Dr. No

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

In 1961, former British journalist and naval commander-turned-author Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel series had just started finally catching on with the public. After then-U.S. president John F. Kennedy personally endorsed From Russia With Love as his favorite fiction book in a Life magazine article, all the books quickly became best-sellers in the UK and the US after many years of relative cult status, critical acclaim, and several failed attempts to be adapted into the visual medium.

Around the same time, British producer Harry Saltzman and American producer Albert R. Broccoli finally picked up the rights to do a 007 film series. By the next year, they had put out their first James Bond film with Dr. No, now available on DVD.

James Bond (Sean Connery) is a hard-boiled secret agent for the British Secret Service. He lives the high life of martinis (shaken, not stirred) and bedding numerous beautiful women, while carrying a licence to kill under the codename of 007.

He serves under the head of MI6, the rather stodgy M (Bernard Lee), regularly flirts with lively secretary Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), and receives the most cutting-edge and gadgets and weapons developed by Q, known also by the name of Major Boothroyd (Peter Burton).

After an agent working for the Jamaican secret service and his secretary is mysteriously murdered by a group of assassins and a series of American launchings are disrupted, agent Bond is sent to investigate and determine if the two events are possibly connected. He soon gains two allies who help him in his mission, American CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jack Lord) and after a bit of confrontation, local islander Quarrel (John Kitzmiller).

Bond’s trail soon leads to a metallurgist named Professor R.J. Dent (Anthony Dawson), who is soon discovered to be working for the mysterious and reclusive scientist Dr. Julius No (Joseph Wiseman). Dent soon bribes the Jamaican governor’s secretary Miss Taro (Zena Marshall) to lure Bond into seduction, while his attempts to assassinate Bond are soon foiled.

Bond’s path continues to Crab Key where he sails with Quarrel and meets a beautiful seashell collector named Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress). Soon enough, however, Quarrel is killed and Bond and Ryder are captured by Dr. No. They soon discover that he’s tied to the mysterious criminal organization Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, or SPECTRE, and has developed a scheme to disrupt American rocket launches at Cape Canaveral to get revenge and wreak havoc on the Western world.

Originally written for the screen by Ian Fleming as the pilot for a failed attempt at a James Bond TV series before being soon reconfigured into a novel, Dr. No ends up being the perfect story to introduce James Bond onto the silver screen. The original novel also had marked a turning point in the book series where the stories went from being more realistic, political, and true-to-life to being more outlandish with larger-than-life villains.

Judged against the latter Bond films, Dr. No is much lower in budget ...