Watching Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No for the first time is a trip
I'd never really seen Sean Connery in a James Bond film until last week. He was not what I expected—he was better
Film Features Dr. No
The caricatured version of James Bond that has permeated pop culture is that of a debonair, shaken-not-stirred-martini-drinking Casanova who may get into a tight jam, but will always find a way out. That’s the image of 007 that I’ve had, because everything associated with the character has become so codified that it’s been parodied in Austin Powers and on The Simpsons and a hundred other places. These Bond tributes, take-offs, and ripoffs are the only impressions I had of this 61-year-old series because until about a week ago, I had a pretty baseline knowledge of the franchise.
So I recently assigned myself a personal quest to fill the gaping hole in my brain where James Bond knowledge is supposed to go. Previously, I had seen two Bond DVDs that my dad had when I was a kid: Diamonds Are Forever, because I knew the theme song, and Octopussy, because I thought the name was funny when I was in eighth grade. (And still do. It’s funny.) I remember effectively nothing about these movies, so for all intents and purposes, I’ve started from scratch with 1962’s Dr. No.
A big job: Launching the Bond franchise
Dr. No is a pretty strange movie with a herculean task. It has the responsibility of introducing the character James Bond and Sean Connery in the role and kickstarting what’s now a six-plus-decade film franchise—the longest running in history. It largely succeeds at these things; it introduces Bond, a few minutes in, with the iconic “Bond, James Bond” line, the first thing he says in the film. He sleeps with three different women, including Zena Marshall’s Miss Taro and Ursula Andress’ Honey Ryder. The eponymous Dr. No gives Mike Myers a great gift by saying “one million dollars.” But as a standalone film, it’s a little rough.
The plot finds Connery’s Bond mostly stationed in Jamaica—a British colony when the movie was filmed, but an independent nation when it was released. When an MI6 agent and his secretary are murdered on the island, 007 is dispatched to figure out what is going on. Essentially, the mysterious Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman) is attempting to block the launch of Project Mercury from Cape Canaveral by using radio signals. The technology is powered by a nuclear reactor, which eventually brings Dr. No to his end.
Look, I’m not going to pretend like I thoroughly understand the science at play here. The film itself seems largely uninterested in explaining how this works, which is for the best. Dr. No is a product of the early Cold War era, and explicitly plays on the anxieties of the time. Your average British or American theatergoer in 1962 didn’t need to fully understand how nukes or rockets work to know that they were afraid of them. Why get bogged down in details?
The geopolitics, which are also barely alluded to, are notable. The people already in Jamaica are treated as disposable, and pretty much everyone who crosses paths with Bond, whether friend or foe, winds up dead. Most disappointing is Quarrel, a local who assists Bond on the case. He is unceremoniously flame-throwered to death by a roving, mechanical dragon. In the film’s conclusion, Bond wins by destroying a nuclear reactor on Crab Key. The island is destroyed and the whole area will be contaminated for generations, but the CIA will be able to launch their rocket. Yay!
I don’t want to take the science to task too badly. This was way pre-Chernobyl and the ramifications of something like this would have been pretty abstract to the general public and, probably, a decent segment of the people working on the film. That’s the generous explanation. A less generous one is that Britain was about to lose control of Jamaica and didn’t care what happened to an island full of non-white people. Regardless of the intention behind it, it’s one of those things that in hindsight you see and tug on your collar a little bit. (As an aside, in Ian Fleming’s original novel, Dr. No runs a guano mine, an operation that actually was fairly prolific in the 19th century and kinda-sorta started the United States’ own imperialism. Geopolitics is weird.)
Connery’s Bond: Cool, and completely confident
What I am willing to take to task is the fact that multiple Asian characters, including the titular Dr. No, are played by white actors in yellowface. It was unfortunately common in Hollywood to do this—hell, How I Met Your Mother did it in 2014—but it’s still an uncomfortable watch. It was just as wrong then as it is now. A small saving grace, if there must be one, is that neither Wiseman nor Marshall leans into a stereotypically Asian portrayal, instead being simply hammy in a Bond-esque way.
The stuff that works best in Dr. No is the stuff that indulges in the camp of the situation. Connery in particular is not what I expected from a first watch—he was better. Yes, he’s debonair and sexy, but he is also so remarkably unperturbed by the frankly insane events unfolding around him. The iconic image of him, eyebrow slightly raised and cigarette dangling from his mouth isn’t simply an image but an attitude. Bond isn’t the definition of cool because everything goes his way, but because he’s completely confident that everything will end his way.
Ultimately, it did. The legacy of this debut is what makes Dr. No successful, if as an artifact more than a standalone film. And it’s the goofiness of this film and the character that I’ve realized is just as influential as Bond’s suaveness. It’s part of the reason the parodies have also proliferated to such an extent. Audiences in 1962 may not have had the most robust knowledge of nuclear politics, but they were smart enough to know when something was goofy. I think that’s why you can still mostly get the gist from watching Austin Powers. But there’s only one place you can get Sean Connery, and it’s right here.
