The first Bond is smaller, quicker and odder than the series it started, and Connery’s introduction still lands. Half a dozen things in it have dated badly and the middle third dawdles, but the good parts hold.
Terence Young’s Dr. No is the first of the Bond films, and it is smaller than anything that came after: one island, one villain, one gadget, and that a handgun. Watching it now, with sixty years of the series behind it, what strikes us is how little it needs. Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli’s production has no volcano and no space station. It has Jamaica, a few good sets and Sean Connery, and that is enough for a good evening, if not the great one its admirers remember.
Connery’s introduction is the best thing in it, and everyone says so, and everyone is right. Young keeps the camera on the back of his head at the chemin de fer table while Eunice Gayson’s Sylvia Trench loses and doubles, and only shows us his face when he lights a cigarette and gives his name. It is a trick, and a cheap one, and it works completely. Connery plays Bond as a man who finds most things slightly funny and nothing frightening. The scenes at M’s office, with Bernard Lee sour behind the desk and Lois Maxwell’s Moneypenny flirting in the outer room, sketch a whole civil service in about four minutes.
Ted Moore shoots Jamaica in colours the British screen was not used to: hard blue water, white roads, red flowers in the foreground of a shot about a murder. Ken Adam, whose sets became the series’ signature, gets his first go here on a budget that shows and does not matter. Professor Dent’s briefing room is a chair, a table and a circular grille in the ceiling throwing a shadow across the floor, and it is more frightening than any of the later lairs with their monorails. Dr. No’s dining room, with a wall of glass onto the sea bed and fish drifting past the cutlery, is where the film decides it is allowed to be absurd.
The scene we still flinch at is the tarantula. Bond wakes to find one walking up his arm under the sheet, and Young and editor Peter R. Hunt hold on Connery’s face, sweating, not breathing, with Monty Norman’s music gone entirely. We went rigid on the sofa, and we have seen the film several times. Hunt cuts the fights hard and short, a punch and a fall and out, and it is his pace more than the script’s that keeps the Kingston section moving. Without it, the middle third, with its back-projected car chase and its rounds of who-is-the-real-chauffeur, would sag. It sags a little anyway.
Then there is Honey Ryder. Ursula Andress walks out of the sea in a white bikini with a knife on her hip, singing, and the film has one of the images it will be remembered by. It is also the point at which the script, by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood and Berkely Mather from Ian Fleming’s novel, stops knowing what to do with her. Andress is given a sad past in one speech and thereafter mostly told to run. Joseph Wiseman’s Dr. No arrives late, talks quietly, wears metal hands, and is the better for keeping his voice down. The casting of a white actor in make-up as a half-Chinese villain is the sort of thing the film does without a thought, and we noticed. So is the moment Bond tells Quarrel, played with real warmth by John Kitzmiller, to fetch his shoes.
The plot, when it arrives, is about knocking American rockets off course by radio beam, and it is explained over dinner rather than shown. It does not matter much. The film is a travelogue with a pistol in it, and its pleasures are all in the manner: Connery straightening his tie before a fight, Norman’s twanging guitar theme arriving fully formed over the titles, the confidence with which a modest British production behaves like a large American one.
Young made two more Bonds and the next is better, but this one has a plainness the series lost quickly and never got back. Start here if you have never seen one, and watch it knowing that everything added over the following fifty years was optional. At 110 minutes it is done before dinner.
