarre. We get the familiar opening gun barrel over some deeply weird, screechy electronics. Then that theme kicks in, and it’s undeniably exciting, but we then get a strange 60’s title sequence of flashing dots and pop art sensibilities. Then it just abruptly stops, we get some “native” drumming, and we’re off to Jamaica. This must rate as the most avant garde opening in the entire Bond series.

Almost immediately there’s an issue though, because the calypso version of the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice”, accompanied by three blind black men just looks… well, racist. I know we’re in Jamaica, and it’s a calypso but… it feels very strange indeed. Shortly we’ll discover they’re a band of assassins after they kill Strangway, but this looks very peculiar. The problem is that, even though they shoot someone on-screen and kick off the actual plot, we’re just not given enough information. They’re either a poor stereotype or an underdeveloped plot point, but either way, they don’t really work. Thankfully they’re on screen for a fairly short period of time.

There’s a bit more shenanigans in Jamaica as some anonymous red shirt secretary gets bumped off (though her secret radio is hidden behind some false books, which is terribly sweet), then we finally get to London, with some surprisingly mixed-gender secretaries receiving broadcasts from around the globe. This gets a message forwarded to M, so we finally get to the point where we meet Bond, but the film takes its own sweet time getting there. But at last we get to see Bond himself. Connery’s very first line is, “Bond. James Bond.” He’s an immediately striking on-screen presence, handsome yes, but he draws focus in a way that nobody else in this film has, even when doing something as simple as lighting a cigarette. Noticeably, when playing baccarat in his first scene he speaks with perfect BBC English, and when he gets into M’s office his Scottish accent suddenly puts in an appearance. It’s a small thing, he doesn’t go full-on “hoots mon, where’s ma haggis”, nor the “Jamesssh Bond” Connery stereotype so beloved of bad impersonators, but it’s a good way of suggesting how in-character he was at the casino, and that now he’s dropping the pretense.

So Bond gets his mission to find out who was murdered in the opening five hours of the movie (or ten minutes, but it doesn’t feel like ten minutes…). There are more notable absences here, since there’s no Q, no gadgets, and no lame one-liners, just a bit of standard flirting with Moneypenny (there’s a surprisingly good, relaxed banter between her and Bond, so praise to Lois Maxwell for not being swamped out by Connery – she’s the only female member of the cast to achieve this in Dr. No). There is, at least, a real sense of history here – we’re told Bond spent six months in hospital because of a gun jamming, that M has reduced double-0 casualties since taking over and wants to keep that going… This isn’t an origin story or the beginnings of Bond, there’s an actual sense of established history. And before we get to Jamacia (we are going to get there eventually, right?) the girl from the casino has a quick fling with Bond. What’s interesting here is that, for Bond’s very first dalliance, she seduces him, not the other way around, a refreshing subversion of expectations.

Finally, Jamacia! One of the things about Dr No is that, of course because it’s the first Bond, things aren’t as we expect. When the Bond theme kicks in, we have an in-built expectation that there’s a big action set-piece on the way. Here when it kicks in Bond is… walking across an airport concourse. The theme, in other words, is being used to denote character, rather than situation. It’s an interesting approach. After some too-long hanging about the airport we get the series’ first car chase, which is a bit limp, but finally we get to see Connery beat someone up and get some information. We at last see Bond/Connery’s steel come out, not just charming but ruthless too. Connery’s good at the physical side of the character – it isn’t showy, just a couple of punches and a flip – but there’s a real sense that the character is only using the amount of force he needs to, rather than unleashing everything. It’s an effective technique, and even more pleasingly we get to see that Bonds knuckles are bloodied from the punch, adding a sense of realism to the (relatively brief) burst of violence.