165 Comments
Every few years I like to go back and marathon the Eon 007 movies (meaning I purposefully exclude the David Niven/Peter Sellers Casino Royale and only sometimes re-watch Never Say Never Again) and yeah, it’s pretty striking how much of what we consider “a James Bond movie” feels almost fully-formed right from the start. Watching it in the 2020’s, it’s particularly interesting to see how S.P.E.C.T.R.E. is established by name very late into the runtime and then just has no relevance to anything else that happens in the movie. Today, it would probably be perceived as shameless sequel-baiting, or teasing for fans of the books (which were adapted wildly out of order). I’m still curious how it was perceived in 1962.It’s one of the entries that I have a tendency to fast-forward through, and I think it pales in comparison to its sequel (though contemporary audiences disagreed, I think). But there’s still tons of great stuff there.
Along the lines of the series being fully-formed in the first entry: something that surprised me watching it for the first time just a few years ago was realizing that almost every James Bond parody I’d been exposed to as a kid was really a parody of Dr. No, specifically. From contemporaneous 60’s send-ups through the original Austin Powers, so many elements across three decades of gags are directly aping this film’s tone and style (Especially stuff like No’s lair, a groovy mix of midcentury modern designs and colorful “stone” walls, populated by anonymous henchmen in bright, color-coded decontamination suits.)
I hate to break it to you, but those elements were not only aped by decades of *parodies*, but also by the majority of the films in the franchise *itself*. That’s why it all seems to you like “Dr. No, specifically”.
Austin Powers actually owes more a debt to You Only Live Twice, which established the visual template for Blofeld and gave us the first truly outlandish villain lair. Apologies for using the word “actually” and all the baggage that comes with it.
It also specifically references Our Man Flint in a couple scenes.
Ah man. Never seen it. I really should.
It’s definitely a second-rate attempt to copy the Bond formula and gets a little silly in places.
IMO Blofeld’s volcano lair is still the best Bond villain lair.Not like they really try anymore though. *sigh*
I don’t know if I agree about them not trying, but I will say the only Blofeld-specific lair in the Craig era was absolutely the least exciting.
His name is Ken Adam and you will acknowledge his set-dressing genius. Prussian. Son of an Iron Cross winner. British fighter pilot. Tank-buster. Designer of the War Room, in which there is to be no fighting.
The smartest move Cubby Broccoli ever made was sniffing out – in 1962 – that the Cold War wouldn’t last forever and didn’t make the Russians the bad guys.
SPECTRE is only in three of the Fleming novels. The rest of the bad guys are all the Soviets.
Not “all the Soviets”, but a fictionalized, still-extant SMERSH.Which, as we see, could’ve easily, consistently, and *realistically* been maintained. Everything old is new again.
Yeah, SMERSH was kind of a rogue agency within the USSR when it existed (Stalin created it as his own service because he didn’t trust the NKVD. Or the GRU).
It might be relevant that, although this was the first book filmed, it wasn’t the first written, so Fleming had had some time to nail the tone.
I think the producers and director deserve a lot of credit for adapting that tone to screen, because Fleming’s writing style is dryyyyy. Plus, I don’t think the character would have endured for all this time if it wasn’t for some the very specific visuals and sounds that contribute to what people consider the tone. But having said that, even before Dr. No was adapted, Ian Fleming co-wrote the screenplay with Kevin McClory for Thunderball, which Fleming later adapted into the book. I think that’s noteworthy because while Goldfinger is often considered the moment when the franchise finally “arrives” in a sense (it’s the first of the films to have an opening title sequence with a truly memorable song), I don’t think it’s until Thunderball that every element that’s considered a staple or trope of the franchise is combined, particularly saving the world. And it’s mostly all there in the original story.
It is weird how they chose Dr. No, which is actually picks up on a cliffhanger.
In the book order, Dr. No comes right after From Russia With Love. The movies switch them. At the end of FRWL, Bond is dying of poison.
Supposedly Fleming was getting tired of the character. Of course, he was in the process of drinking and smoking himself to death at the time and would soon realize he liked having money to continue doing so and kept writing.
The business in the movie Dr. No about forcing Bond to get a new gun is directly taken from the book Dr. No, almost word-for-word. Only the book is referencing the events of the book From Russia With Love, where Bond’s gun jammed just before he is kicked by that poison shoe dart thing.
I’m a bit curious what exactly led them to adapt this particular book first, as it’s one of the few in the series that directly ties back to a previous one. The prior book From Russia with Love ends on a cliffhanger with Bond getting brainwashed and strangling M, and then Dr. No opens with him being stopped and deprogrammed.
FRWL ends with Bond being poisoned; You Only Live Twice – which incidentally No Time To Die took a few elements from – ends with a cliffhanger that leads to him being brainwashed and attacking M in The Man with the Golden Gun. But yeah, I’d also love to know how they settled on Dr. No.
Here’s where it probably had something to do with cheap location shooting.
Look, I’m not going to pretend like I thoroughly understand the science at play here. The film itself seems largely uninterested in explaining how this works
See also: The baccarat game where we meet Bond. I know Casino Royale got some guff for having Felix Leiter present during the card game scenes to essentially serve as the World Series of Poker announcer for members of the audience unfamiliar with the game, but in Dr. No you watch Bond play a fairly obscure, wholly impenetrable card game for like 5 solid minutes with no explanation of the rules or any real context. It’s a confusing way to introduce the character and leaves you wondering “Is this guy clever? Or just lucky? He runs in elite circles? What am I supposed to take away from this?”
“Suive.”“Carte.”Me: What the fuck’s happening!
“Bingo!”
Not ‘bingo’, Monsieur, ‘banco’!
