Bondathon: Dr. No

Dr. No marks the start of the official movie series and sets up things to come.

James Bond (Sean Connery) is sent to Jamaica after an MI6 agent and his secretary are murdered. Bond soon discovers that these deaths are related to the agent’s investigation about a private island and the mysterious Chinese man who owns it.

Dr. No manages to be familiar and different from the series that succeeded it. It has the formula tropes like Bond’s love for gambling, alcohol, and women, villains having hidden lairs, and having the agent partner up with a beautiful woman already down. Dr. No has some of the hallmarks of the franchise like the gun barrel sequence, and the iconic theme music.

However, there were differences to the rest of the franchise. One of the most obvious came at the beginning because there was no pre-title sequence or original song. Dr. No had a calypso version of “Three Blind Mice”. The biggest change came with the style of the story. Dr. No was made on a million-dollar budget which was fairly low, even for the time. This forced all the action to be set in London and Jamaica – there was no location hopping that happened in later films. The story was a smaller scale one – Bond was less an action hero and more an investigator. MI6’s best had to find clues, talk to people who knew what the agent and figure out what he was doing.

Whilst Dr. No was different it didn’t mean it was bad. This film was a stripped-down version of Bond because he had no gadgets and there was less action. Bond had to use his wits, like in his hotel room he set up items to see if anyone had broken into it. It was great to see a more resourceful Bond and it was a well the series has returned to, i.e. For Your Eyes Only and the first three Craig-era films.

Due to the limited budget, the two car chases in the film were basically cars speeding down the road. The biggest stunt was a car driving under a crane and the other car driving off the edge of a cliff. The biggest action sequence came at the end of when Bond blows up the base. This was where most of the budget was spend and the franchise used this ending again and again (i.e. You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker.) The biggest stunt in the film was Quarrel’s (John Kitzmiller) death which was pretty violent for a film rated PG.

Sean Connery was never on Ian Fleming’s choice to play Bond, he wanted someone like Christopher Lee or David Niven. Connery was an unknown actor before, yet he was able to prove his star power in the first Bond film. Bond had one of the coolest introductions in cinema with the camera showing his hands as he plays baccarat before coolly showing the man smoking at the table and saying that famous line. Connery was confident using his fist and he was the definition of ‘60s cool. At this early stage, Connery already had chemistry Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell as M and Moneypenny.

Ursula Andress is always going to be remembered as the first Bond girl and her introduction was iconic. It was a famous moment when she steps on to the beach wearing nothing but a bikini and a knife at her side. However, as a character, she was pretty useless. She appears an hour into a movie that was an hour and 45 minutes long and she just tags around with Bond and Quarrel.

The titular Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman) only appears in the final act but he was able to make an impact. He was refined, intelligent and had a recurring trope for Bond villains – a disfigurement. In Dr. No’s case, he has metal hands, and even though the character had an impairment he was still a physical match for Bond.

Dr. No was an important film with the Bond series and cinema in general. The series was finding its feet at this point yet Dr. No does have most of the parts that made the franchise so part popular and showed how a more grounded Bond film can work.