Information gained and potential assassin dead, Bond is back at his hotel and setting traps (hair over the wardrobe door, powder on his attaché case), and there’s a proper sense that Bond is actually investigating here. The action so far has been relatively limited, but Bond is actually following clues, getting information and really working out what’s going on. That makes Dr No feel in some ways more like a detective movie than a spy caper, despite the “exotic” location. But at least we get to see Bond using his intelligence as well as his fists. The vodka-martini puts in its first appearance (the vodka is very, very clearly Smirnoff, for those who think product placement is somehow a new phenomenon).

Then we get to move down to “the pier” and another Bond staple, Felix Liter, puts in an appearance, here played by Hawaii 5-0’s Jack Lord. There’s another pleasing subversion of expectations here, where it looks like the (tellingly black) boat owner and bar owner are going to end up being the bad guys, yet actually end up being extremely helpful and informative, and it all ends in handshakes rather than gunfire. Admittedly that’s only after (the white) Liter puts in an appearance, but it at least means that not all black men in the film are bad guys, which it really looked liked it might have ended up being at one point. The bar is playing the song “Underneath The Mango Tree”. I hope you like it, because it appears to be the only song on the whole damned island. There’s lots of bad 60’s dancing going on at the bar as they plan their course of action, and the odd hilarious costume as well, which is always fun.

But before we can head out to the mysterious Crab Key to find out what the point of this film is, we have an attempt to assassinate Bond by spider (Connery does a good gob of looking genuinely frightened, but it’s a hokey scene), and some more seduction by a soon-to-be-dead femme fatale (though again we get to see Bond being smart enough to know that the assassin sent to kill her has a Smith and Wesson, and he’s used up his shots). But before she dies there’s a lingering sense of threat in the scenes between her and Bond – look at the way he approaches her with the towel wrapped round both his fists, as if ready to strangle her, or the way he grabs her lapel as if she was a common back-alley thug. They really paint a picture of Bond’s (not exactly pleasant) interior life in very small details and it’s effective, if unsettling. Again Connery brings the steel effectively, but there’s a game being played here by both of them, two predators circling each other, even if she ultimately loses.

Finally, we’re heading for Crab Key! Oh should I have mentioned there’s some plot point about “the Americans” trying to launch a moon shot and this maybe being the point of the film? Probably, but the movie itself doesn’t exactly linger over the details. Even getting to Crab Key, ostensibly where the whole film has thus far been leading, we still take ages to get there, including night shooting and Bond and the Anonymous Black Barman bedding down for the night. And then Ursula Andres turns up as Honey Ryder – it’s worth pointing this out simply because we’re now about two-thirds of the way through the movie before the now-standard “Bond girl” puts in her first appearance. Can you guess what mango-related song she might be singing as she emerges from the sea?

Here she’s a fiercely independent woman, capable of defending herself and standing up to Bond as an equal. Well, until they reach the Secret Underground Lair, where she abruptly undergoes a personality change and becomes a peril monkey of the worst kind. We spend about fifteen minutes avoiding the bad guys, which at least suggests some effort being put into making Crab Key a real environment, but then they just get caught anyway and Anonymous Black Barman is killed off in the most perfunctory way possible because he no longer serves any plot purpose.

Bond is very unphazed by moving from a sweaty tropical island to what amounts to a spa club, but at least we are (finally) approaching the point of the film. Things have been kind of slow so far, but they’ve more or less made sense. But now we come across a series of logic gaps of the kind that will come to typify Bond movies. For one, Honey and Bond drink some coffee, which turns out to be drugged. They collapse, and are put to bed. Why? We don’t get anything approaching an explanation, and it contributes nothing to the plot. Dr No’s plan is world domination, and we get the first mention of SPECTRE, which is nice, but it’s all a bit ridiculously over-ambitions (he will not the only villain to make that mistake).

When we finally meet him we get a phenomenally arch performance from Joseph Wiseman as the titular Doctor, but he’s barely on-screen for more than five minutes, explaining his Evil Plan, then retreating. He has metal hands, we’re told, because of some mishap with radiation. Right. That’s definitely a thing. And they’re strong – he can crush a gold statue, but in the end the strength amounts to nothing (it’s presumably meant to add additional threat during the climactic fight, but this doesn’t work, partly because we don’t see him do anything with his super-strong hands and partly because the final fight is two stuntmen in radiation suits slugging it out, and it could be anyone fighting). Meanwhile, back at the plot problems, when Bond is escaping through the air ducts, why are they hot? Why does water flush through them?

