Dr No (Terence Young, 1962)
(Note: This review started out as part one of a planned seven-part essay on the 1960s Bond films, consisting of an essay on each film and a seventh part that would explore Bond’s journey since the 1960s. That project became so overwhelming that I have had to move onto other things, but I thought the first part would be of interest. It was republished in the 007 Magazine Archive Files, pictured at right, in May 2011.)
It’s hard to watch Dr No and not see it as the start of something. This isn’t just a product of hindsight – the popularity of the Bond novels meant the film was understood as the first of a series even on its initial release. As a result, it is usually discussed more as a template than a movie. Analysis of it tends to either emphasise those aspects of the film that foreshadow the series to come, or those aspects of this first entry that appear aberrant in light of the later entries. Such an approach is valid, and I won’t avoid it either. Yet Dr No, paradoxically, works as the originator of a series because it stands so well on its own. It was in the sixties that the best Bond movies were film classics in their own right.
The odd thing about this excellence is that so few of the creative personnel involved would really excel in the film industry outside Bond. Composer John Barry and set designer Ken Adam would become recognised as top figures in their respective disciplines, but otherwise the team that producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli threw together for these films would always be best known for their Bond work. Most of the principal creative people on Dr No would contribute to several Bonds, with some contributing to their association with the series well into the 1980s. Director Terence Young would helm three of the pivotal sixties films; Richard Maibaum, one of three credited screenwriters here, went on to script or co-script most of the entries until 1989’s Licence to Kill. Title designer Maurice Binder’s involvement would end with the same film. Editor Peter Hunt’s Bond association exactly matched that of the series’ best decade: his involvement would climax with directing the series highpoint, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. That so few of these names have resonance outside the realm of Bond cinema speaks volumes about the happy alchemy achieved in Dr No: the film is a reply to the auteurist idea that great films are the work of great filmmakers. Dr No instead is an example of a collaborative effort in which all involved achieved above their usual standards. (The story of the post-1960s decline of the Bond series, is, I would suggest, partly the story of this magic wearing off).
The startling qualities of Dr No are evident in the opening seconds. As Maurice Binder’s titles commence over unidentified electronic noises (which, disconcertingly, start a few moments before the visuals appear) it is clear that this is not just another genre thriller. The iconic image of the travelling dots turning into a gun-barrel is just the start of a classic title sequence that could hardly be further from the cliché of naked female silhouettes into which Binder’s work would eventually descend. Nothing stands still: even the words Dr No shimmy around the screen trying out different positions. Animated dots dance in abstract patterns. Three distinct musical cues are used, and Binder doesn’t worry about smoothing the transitions: if the music will restart, so will his titles. While obviously inspired by the work of Saul Bass (such as his credits for The Man with the Golden Arm) it is distinct piece of design in its own right that established early on some of the preoccupations that would flower in Binder’s later Bond work. The whole piece is dated in the best possible way, showing just how great the design of the period could be.
The final images of the title sequence segue smoothly into the opening shots of the movie proper as the three blind assassins walk the streets of Jamaica, with the musical cue continuing well past the concluding titles. It is a particularly nifty transition given the contrast between the garishness of the opening titles and the down to earth reality of the opening sequences. We switch from brightly coloured animation to unsaturated location photography that emphasises ordinary, unremarkable parts of the island. The Bond tradition of travelogue sequences started here, but in its early passages Dr No avoids the conventional tourist brochure representation that would become the norm in later Bond films. Here it is a travelogue that emphasises everyday activities in exotic places, and this tone matches the events of the opening minutes. Even as the subject shifts to espionage and murder, the emphasis is on the routine and procedural: Strangways is murdered during a lazy summer afternoon at the club; his espionage duties appear to involve radioing London once a day that he has nothing to report; and when we first see the spy headquarters at London, it looks like a telephone exchange. That this deglamorisation is intentional, to the point of being a sly joke, is suggested not only by the office-cubicle layout of the communications room, but also by the ludicrous way the intelligence officers communicate with each other. The radio operator presses a buzzer, which attracts a female co-worker to his desk. He gives her a message on a piece of paper, addressed to the clerically-titled “foreman of signals:” she then walks down and passes it to said foreman, who, it turns out, is sitting about four desks away from the original operator. The bespectacled foreman then gets up and walks to the desk of the operator, who might as well have leant back on his chair and called from his desk. (It’s like a gag from a Zucker brothers movie.)