What a clean old man.
STOP being taller than me!
Hey spidah, can we ‘ave our ball back?!
You’re a swine, Scotty!
Sorry we hurt your field, spidah.[Why yes, I am entirely happy to keep quoting A Hard Day’s Night]
I see it all now, it’s a plot…a plot!
I only know what I’ve read about it, but apparently winning in baccarat (the version played in casinos in much of the world) is dependent on luck and involves little/no player decision. Casino Royale features a variant called chemin de fer in which it’s still mostly luck but a skilled player has an advantage over an unskilled one.
I thought the problem with the card game in Casino Royale was replacing baccarat with the trendiest-at-the-time variant of poker imaginable.
The first line Sean Connery says in Dr. No is “I admire your courage, miss…” (although it´s VO). Then she asks his name, and then he says “Bond, James Bond” on frame
Sylvia Trench. Because Bond girl names used to be subtle.
i did a ‘every bond watch’ for the first time after skyfall came out. i was a little hesitant about the early stuff, but i remember being immediately like ‘oh wow that’s a movie star’ as soon as connery came onscreen. it’s wild.felt a similar way with burt reynolds when i was doing a 70s movie thing over covid and i finally watched smokey and the bandit.
Burt Reynolds said he was offered the part of Han Solo and turned it down, one of his big regrets. Most people seem to find that unbelievable, I guess they never saw Deliverance, I can totally see George Lucas watching that, and saying, “that’s my Han Solo.”
i also think a lot about how connery turned down the matrix and lord of the rings, so when he was offered league of extraordinary gentlemen he felt like he had to say yes.conversely, can you imagine how bad the matrix would have been with sean connery?
Would he have played Neo or Morpheush?
Will Smith was considered as Neo at one point. Imagine that pair.
Myesh
The Architect? Casting James Bond as the boss of the Agents probably would’ve been a meta gag.
The Matricksh
Thank You for making me snort out loud in my quiet office today.
One big regret of Connery leaving the role is that we didn’t get to hear him say the name “Octopussy.”
Och aye thar noo, pooshy!
HE’SH SHTARTING TO BELIEVE, DAWG.
“Be careful what you shoot at, Neo. Most agents in here don’t react well to bullets.”
Would have made an epic “Zardoz” sequel.
Really hard for me to imagine him living in New Zealand for 18-24 months without killing somebody
Burt would’ve been a fun Lando too. Billy Dee as Han?
…and Star Wars would have had the success of “Springtime for Hitler.”
It would only work if we got Jerry Reed as Chewie.
It helped that Burt had Sally Field to bounce off of, they worked really well together.
And for a few years he had her to bounce off of off camera!
That first look at his face where he says “Bond, James Bond” was a total accident during filming. It was written that way just because he was replying to the way Sylvia had introduced herself, and wasn’t supposed to be anythig special, but then on one take Connery just happened to pause and light his cigarette between the “Bond” and “James Bond,” and immediately everyone realized that something magic had just happened and they had to keep it up.
AI could never.
Yeah, he’s just flipping Sylvia some shit by copying the hoity way she introduced herself. They almost should reset the gag with the new guy (Taylor-Johnson would be fine, but whomever) just so the next generation can go, “Oh! I get why he does that.”
I feel like for a lot of younger people, they only know Sean Connery from the SNL Jeopardy skits and don’t realize that he was a damn good actor when he gave a shit. Of course this also meant that you could almost instantly tell when he didn’t in a movie. And being an old school actor, he was not picky about his parts for much of his career.
totally. also he had just been old and kind of pudgy my whole life, so seeing him as a strapping young man just made everything click.one funny thing about the bond rewatches is that he gains like 5 pounds and loses an inch of hairline with every appearance, as opposed to modern actors like hugh jackman who got bigger every time you saw him as wolverine.
I also think pop culture prematurely aged him in a lot of our minds by playing Henry Jones Sr. He was only 59 when the movie came out and still in great shape. Just look at him a year later in Hunt for Red October. It’s silly to say but movie magic is kinda real. Wardrobe, makeup and some body language acting can really transform someone. Also fun fact. His hair does change in every Bond movie but he’s wearing a hair piece in them all. Connery started losing his hair at 17. So in the early movies they had a bit left to work with but by the end he was fully bald on top.
His hair also changed in Hunt For Red October. RIP the Ramius swingin’ dick ponytail.
Dr. No is half-German, half-Chinese. Does that make you feel any better about “yellowface”?
“What I am willing to take to task is the fact that multiple Asian characters, including the titular Dr. No, are played by white actors in yellowface.”I wish I could be sitting next to you and see your reaction when you get to You Only Live Twice.
Yeah I remember watching that as like a 10-12 year old kid and thinking “well that seems kinda fucked up”
You were a better kid than me, because I remember when I first saw it, my confusion was why he did it in the first place. They say it’s to fit into the fishing village, but he still stands out like a sore thumb and after a few scenes it doesn’t look like Connery is even wearing the make-up anymore.I didn’t grasp the insensitivity until I was much older.
Well I think I was more like “why is he trying to pretend to be Japanese and doing an absolutely shit job of it?” I think by the time I saw this I was aware of blackface and the, you know, not ok-ness of it, so it wasn’t hard to draw a line to “hmm, this probably isn’t ok either.” But I for sure noticed that mostly he wore a kimono and for some unfathomable reason pretended to be married to a Japanese woman.