It’s great that we see Bond being put through his paces – like the way he braces for the water rushing over him, and it’s a well-shot sequence – and he’s visibly bloodied and harassed, but again, we don’t get anything approaching an explanation as to what these vents are or why there’s water running through them. Venting for the reactor perhaps? Fine, could be, but one line of dialogue or even a whacking big REACTOR COOLING sign (and there are many big ridiculous signs in this base) would have cleared some of this up. Still the base itself is a huge set, and it’s pretty ambitious. What a shame, then, that we spend so little time on it. Bond gets to slide a hilariously oversized “DANGER LEVER 25” lever, the place goes into meltdown, there’s some perfunctory fisticuffs, and Dr No is defeated because his hands are metal and he can’t get a grip to climb out of the boiling water. OK. Sure.

Still, the American moon shot is saved (hurrah? I can’t even remember being told what the point of this is), and Bond at least makes times to go back and rescue Honey, who has, in what is not the film’s finest moment, been literally tied to a slab of concrete (read: rock) where she will apparently drown when the tide comes in. I say “apparently” though, because when Bond rescues her, the water hasn’t even reached her knees, so it’s not liked she was saved from imminent danger or anything. Anyway you can probably guess the rest: they make their escape, base goes up in big explosion, they’re rescued just before they start having sex, then have sex anyway, while some hilariously parping horn music plays over the top.

And then we’re back under that fucking mango tree for the closing credits.

In Conclusion
Dr No isn’t a bad film.  In fact it’s often a sporadically entertaining one, but it’s also often a fairly plodding, with longeurs all over the place and a sense that script could have done with being tightened up a bit. That will become something of a recurring theme as we move forward with the Bond movies, but it’s interesting to observe it here, right out of the gate – this has always been a feature of Bond, not a bug. This tightening up might have made a lot of the middle sections a bit less tedious, because the film definitely does sag in the middle, and give a bit more of a push when we actually reach This Movie’s Point.

There’s definitely a sense that we’re following a chain of events here: murder leads to intrigue leads to Bond being involved leads to Jamaica etc. but it’s all fairly linear, and that linearity doesn’t do the film many favours, even though it means everything more or less makes sense and flows from one point to the next.  Bond is genuinely working things out here, and that’s just how the character should be being deployed. Certain later films will often fall into the trap of having a series of set-pieces with a bit of dialogue in-between to justify them, but here Bond really does deduce and discover, and it feels exactly right for the character, and for this specific interpretation of it.

Dr No, as a character (and, lest we forget, this is the character the film is actually named after), never really coheres into anything very much – having him absent in the first half of the movie, as the puppet-master, has a certain logic to it, but we need more of a sense of the man to understand why he’s doing any of this. We’re told it’s because he’s a member of SPECTRE, and obviously from our perspective we know that’s going to go on to be significant but watching it from the perspective of an average movie-goer in the 60’s, it’s more likely to elicit a shrug and, “yes, and…?” He just seems to be a generically wealthy nutjob with a love of Chinese collars.

The limited screen-time given to the character can, in other words, be seen as successful from a scripting point of view, but not really from a character point of view, and a bit more time – even just a few minutes – would help flesh out a lot of detail and give Joseph Wiseman the space to really make the character something special.  He is great in the role – despite the first emergence of disability/disfigurement = evil motif that will become an all-too-regular occurrence in Bond movies – it’s just a shame we don’t get to spend a bit more time with him.