This is not to say the opening sequences are in any way dull: Terence Young’s unfussy but focussed direction and Peter Hunt’s rapid editing keep it fast paced. The point, however, is that in Dr No, even assassinations in the Caribbean are all in a day’s work. This highlights the balance between reality and fantasy that is central to any understanding of the Bond character’s appeal in either literary or film incarnations. There is a tendency to assume that Bond is a purely fantasy-based depiction of a spy, in contrast to other genres of literary espionage fiction that depict the mundane mechanics of actual intelligence operations. Certainly this “Bond as fantasy” view is true of many most of the later Bond films, but it oversimplifies the particular appeal of both Fleming’s best work and Dr No, the definitive screen realisation of that fiction. Fleming’s writing stresses little details – the minutae on which espionage is built. This extends from the administrative workings of the secret service to the things Bond does when he arrives in a hotel room: Dr No faithfully recalls details from the novel such as his sticking a hair across his cupboard door to check if it has been opened. This technical stuff is the key to making the character work: it is the fantasy grounded in, or emerging from, a realistic basis that defines the character. Yes, his world is a male fantasy of available women, fine food and drink, lavish material possessions, and impeccable personal grooming. However, the character is most vivid when he is presented not overtly as a fantasy figure, but rather as a real figure who happens to be exceptional enough to consider the exotic his everyday environment. The unglamorised depiction of the lower levels of a large intelligence organisation – the agents look like bank clerks and work in a telephone exchange – helps to sell the idea that at the top of such an outfit there must be a small group of elite people with amazing skills.
The idea that the success of Bond lies in grounding the fantasy in reality, and in keeping both balanced, might seem both glib and unoriginal. Yet few films manage to duplicate the alluring mix of the two extremes that Dr No achieves. Dr No makes this tension inherent to its overall structure, with the almost documentary-like detective work of its early sequences tipping gradually to the implausible world of Dr No’s island fortress. Returning to the opening scenes, we find a similar transition used, in miniature, to introduce the character of Bond himself. As I have noted, the opening sequences of Dr No foreground the gentry and bureaucracy of spying: this, we are to assume, is the basic everyday groundwork of a very large intelligence network. We then shift to “La Cercle,” as the ripples from the events in the Caribbean reach an elite level. This is, it is clear, a first class nightclub, and even the messenger looking for Bond (who has hardly any dialogue) looks sharp enough to be the male lead in his own film. We learn nothing about this man, but he is a lesson in how the shrewd casting and costuming of small parts can make a world complete: he is instantly convincing as a mid-level operative, a junior agent who may one day be a double-0. For now, though, he is part of the chain.
A casino, at 3am. It is the same approximate setting Fleming chose to introduce us to the character in his first Bond novel, Casino Royale. In that introduction, Fleming focussed first on the environment and then broadened it to the man: Young follows suit, crafting one of film’s most memorable entries, up there with Harry Lime’s introduction in The Third Man. The entry is heightened by a gradual reveal of Bond’s features: we see his hands, then a view over the shoulder, before we see his face. It isn’t a particularly original or clever device, although Young’s execution of it is deft. It is, however, a strategy that relies on having something decent up your sleeve to avoid the “vaguely comical” effect (as Young described it) souring into actual unintentional comedy. Thus, in The Third Man, Carol Reed got away with building the first half of his movie around the leadup to Harry Lime because he had the velvety charisma of Orson Welles to reveal, and Young gets away with the contrived casino introduction because he has Sean Connery. Eunice Gayson’s Sylvia Trench introduces herself to the gambler across the table, and Connery is at last revealed, countering her “Trench… Sylvia Trench” with his own drawled “Bond… James Bond.” Years of repetition of this line have not dulled the chill-up-the-spine perfection of Connery’s delivery here. Said with a faint whiff of weariness, with a raised eyebrow, through a cigarette, and with the lighter snicking shut as he speaks, the line instantly places Bond as master of this world. Connery deservedly went from anonymous leading man to movie star with these three words of dialogue.