Worth it for this, but. “…my thoroughly Japanese friend who is easily – easily! – six foot two.”
“thoroughly Japanese”?
You really think so?
Yes, my uncharacteristically hirsute arachnid comrade!
Came for this. Leaving… before women.
At least it’s got the autogyro…
I get where you’re going here…and, I’m certain the he, too, will totally mis-interpret the “Bond-san” scenes.
How about the episodes of Get Smart featuring The Claw and Dr. Yes?(I still find “Not the Craw, the Craw” hilarious even though I know it’s wrong. I’m sorry.)
I enjoy the pure Bond energy of Dr. No. Everything is fresh, nothing is cliche, everyone is young and svelte, Connery is maximum invested and dangerous in a way he never would be again. Jack Lord is the best Felix until Jeffrey Wright. It’s an aggressively problematic movie of course. They all are until sometime in the mid-70s when they start to acknowledge feminism exists and thereafter become no more or less problematic than any other contemporary movie. But the thing with Connery is execution. You know what you’re watching is wrong but he’s just so goddamn charismatic and good at what he’s doing you can’t help but be charmed. It’s the bad boy attraction, done better than it ever had been or arguably would be again.
One of the best character introductions of all time. The way the camera pans up to his face, and then, that iconic line.
Bond was fridging men and women before the term even existed. Being the first woman Bond sleeps with or the first male agent to greet Bond to his new assignment has like a 100 percent death rate.
I don’t know if you could call it “fridging” in the Connery movies because he never seems remotely bothered.
Not exactly true.
Dr. No – He is world-class pissed over Quarrel, to the point where he brings up getting revenge on Dr. No to his face.
FRWL – Kerim’s death affects him deeply, so much that he belts his lady around a few times over it. (It was a different time…)
Goldfinger – BOTH Masterson girls die and he seems pretty angry about it.
Thunderball – His girl Friday is killed by the bad girl. He then kills bad girl! (After fucking her in one of the hottest scenes in the entire franchise)
You Only Live Twice – OK, yeah, he isn’t that bothered by Aki dying.
Diamonds are Forever – Someone dies. I forget. That’s a bad movie.
If Bond is at all bothered by the deaths of women in Goldfinger or Thunderball, he doesn’t show it in the least. Those movies literally defined how little he cares about getting women killed.
Plenty O’Toole dies, she was named after her father of course.
Plenty O’Toole.
They were the Red Shirts long before the original Star Trek ever hit the airwaves.
Like wearing the red shirt in Star Trek or being that one guy in the war movie showing everyone the picture of his girl back home.
I’ll forgive that Zena Marshall just about anything for the towel scene…
I learned to play baccarat because of James Bond. I’ve watched Goldfinger and From Russia with Love so many times as a kid, my family just leaves it on if it’s playing on cable because it’s like comforting, nostalgic background noise. Dr. No is ok, but those two are more quintessential Connery-Bond.
For reference, this movie released in the US in May, 1963, about six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis and 18 years after VJ Day. People were definitely aware of the politics of nuclear war (at least to the extent that the West needed to maintain nuclear supremacy).
“It has the responsibility of introducing the character James Bond and Sean Connery in the role and kickstarting what’s now a six-plus-decade film franchise—the longest running in history.”What? It didn’t have that responsibility at the time; nobody was expecting Bond to become the colossal franchise it became, much less expecting Dr. No to “kickstart” that on its own.It also doesn’t have that “responsibility” now. Nobody is watching Dr. No today and deciding whether the rest of the franchise is justified based on how good Dr. No is.That entire sentence is nonsensical gibberish.
Yeah, it’s kind of a silly review. The writer seems genuinely unaware of how immediately people in the early 60s felt the Cold War, the space race, and the threat of nuclear war. It’s like reviewing Iron Man and saying, “I don’t know if people in 2009 knew much about political tensions in the Middle East…”
This stuck out to me the most. Kids in classrooms were drilled to safety practices in the case of nuclear warfare breaking out. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a “crisis” because of the fear it would lead to nuclear war. The dropping of the first atomic bombs happened more recently to them than 9/11 did to us. Scientists and peaceniks were beating the eternal refrain of “war, turns out it’s actually good for nothing.”Not knowing James Bond while being a pop culture writer is forgivable, but the general ignorance of basic history is less so
I’m going to guess the writer was born the year we invaded Iraq again.
They also appear to be unaware that nuclear explosions were common back then. Heck, the French were still launching atmospheric blasts into the late-1970s (maybe early 1980s). In many ways, your average teenager in the early -1960s knew more about the actual impact of a nuclear explosion than a 40-year old now days.
Well, the author is def a naif, but on this tiny point, you get a “No”, Dr.Broccoli & Saltzman did absolutely intend to launch a *franchise*, at the time. Broccoli had pursued the adaptation rights to *the series* for years, purchased an option to the entire series (excluding any other producers to any other books – save Casino – in the series for movies), locked up character rights, and made it’s financing cross-collateralized with future films in the series. They set up Danjaq and Aon as entities dedicated to the franchise, rather than a single film.They knew what they were planning, dedicated themselves to the risk, and – as it rarely does in films – it paid off in spades. It became the model going forward for this type of character/series/adaptation rights negotiations (avoiding all the Harry Palmer, Parker, Dirk Pitt-type mishegoss in adaptations).