But I don’t want to be too harsh here, because there is plenty to enjoy. Bond himself, for one. If there’s one thing this film had to get right it was Bond, and Connery makes an immediate impression in the title role, nailing it first time out. Bond here is a likeable character right up until the moment he’s not, and that sense of unpredictability and the fact that he can turn on a sixpence is something Connery is able to bring to the fore quite effortlessly. He’s equally good at playing Bond playing a role – when investigating at the club where Strangway was shot, Bond is playing rather diffident, then immediately snaps back to his old self the moment he leaves, a nice bit of variegation from Connery, who could have played it as Bond just demanding information.

And as  mentioned earlier, the fact that Bond takes time to really investigate does give a good sense of the intelligence of the man, and why he might be suited to this kind of mission. He’s drawn as smart and capable, but far from invincible, and that’s the right way to build the character. Connery seems to instinctively understand this and, while the film may have other failings, his Bond is front and centre throughout the whole movie, and both the fictional agent and the actor are more than able to cope. It’s a flat-out terrific start for the character.

It’s fairly obvious that this isn’t a high budget production – far from the globetrotting of future entries, here there’s only two principal locations, London and Jamaica, and the former is only there for some scene-setting at the start of the movie. This focus on one location does mean we get to spend some time getting a sense of the place, but in the end we also spend a bit too long there. We spend simply ages waiting for Bond to get to the damned island already, and even when we do arrive we still have to endure fifteen minutes of runaround before the plot deigns to move forward.

When we actually get into it, the base looks fantastic – it’s pretty obvious this is where the money went, and everything’s decked out in copper, an unusual but successful design conceit that makes it look like a Dalek might glide round a corner at any moment. And the big control room, hilarious signage aside, at least looks like somewhere the big climax of the movie properly belongs. That the climax itself is a bit perfunctory is a shame, and because everyone’s wearing big Michelin Man radiation suits the final fight between Bond and Dr No is pretty incoherent. But still, it does look good.

So is this a good film? Well, bits of it are. In the end, it’s not so much a good film as a good enough film. It gets the Bond series off to a start, and in Connery it finds a leading man worthy of the role, and for that alone it deserves some praise. There’s a few standout moments here, and despite it’s setting and a couple of misjudged moments (the blind assassins, Anonymous Black Barman’s stupid demise) there’s nothing that’s really awful here, in itself something of an achievement. So while it’s impossible to give Dr No an unreserved recommendation, it’s not a complete bust either. Not bad.

What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut?
Bond films can often feel over-long and rather flabby, so this feature is here to address that very issue.  Dr No is one hour and fifty minutes long, which isn’t exactly the longest Bond movie, but because the pace is pretty slack it never feels like it’s really clipping along (well, until we finally get to the base, anyway, when things finally get going).  The script definitely needs tightening up, especially in the middle section of the movie where we spend simply ages hanging around in sub-plots that could have just been dropped in favour of “Bond finds a clue, finally we’re off to the fucking island already”.  Conversely, we should have spent a bit more time on the actual base once we get there, rather than a quick runaround then off in time for Felix to come to the rescue.  So I’m going to say 15% here could get the chop.  The film would be better for it.

Quip Level
Based on the following scale.  Low, Medium, High, Shameful

Extremely Low.  Bond gets of a few flirtations lines with Moneypenny, but they’re not really quips. And rather than one-liners that he’ll eventually ene up delivering, here Bond tends to state things which, while amusing in their own right, don’t really qualify as quips, like his, “that’s a Smith and Wesson.  And you’ve had your six,” to a potential assassin.  It’s funny, dark (since Bond kills him straight after delivering the line), just a little understated, and adds something to the movie. The character seems witty (and just a bit of a bastard) without overstating things.

2024 Cringe Level:
Dr No earns a High.  The Three Blind Assassins are poorly thought out rather than actively offensive, even though they’re a bit toe-curling.  And there’s a bit I haven’t actually mentioned yet, whereby a flame-spitting truck has a big smile painted on it because apparently that looks like a dragon and it’ll keep the natives away (that’s how Anonymous Black Barman meets his maker).  Which is stupid, racist and quite cringe-y, but also under forty-five seconds of actual screen time.  It would have been part of the 15% that should have been cut.