Dr No is built around Connery: it is an exercise in style and screen magnetism. The whole Bond character depends on an aura of rugged yet sophisticated male glamour, and while other actors in the role relied on conventions that were understood by the audience to signify this (tuxedos, gambling, fast cars, beautiful women, vodka martinis), Connery had to build it from the ground up. The series of fairly straightforward expositional scenes that follow (Bond’s briefing, his arrival in Jamaica, his investigations there) are possibly my favorite in the Bond series because they are so richly revealing of the kind of man Bond is and the way he goes about his business. They are full of detail: the tension between Bond’s professional subservience to M – “never on the firm’s time, sir” – and his personal independence as he tries to surreptitiously take his Berreta back; his willingness to enter a trap by leaving with the fake chauffeur; his insistence on meeting Strangways’ bridge partners socially; his methods for detecting intrusions into his room; and so on. The character is firmly established as we watch the assured way he handles these situations and encounters: as silly as it might sound, Dr No is very much about the way Connery moves. There is a coiled, yet assured quality about Connery’s Bond that perfectly evokes someone who is at the top of a very dangerous game. Without the interior monologue afforded by the novels, Bond inevitably is less human here. The compensation is that Connery’s portrayal of the suave secret agent is so definitive that it instantly made Bond an iconic, almost archetypal figure.
The novel started with Bond being sent on a “soft” assignment as punishment for an error on his previous operation: it turned out, of course, not to be so straightforward. The film talks up the assignment more (introducing the relevance to the American space program up-front), and adds incidents along the way to quicken the pace (the treacherous chauffeur, Bond’s encounter with Miss Taro), but there is still an element of the mundane about the early proceedings. This works to the film’s advantage not only in allowing Connery to firmly control the screen, but also in giving a real sense of Bond’s profession. While the screen Bond usually does less actual spying than that of the novels, here the story is greatly enriched by the fleshing out of Bond’s investigations. In the novel, suspicions centre on Crab Key from the beginning and the central passage of the novel essentially covers Bond’s preparations for his journey there. The film adds the business between Bond, Dent, and Miss Taro, and it is Bond’s investigations that lead him to suspect unusual goings-on at Crab Key. Bond’s encounter with Taro shows the business-like manner in which Bond uses sex to achieve his ends: what would in the seventies become a mere joke is here set up as a thematic motif that will continue to be thoughtfully explored throughout the sixties films. Bond’s dealings with Dent are even more entertaining. If Connery gives the perfect rendition of the secret agent, Anthony Dawson as Dent gives the definitive snivelling, weasel-like, out-of-his-depth henchman. Bond’s final encounter with Dent is possibly the best example of what Connery brought to the role that none of his successors could: the icy calm assassination of the defenceless Dent showed Bond’s credentials as something more than a jocular action hero.
There is more than a touch of Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates in Dawson’s Dent (Perkin’s performance in Psycho had been only two years before). Dent’s nervous, fidgety manner recalls Bates’ desperate attempts to laugh off the probing of his pursuers, and we start to empathise with Dent in much the same way we do with Bates. This partial transfer of audience sympathy is most pronounced when Bond visits Dent at his lab, and in the scenes immediately following. We go with Dent to Crab Key, and it is through him that we have our first encounter with the disembodied voice of Dr No. In no other scene in a Bond film is the audience so encouraged to share the emotions of a supporting character. Ken Adams’ set is a masterpiece of simple expressionism, a physical manifestation of Dent’s dread. The moment once again shows up the balance between reality and fantasy, with the film taking on a very different tone for the sequences on Crab Key. Dent is briefly the audience’s surrogate, and through him we receive a preview of Bond’s own journey to the island. Dent’s fate, of course, does not match that of Bond. He is sent back to take another shot at Bond, using the most ineffectual of assassination methods, the poisonous animal sneaked into the room. For once, this rather silly device doesn’t diminish the menace of the villain. The way the whole scene is staged and performed gives the impression that Dr No is more than happy to wait for Bond to come to him – if Dent succeeds, fine, but Dr No isn’t counting on it. Dent is just a tennis ball in a game between two strong-willed men, and all he can do is return to Jamaica for another doomed attempt on Bond’s life. You can’t help but feel for the guy. It is this, as much as Connery’s manner, that makes Dent’s murder the most shocking, well-remembered of Bond’s killings.