Not to mention, franchise-starters like Dr. No do gain a bit of retroactive weight anyway.Like, consider the original Star Wars. That wasn’t intended to launch a franchise or revolutionize the concept of a summer blockbuster, no matter how much George Lucas tried to make it look like it was. But that doesn’t change the fact that it did all of that, so we do inevitably look at it differently than we do, say, Close Encounters. We raise our expectations, because something that started that HAS to be good.And some stuff just can’t handle that weight! Dr. No can shoulder it mostly thanks to Connery, but that first episode of The Simpsons doesn’t feel like it could possibly have launched something like The Simpsons.
Actually…you’re quite wrong. Connery was, in fact, contracted for several more Bond adventures when he signed to play the role. So it’s quite clear the producers were planning for the long haul. So there was, in fact, a lot riding on the success of Dr. No.
Actors were pretty much always contracted for sequels in those days, whether the thing panned out or not. This was the tail end of the studio system era, after all. The producers hoping for the long haul is not the same thing as there being a general expectation that it was going to happen.To put it another way, the article talks about it as if the public at the time were conceiving of the franchise the way we do now, which was absolutely not the case: nobody, not even the Broccolis, could or would have thought it would be something that would run for 60 years with half a dozen different Bonds and become the colossal cultural touchstone it has become.
They are still contracted for sequel options THESE days for licensed property stuff. It’s best to lock them in early before their rates rise, dangling the carrot of profit participation down the line that never materializes.
1. No, actors were not “pretty much always contracted for sequels” in those days, quite the opposite. Under the studio system, actors were under contract for *whatever* films their studio wished to put them in, which would logically include any of the studio’s sequels. During and post-studio-system-collapse, actors preferred their free negotiations, and the norm quickly became contactually agreeing to do a second project for the producing party (which might be a sudio or indie studio) at a locked-in price. You got quotes with floors, ceilings, escalator steps, %age of the production budget, etc. But you *didn’t* get long-term multi-pic deals anymore… nor could most indies and boutique prodcos couldn’t afford those commitments to stars anyways. UNTIL AON and Bond: it became the model in drafting the few such “character/franchise” agreements, with standard clauses and mechanisms.2. “Hoping” and “expecting” are hardly mutually exclusive terms – they are practically interchangeably used by smart producers, because together they equal “planning”. Abent that, you are *guaranteed* a failure.3. You said this elsewhere too, so I re-read it… and *absolutely nowhere* does the author discuss “Dr. No” as if the public at the time were conceiving of the franchise the way we do now – he doesn’t do that at all. No one treats the Broccolis or Saltzman as if they were magically prescient, either. They were lucky and fortunate that what they presumed would be a popular character *was one*, that they executed their vision and assumptions in such a way that it resonated strongly with the public, and they were able to tweak it along to way to keep up with the times going forward. But they were also wise to lay the financial, legal, and contractual foundation to make it a singular *business and creative franchise*, so that it *was even able to* last 60+ years so far.
You know, I think it’s best if you simply avoid responding to my comments. I don’t really want to hear from you.
“nobody was expecting Bond to become the colossal franchise it became”I’m pretty movie producers who are adapting one of a series of books like making money and hope to make more of it by adapting the other books.
“Hope to” and “expect to” mean quite different things. Obviously producers hope the movies they make will be huge hits. They don’t usually expect that to be the case.
Only if you’re insufferably addicted to being correct about every tiny detail and euphemisms make your skin crawl.
Yes, but you’re the only one making this distinction-without-a-difference.AVC: “…a herculean task. It has the responsibility of introducing the character James Bond and Sean Connery in the role and kickstarting ….[the] franchise”You: “It didn’t have that responsibility at the time; nobody was expecting Bond to become the colossal franchise it became, much less expecting Dr. No to ‘kickstart’ that on its own.”Nope – it *did indeed* have those responsibilities, as the novel that Broccoli & Saltzman chose, from a number of options, to launch their franchise with their chosen star (who wasn’t a huge star then at all). They were absolutely planning – hoping AND expecting – to “kickstart” a run of 3-6 feature films from the beginning, based on the series of quite-already-popular well-selling books they optioned for just that purpose. OF COURSE most film projects fail. OF COURSE no one expected it to go 60+ years. That’s why nobody mentioned “expectations of the public” – because who cares? (That’s what promotion & advertising are for.)[And then you also added “It also doesn’t have that ‘responsibility’ now.” – a weird sentiment expressed exactly nowhere at all in this piece – which, I remind you, I also found moronic. You just happened to pick the one point he made which was legit.]
Yup
I watched Dr. No for the first time a few years ago, having already seen almost every other Bond movie (there’s a couple early ones I haven’t gotten around to). It struck me the same way Citizen Kane did when I first saw it: “I don’t get what the big deal is.” Sure, Connery’s clearly a movie star with a great presence, but I’d already seen so many reworkings and parodies and adaptations of the same ideas that the original just seems quaint by comparison. (The incessant sexism and and racism didn’t help.) The same thing had happened with Kane: All its groundbreaking moves had been reused by thousands of films since, to the point where to my late-1990s eye, nothing really seemed special about it. I do understand its importance to cinematic history, and I’ve rewatched it since with that in mind (and enjoyed it more).
