Dr No

Following the disappearance of the head of the local secret service station in Jamaica and his assistant, M send James Bond to investigate. Bond quickly teams up with the CIA's Felix Leiter and with the help of the CIA man and his local hand, Quarrel, Bond follows up a series of leads. His investigations point him towards Crab Key, home to the enigmatic Dr No, and he and Quarrel set sail at night to investigate. After arriving, Bond awakes to find a bikini-clad girl collecting shells on the beach. It turns out that Honey Rider also sailed overnight, but alerted by the sail on her dinghy, Dr No sends a motor patrol boat to deal with the trespassers. Disappearing into the mangrove swamp, the three come face to face with a march buggy armed with a flamethrower dressed up to look like a dragon. After seeing Quarrel being scorched to death, Bond and Honey are taken to Dr No's base after surrendering, where the two are surprised to find they have been expected in what appears to be some kind of luxury clinic. After dinner with the Doctor, during which he reveals that he has been interfering with American missile tests on behalf of SPECTRE, Bond is taken to a cell. Escaping though a ventilation shaft, Bond tracks Dr No down to his laboratory and kills him. While a chain of gigantic explosions begins to rock the complex all around, Bond rescues Honey, and they make their escape from the island in a boat.

Although following Ian Fleming's plot quite closely, the scriptwriters added some characters, such as Felix Leiter, Professor Dent and Miss Taro. They also added a central section in which Bond has time to firstly bed Miss Taro, and then cold bloodedly kill Dent. However, the script ignores one of the best sections of the book, in which rather then escape through a ventilation shaft, Bond enters Dr No's obstacle course, designed as part of his experiments on human endurance.

It is difficult to imagine the impact that Dr No would have made on unsuspecting audiences in 1962. Although audiences have come to expect the gun barrel sequence and opening credits from 40 years of James Bond films, the groundbreaking start to Dr No was hugely influential. With a strong visual identity, fast pace and tight editing the straightforward plot cracks along with just the right balance between action and humour, while a combination of spy craft with an absence of gadgets make the film both harder and more believable than more recent Bond outings. It is, of course, also the film in which Sean Connery first introduced two iconic phrases to modern culture, without which the English language would be all the poorer; "Bond, James Bond" and "shaken, not stirred".

Connery's hard edge, flawless delivery of one liners, a simple plot and absence of gadgets all work in the film's favour and with a freshness that has evaded the series since Goldfinger, Dr No remains one of the best Bond films.

Sean Connery	James Bond
Ursula Andress	Honey Ryder
Joseph Wiseman	Dr. Julius No
Jack Lord	Felix Leiter
Bernard Lee	M
M Anthony Dawson	Professor R. J. Dent
Zena Marshall	Miss Taro
John Kitzmiller	Quarrel
Eunice Gayson	Sylvia Trench
Lois Maxwell	Miss Moneypenny
Peter Burton	Major Boothroyd
Director	Terence Young
Screenplay	Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood & Berkely Mather

 

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