From Dent’s visit to Crab Key onwards, Dr No starts its transformation from its predominantly realist first half into the lush fantasy of its second. The film is at its most faithful to the novel in Bond’s early exploration on Crab Key, and it effectively catches the spirit of the novel as the outdoor-adventure lark sours into something darker. The early Crab Key scenes are all sun, and we’re back to the novel where Bond is overly blasé about his mission. (He’s supposed to be infiltrating the enemy’s compound and he’s stopping to pick up, for goodness sake.) The beach on which Bond and Honey meet is standard picture postcard stuff, as is the waterfall in which they shower. Yet as they start their journey inland, we shift to muddy, unattractive swamps and the tone becomes more downbeat. This short section of the adventure is notable for the deglamorisation of Bond’s adventure. Relying on wits, not gadgets, he has to messily dispatch one of Dr No’s guards. It’s an unpleasant killing, that forms an interesting counterpoint to the assassination of Dent: while the earlier killing has a certain cool about it, this is just grubby. Things darken further as Bond, Quarrel and Honey take on the dragon and are captured. The dragon itself is a silly device (albeit one fairly accurately taken from Fleming’s description), but Quarrel’s death shows once and for all that things here are serious. That the character’s death is so affecting is attributable entirely to John Kitzmiller’s performance: he took a role that on paper was patronising and stereotyped, and imbued it with real integrity. (He compensated for the familiarity that the film lost by making this Quarrel’s first appearance: in the novels, Quarrel was a recurring character from Live and Let Die.)
So Honey and Bond are imprisoned and decontaminated in a bizarre combination of shower and travelator. Here the tone of the film starts to become harder to peg. We are entering, for the first time, the surreal world of the supervillain and his superhideout, which is a long way to come from the documentary-like early scenes. That stretches the film’s range enough: the problem is compounded by the budgetary limitations the film was completed within. The technical end of Dr No’s operation – the decontamination chamber and his nuclear reactor – is ludicrously presented, both in technical detail and its stylings (the sets have the same gaudily coloured, bare bones look as early Star Trek sets). Dr No’s personal suite isn’t much better, filled with bizarre and unsightly bric-a-brac. These sequences have dated in a way that, say, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger have not. Why, then, do these sequences nevertheless work?
Again, Connery is a key here. If there were more than the faintest hint of a wink at the audience in these sequences, they would revert to camp, as they so often do in the later films. Connery’s Bond here is exactly that of Fleming’s original: angry at himself for having been captured, still assertive (as when he orders his guards around), but ultimately compliant as he waits for the chance to escape. That Bond remains a human figure throughout means that the sequences in the prison suite, in which Bond and Honey are “mothered” by overly friendly nurses, become grotesquely creepy. The incongruous hospitality and weird décor are here not the tired convention they would become. Set against a background of down-to-earth, realistically presented espionage, these sequences don’t simply signal that we have entered a comic book universe (as in the films of The Spy Who Loved Me or Moonraker): instead they foreshadow the twisted mentality of our still unseen villain. Dr No’s apartment may simply be a lapse of taste or budget by Ken Adam, but whatever the intent, forty years later its strange furnishings still create a sense of unease.
That we are tempted to read the villain through his furniture at all is a function of Dr No’s unusual structure: only You Only Live Twice holds the revelation of its principal villain to so late in the piece.* Young held back the introduction of his hero at the introduction, but his source novel afforded him the opportunity to also hold back the villain for most of the running time. Like Bond’s introduction, it’s a teasing reveal, with the disembodied voice lecturing Dent, and then a brief, creepy sequence (again, straight from Fleming) in which Dr No surveys his captives, but we do not see his face. Throughout the film, Dr No’s power is demonstrated by the fear he inspires in his minions. As with the revelation of Bond, such forbearance raises expectations of the villain when he does arrive. Fortunately, Joseph Wiseman’s calm monotone gives the evil doctor menace to spare. The tense dinner that follows is the series’ definitive “villain dines with Bond” scene, well written and brought off perfectly by Connery and Wiseman. Bond taunts the Dr about his lack of hands, while Dr No casually crushes a metal ornament. In the later movies, Bond’s insults to the villain would be a sign of his invulnerability and super-confidence. Here, they are the frustrated gesture of a man who knows he has no options. At one point he is about to attack Dr No by breaking a bottle, and is disarmed after he is told it is a Dom Perignon. This would have been merely a joke in a Moore film, but here, Bond’s acquiescence clearly acknowledges he is – for the moment – defeated. This is even clearer when, a moment later, Dr No detects Bonds attempt to steal a knife. Bond, chastened, insults Dr No about his lack of hands – again the context makes it clear the wise dialogue arises from defeat, not the smug assurance that would come to define the character. It should also be noted that the sequence is purely about the character of these two men, rather than serving as a plot device to allow the villain to explain his evil plan.