My wife made a keen observation last week, which is that a lot of art eventually stops being entertainment and starts being context. You can learn a lot about what a culture valued at a given point by looking at its art from that era, even if you don’t find the art particularly entertaining.
Dr. No doesn’t even rate particularly highly on most people’s rankings for the series, and the people that do tend to give it a lot of weight for establishing the conventions and tropes that recur throughout the franchise. For me, that’s tempered by the fact that there were still a lot of franchise staples that hadn’t been introduced yet, so watching it is like turning on the oven light to check on the progress. It’s almost there; not quite done.
For me, I like that Dr. No actually feels like a spy movie. Bond does things that show resourcefulness, like using a piece of hair across a door to determine if someone’s entered his room. There’s a lot less of stuff like Q giving Bond a device that would only work on one very specific context, and then, surprise, he has the thing that saves him from an avalanche!
Yeah, Goldfinger is where the gadgets took off, and You Only Live Twice established the norm for bonkers villains with elaborate lairs.From Russia with Love will seem like a Bourne movie to first-time viewers.
Wait: you didn’t get what the big deal was about Citizen Kane??
Yeah, as did most of the class. This was at an intro film class at UCLA in 1996, and after watching Kane, we were all like, “Okay, and?” The professor then detailed its many innovations and techniques, explaining how it had been groundbreaking at the time of release, and then we kind of got it, but because we had already seen all those techniques a million times in other films, it just didn’t have the impact that its reputation implies.
Man that sounds so fucking bleak. I was friggin’ mesmerized. NYU vs UCLA… FIGHT!
USC?
None of my film classes (East Coast, not NYU) screened more than a few clips from Citizen Kane, so I sought it out to watch for myself for the first time around the time I finished undergrad (can’t remember before or after). I really liked it. Feels like somewhere along the way it just became to cool to act too good for CK or something.
Sometimes things get hyped up too much, and the reality is a bit of a let down. (I’m still baffled as to how anyone thought Rebel Without a Cause had good acting or was at all realistic.) I watched Citizen Kane in the 80’s or 90’s. I liked it, but even then, it was kind of slow moving.
Watching Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No for the first time is a trip Previously, I had seen two Bond DVDs that my dad had when I was a kid: Diamonds Are ForeverUhm…. Sean Connery played James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever
if you were watching dr no for the first time you would still be watching him as james bond in dr no for the first time. people used to know how snark worked around here!
I might also argue that you haven’t actually seen Connery play Bond if you’ve only seen Diamonds Are Forever. He was clearly just in it for the paycheck by that point.
LOL Did he? Connery clearly was just playing himself, reading the lines and counting his dollar bills from that MASSIVE contract they gave him (and also not giving a hoot that he was out of shape and lazy during the fight scenes). in Dr. No he’s playing James Bond.
Weirdly enough he was more bond more than a decade later in Never Say Never Again than in DAF.
Growing up in the 70s, I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen the Connery Bond films. They were shown frequently on network TV as movies of the week. The last time I watched Dr. No, the biggest observation I had was how glacial the pacing can be. There’s these ridiculously long sequences of Bond casually parking a car, getting out, and walking to a door while the theme plays. I guess it was padding out the run time? In today’s film making, a sequence like that would be 3 quick edits.
Actually Dr. No is Eurasian, not Asian. This point is explicitly discussed. I don’t think Miss Taro’s race is ever mentioned but one is free to make assumptions based on stereotypes. Taro is not a Chinese name.On the other hand you did not mention Miss Lily and Miss Rose, played by genuine Asian actors, who manage to steal the scenes they are in.
Yeah, it’s never made clear, but I always assumed Miss Taro was just a white character with an Asian fetish.
Are you going to continue this as a regular feature? Outside Inventory and Streaming Guides, there’s not much in the way of regular features around here anymore. It would be nice to see some more longer-form writing here that goes beyond a hot take or a simple thesis.
I don’t want to be too misanthropic for you, but to launch a feature like “Kid writer fills in another huge glaring cultural blind spot for readers that know a lot more than them” is more of a death knell for the AVC than a renaissance.
And, let’s be honest, they’re only doing this because of the twin strikes.
Dr. No is an odd duck in the film series in that the novel is easily the most over the top of the Fleming books. You can see the producers wanted to keep the plot, outlandish though it is, but they didn’t to make something too over the top, so they removed some of the most bizarre elements. In the book, Dr. No has steel pinchers for hands, steel rods in his spine, and his heart is on the right side of his body. And he has a giant squid for a pet.But by the time Thunderball rolled around, the producers had swimming pools with sharks. With You Only Live Twice, they gleefully jettisoned the main plot of the book and had SPECTRE using their super spacecraft to steal manned probes to trigger war between the US and the USSR.
Highly rec Ready Loading one’s bond podcast. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV_qemO0oathZWE6xVp94GSevMTcrurPt
…and kickstarting what’s now a six-plus-decade film franchise—the longest running in history.Hasn’t the Godzilla franchise gone longer?
Yes. Continually produced by (or licensed from and co-produced with) Toho since 1954.
Lots of Wong Fei-hung films too. The guy Jackie Chan plays in the Drunken Master flix. Over 120 since the late 40s… with one particular actor playing him from the 40s to the 80s in like 70 of them.