The dinner scene can’t be about Dr No’s scheme, because he barely has one. In the novel, Dr No does explain his scheme over the meal, but it comes off sounding half-baked, and isn’t really the point of the book (which centres much more on Bond’s need to prove himself). The film slightly amends the villain’s scheme and shifts much of the exposition about it to the opening briefing, but by the end, we still don’t really have a clear idea of what exactly Dr No is intending to achieve. More important than the scheme itself is the introduction of Spectre, the organisation Dr No works for. This, again, is an introduction by the filmmakers, and it serves no real purpose in this film: it’s actually pretty silly, if only by virtue of the ridiculous acronym (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion). Yet it is an indication of the extent of thought that was being put into the progression of the Bond series: the 60s bond films share a broad arc showing the gradual revelation of this organisation, culminating in their murder of Bond’s wife. Here, their mention in the screenplay is simply a cloud on the horizon, the first fateful omen of trouble to come. That portent would not be realised until future films.
After dinner and “softening up” by guards, Bond is thrown into a cell. His escape through ventilation shafts is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the film. While the sequence is exciting enough – the use of electronic sound effects is particularly effective – it makes little sense. In the novel, the series of tunnels was a deliberately planned endurance test, culminating with Bond being fed to a giant squid. Here, the sequence needs to get him into the reactor room so that he can thwart the attempt to topple the moon rocket, so the tunnels become simply ventilation shafts. This change causes several problems. It makes Dr No look foolhardy, for one, in placing a secret agent in such an easily-escaped cell. And there is no obvious explanation for why the shafts are flooded with water (or why the water does not flow into the reactor control room). The deliberate endurance test would have lacked the thematic relevance it has in Fleming’s original: there, it serves as a response to the underlying speculation that Bond has lost his edge, and allows Bond to prove his fortitude. Even so, its inclusion in the film in a context closer to the original novel’s would have nicely served as punctuation to the dinner sequence. Preceding the ventilation shaft sequence, Bond has been in the subordinate position to Dr No, captured and helpless, and his survival of this ordeal serves as the turning point in his fortunes. If the film used the sequence as a more explicit test of Bond’s abilities, Bond’s victories once he passed it would be more dramatically satisfying.
Once Bond is in the reactor chamber, we are firmly in the realms of science fiction. The business that follows – Bond overpowering guards, disguising himself, sabotaging equipment, and battling to the death with Dr No over the reactor – is original to the film. It grafts a generic action-adventure climax onto the story that was missing in the book. Monty Norman’s score is at its most stridently ineffective here, consisting of what sound like stock action cues, with none of the soaring adventure that John Barry would bring to the action sequences once he took over as the series’ composer. That these sequences sit in the film at all without appearing hopelessly out of place is attributable to the film’s structure. The film gets away with its massive shift in tone by getting there in small increments, and making the progression inherent to its structure. Bond films since have struggled to balance the different aspects of what Bond is supposed to be, mixing action-based fantasy and character-based scenes in often incongruous ways. The comicbook-like later sections of Dr No, based in the supervillain’s fortress, would increasingly become the template for what the film character was about, and attempts to show Bond the spy (or even Bond the man) would be dropped in almost at random as an apologetic nod to Fleming. Such wild variations in tone take enormous skill to pull off, and the 60s Bonds show varying degrees of success at the task. Never again, though, would a Bond film have a narrative that made such a point of its movement towards fantasy, and which would so skilfully use a geographic location as a site for the bizarre and dreamlike. Bond’s journey from comfortable London nightclub, to gently anachronistic colonial Jamaica, to Dr No’s island fortress works as a psychological journey as much as a physical one.
It also deliberately explores the range of the character, showing us Bond as both tuxedo-wearing socialite and rag-covered action hero. Dr No was therefore a wise choice as the first Bond picture. From Russia With Love, the story that immediately preceded it in the books, and immediately followed it in the movies, received an equally sympathetic adaptation. Yet it would not have got the movie series off to as good a start, because it is much more one-note stylistically. Dr No, in addition to being a top-notch adventure film, served as the model for the Bond series to come. Over forty years later, it still has definitiveness about it: not only is it a touchstone for all Bond films since, but it is a pivotal film in adventure cinema more generally. Hollywood filmmaking would be reborn in the late 1970s and 1980s, and generally discussion of the new mode of blockbuster filmmaking would centre on films such as Jaws and Star Wars. Yet the basis on which Spielberg and Lucas would build – big budget, prestige ventures into previously disreputable or infantile genres – was firmly laid by the Bond pictures in the 1960s. Dr No serves as an example of the best kind of this filmmaking, and is one of the finest genre movies ever made. It deserves greater recognition not just as a classic Bond movie, but as a classic movie, period.
* I think it’s fair, in making this point, to disregard the shadowy Blofeld of From Russia With Love and Thunderball.