Godzilla’s gone longer, but actually did have a hiatus in there: after Final Wars, Godzilla went dark for either eight to ten years, depending on if you count the Legendary Pictures Godzilla or Shin Godzilla as the drought-breaker; in both cases we were obviously looking at a full reboot rather than a sequel within the same universe. So while it’s most likely that the writer just forgot about Godzilla (yes, I know, how could you), I could sort of understand looking at it as one Godzilla franchise ending and another beginning.James Bond, for the record, had his longest time between films being six years between Spectre and No Time To Die, and there wasn’t even a Bond switch between those films.
What Connery brings to the role is a sadism that’s in keeping with the books and was never repeated by the other actors since. Dalton got closest with his coldness but it’s not quite the same. Real danger is on screen. That’s what any new Bond needs to bring to the role as well imo refreshing an aspect of the character that initially made him so dynamic and hasn’t been used for a long time.
Oddly enough, the lightest Bond of all, Roger Moore, played that same kind of role in The Wild Geese. It’s pretty disturbing.
Oh damn never thought of it like that before but you’re spot on.
MASTER SPY THESPIAN!
I know it’s not the first time… but this article sure seems like a canary in a coal mine for the encroaching time that EVERY SINGLE RESPONDING POSTER is much more knowledgable on the topic at hand than the author.I can see the end of the AVC from here, thanks.
Every writer: “I’m just a little baby who doesn’t know any better.”
Every commenter: “Shut the fuck up, you stupid baby!”
Every algorithm: “Engagement! This must be popular, let’s elevate it.”
STOP GETTING BOND WRONG!
“Star Wars is a series telling the tale of the adventures of James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the space battleship Galactica…”
ha, you think this is the first AVC reset… there have been generations of commenters who have come and gone.
My favorite acting moment of Connery is when he learns the guy meeting him at the airport isn’t from the agency, and he gets that smirk as he decides to have some fun with this situation and lead the guy on until they’re out of public. So much of what makes the character work in that one expression.
I don’t watch early Bond for the plots anymore, just the vibe, and the Connery Bonds had the coolest vibe. Goldfinger for me is the perfect Bond movie. Moore got too silly, Dalton was boring, Pierce was good but the movies were not, and Craig is too one note and humorless. Preceding Dr. No, I always felt North By Northwest was a proto Bond picture and what the Broccoli’s were trying to copy stylistically with the early Bond’s. It has alot of the same aesthetics, structure and plotting, albeit with an accidental hero that gets mistaken for a spy, but is just as suave and debonair as Bond.
Goldfinger is peak Bond vibes, no question, but the older I get, the more amusing it is to me that the entire third act of this globe-trotting story takes place in Kentucky.
On that note, it always kind of bummed me out to see Bond wandering around the Vegas haze in Diamonds are Forever.
Oh man, seeing Connery strut around that shitkicker redneck podunk casino in the classic white-jacket tux while everyone around him seems to be wearing denim is oddly depressing. Like, thanks for making the effort, but you really shouldn’t have bothered.
You really get the idea that if Bond bet his cufflinks at a poker table, the house couldn’t cover the bet.I was waiting for this conversation with the dealer:“Minimum bet is one.”
“Thoushand?”“Dollar.”“I…shee.”I don’t mind the old skeevy Vegas, but you’re right: the 70s were shit. At least Sean avoid the aerospace-sized collars Roger was saddled with:
It doesn’t help that Diamonds just wallops you in the face with aggressive 1970s-ness. Colorful go-go jetsetting 1960s cool? Nah, that’s passe–make everything brown and orange, dim the lights by 20%, and give all the villains ridiculous muttonchops.
It’s hard to tell which is the worst Connery Bond film out of Diamonds and Thunderball.
I actually have always seen “To Catch A Thief” as the proto-Bond Hitchcock picture. Cary Grant’s suave, sadistic retired jewel thief is pure Bond (the scquence where he dangles the girl over the courtyard!), and Grace Kelly’s bored, thrill-seeking rich girl is one of the best Bond femmes ever.
I believe the Bond producers offered the role to Cary Grant but he wouldn’t sign for more than a single film. Also, the crop duster scene directly influenced the helicopter chase in From Russia with Love
The biggest shock I got watching Dr No and the other early Bond films on DVD was how… normal their runtime was. (I think Dr No is about two hours.)I grew up in the ABC Sunday Movie / cable TV days where they were padded out to 3 or 3.5 hours with commercials.
What I am willing to take to task is the fact that multiple Asian characters, including the titular Dr. No, are played by white actors in yellowface.
In all fairness, Dr. Julius No is half German/half Chinese, both in the film and in the novel. If I were you, I would grasp at that straw while I can because the racism gets a lot worse later in the series…
Dr. No is quite different than the other Bond films…it was the first and not everything they did ‘stuck’. But what I love the most is how much more ‘real’(ish) it is. Bond is cold…very cold. Plus, careful…there was a bit more of the tradecraft shown (putting a hair on the drawer to see if was opened), and even a hint of the boredom as it isn’t ‘guns and girls’ the entire mission (after he has the secretary arrested and he is waiting for her contact, he is playing solitaire.The best line, and delivery of said line, in ALL the Bond films occurs in this one. When Professor Dent comes to the secretary’s house to kill him…he shoots up the bed. Then Bond questions him while he tries to surreptitiously get his gun closer…once he grabs it and tries to fire, he finds it empty…and Bond merely says, “That’s a Smith & Wesson…and you’ve had your six.” Awesome stuff. Even a little bit of humanity comes out after, when he removes the silencer, looks at the body with a tiny bit of regret, and sighs. Great stuff.
What the fuck is this 60fps bullshit in that clip – that’s not what the movie should look like. Why is it here
Look, I know young people have to exist and there’s nothing I can do about it, but an article which is basically “Guys! Guys! Did you know Sean Connery was James Bond?! And he was actually good?! Pity your average person living at the height of the Cold War knew almost nothing about the threat of nuclear technology like we do, though” made a little bit of my heart die.
If you’re actually working your way through the entire franchise, you’re in for a treat with the next one.
Hold on, you’re saying there’s a prequel film series to James Bond Jr.?
“Grown up” is when you realize what a colossal asshole James Bond is.
Someone used the term “naif” on here to describe the author…. uhhhh newsflash geezers I’m 32 (an adult) and I’ve almost had Daniel Craig as Bond exclusively my entire life, excluding a dash of Brosnan in my early years… I’m 32… if you’re calling the author a naif for not being familiar with the first Bond film (neither am I), than you’re probably an out of touch Boomer cuz…. details on this actually aren’t general knowledge anymore.
This is knowledge that old people know…. just saying…. check yourselves.
“This is knowledge that old people know…”Um, no, this is knowledge that anyone can (and many do) know, provided they aren’t predisposed like you and other Millennials and Zoomers to outright reject the idea that anyone should ever know about anything that was “before their time.” I’m less than a decade older than you. I was certainly not around when Dr. no was released but…I saw it. I have also seen hundreds of movies made before and after that film was released that all were before my time. And read books, and watched TV shows. And that is also the case of most of my friends and colleagues, who are apparently the final generation that believes there is something worthwhile about giving a s**t about history and culture.I have never before seen so many people in my life who think it is not only an OK answer but the RIGHT answer to respond to something with the phrase, “sorry, that’s before my time,” but here we are. And the irony is that it is so much EASIER for you now. Between the Internet, digital books and music, and streaming, centuries’ worth of art and culture are literally at you fingertips in a way that they were not for those of us who grew up without a computer in their homes. There is just no excuse beyond the fact that you folks seem to wear ignorance as a badge of honor.
Really fascinating that “I watched X famous movie for the first time and I have thoughts“ has become a relatively common feature across pop culture sites. Maybe I’m reading into it, and def leaning into fun police a bit, but it signifies a few things to me:1) Authors who were once expected to have more general knowledge than the public are likely too old and too expensive, so features pivot to taking advantage, weirdly, of what the younger writers don’t know. I’m not saying all writers/critics don’t have their blind spots in film history, but that this is regularly done means these writers have pretty colossal gaps in knowledge. 2) The younger public is more interested in reading reactions that might echo their own experience (here’s what it’s like to watch Bond for the first time) than something that enriches the experience once they have it. I know when I watched a movie as a kid I would gobble up criticism/commentary of it afterward by experts who could place it in historical context both sociopolitically and cinematically which I couldn’t. I’m not sure what someone who watches the movie for the first time gets out of reading a review from someone who also did that, especially someone, like this author, who also doesn’t seem to be too knowledgeable about the general era. 3) There is such a glut of expert writing about Bond specifically that I’m just not sure where this is supposed to fit in with all of that. All told, features like these feel like the written equivalent of watching a Twitch streamer play videogames.
I feel like this falls into the same category as the inexplicably (to me, anyway) popular “reaction videos” that have taken over my YouTube feed. Not only am I too old to understand why I should care about someone ELSE’S (inexpert) “reaction” to something, but I look at these people and have to marvel at how they have remained completely shielded from every single event, song, or movie that happened a minute or more before they were born. As I responded to some snarky 30(!) year old above, people being ignorant is nothing new in the world, but we are I an era where people actually brag about it (and monetize) it and I haven’t yet grasped how this came to be.
I can’t express how much I hate reaction videos. I don’t understand who the fuck is watching them. And I hate that these idiots make any money off of their own ignorance (and someone else’s song or movie or whatever). If they haven’t experienced it yet, their reaction and opinion is absolutely worthless. Just like this article.
Season Connery looks rough for 31
1. How is this possible?2. “He is unceremoniously flame-throwered to death by a roving, mechanical dragon.” There is literally NO WAY to unceremoniously do ANYTHING with a roving mechanical dragon.
As a Jamaican, I can say the island is quite ethnically diverse. In addition to people of african decent, there is a significant white, Chinese, Indian, Syrian, and Jewish population—and more than anything mixes of all the above. Many Jamaicans of diverse ethnicities (my aunt and other friends of the family, for example) had speaking or background roles in the film. This type of diversity is common across the Caribbean. So the comment describing the island as “an island full of non-white people” is unfortunate, and unfortunately typical. What should be highlighted is not the “non-whiteness” but the rich and blending cultural diversity of the island, and hence it’s official motto: out of one, many people.
The current version of Dr. No was digitally remastered from the original negatives. I first saw the movie on VHS (actually, maybe Beta?) back in the ‘80s, which was taken off one of the many prints of the film. The remastered print took the film from looking like an old ‘60s movie to a movie *set* in the ‘60s – amazingly beautiful and clean transfer that actually made the movie more enjoyable.
Kids……. (HUGE eye roll)……