Dr. No

(Here be spoilers if you are yet to see the James Bond movies...)

The Mission
Debonair British spy James Bond (Sean Connery) is sent to Jamaica to investigate the source of radio interference with U.S. missile launches. On arrival he finds himself met with resistance by a network of dangerous agents in the employ of Dr No (Joseph Wiseman), a Chinese scientist operating from the nearby private island of Crab Key.

Jimmy Bond yo!
Sean Connery's first outing as James Bond is extremely likeable. He's smooth, charming, self-assured and always armed with a smirk, but it never comes off as smug. He's also a very 60s creation - thoroughly without angst and always ready with a quip. Connery manages to pull off such a feat without Bond ever really feeling the pressure to any large degree, and it's easy to see why this film and it's sequels made him such a star, as his performance is effortlessly appealing.

Villainy
Dr No is first introduced to us a neutral disembodied voice and then doesn't show up again until the last half hour of the film. His lair - a large wooden fortress and an ornate underwater hideaway - is pretty cool, though the end sequence in the massive lab area feels rather dated and cliched in light of the way things like The Simpsons and Austin Powers have parodied it since. Dr No's backstory (he's a half-chinese Tong crimelord turned atomic-scientist and he also has robot hands and some ties with a mysterious organisation of oppurtinistic terrorists known as SPECTRE) is fairly interesting if a little outlandish, but it's a shame that the film doesn't go into it more. It's also a shame that Dr No features so little in the film overall, especially as it's called Dr. No... he's in it for all of about 15 minutes. Joseph Wiseman gives a fairly restrained and dignified performance (probably all too aware of how ridiculous his asian make-up and metal hands were), and he's backed up by a host of faceless Jamaican mercerneries. He also has a cool flame-throwing tank that looks like a dragon.

Buddies and Babes
M (Bernard Lee) is introduced here as a pipe-smoking old boy of the establishment before routinely despatching Bond to the Caribbean. Once there, Bond teams up with a fairly nondescript CIA agent (Jack Lord) and a local Jamaican fisherman named Quarrel (John Kitzmiller). Quarrel comes off as fairly tough and awesome at first, but the characters devolves into a superstitious and mildly racist stereotype by the film's end.

The main 'Bond-Girl' here is Ursula Andress as Honey Rider, who doesn't show up until the last third of the film. Normally I would single something like this out as a structural weakpoint but Andress is such a terrible actress that it's probably for the best that she has the minimum amount of screentime. I suppose she looks good in a white bikini but she's very unconvincing as a marine biologist.

Locations
A little bit of the film is set in London at the beginning, and the rest of it was filmed in a wide variety of locations across Jamaica.

Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
The only 'gadget' that Bond is given is a top-of-the-line handgun. He does however demonstrate his espionage expertise throughout the film with a number of tricks that have now become cliches... he breathes underwater thanks to a hollow reed and puts a strand of hair on his hotel-room doorframe as a way to detect any interference with his room (though he doesn't seem to care much when he inspects it and finds that it's gone). He also sets up a decoy-dummy in his bed, disguises himself in a radiation suit whilst in the villain's hideout, and is smart enough to wait for a deadly spider to crawl off him before making any rash moves.

Licence to Kill
Bond's first direct kill in the James Bond franchise is... a spider. He defeats a No henchman earlier in the film but the poor guys kills himself before Bond can make him talk. Bond also manages to shake off a car that's chasing him, which ends badly for the chap(s) in the car. He also kills a geology professor in the employ of Dr. No, a mercenary in the lagoon (he strangles/drowns him), chokes a scientist in Dr. No's lair, and fights off Dr. No before letting him drown.

Shag-Rate
I thought that Bond's reputation with the ladies might be something that builds up over the course of the series but I was wrong - he's really quite the player right from the start of this first film. He shags Sylvia Trench (a random woman he meets at a casino) at least twice before he starts his mission, beds Miss Taro (an asian agent of Dr No) maybe twice, and 'bonds' with Honey Rider in a small boat at the film's end. Nice going!

Quotes
CONSTRUCTION WORKER (after witnessing a car crash): How did it happen?
BOND: I think they were on their way to a funeral.

BOND (on seeing Dr. No's fish magnified by a convex window): Minnows pretending they're whales - just like you on this island, Dr. No.

DR. NO (to Bond): Unfortunately I misjudged you, you're just a stupid policeman.

How Does it Rate?
More Tintin than James Bond as we know it. Dr. No stretches credibility in the name of entertainment, and probably got away with it at the time as it would've been a breath of fresh air in comparison to previous films about spies (which tended to be quite dark and on the noirish side). The music is very swinging 60s, and the jazzy opening credits with silhouettes of women dancing in a frantic fashion also feels very much like a product of its time. It bugged and confused me that the production team would hire a white actor and put him in yellowface to play Dr. No for just a few minutes, yet they were happy to use real black actors for the Jamaican characters. I also could've done without the overuse of CSO/bluescreen and would've liked for some more time to be spent on the villain, but overall it's a fun and mostly inoffensive spy adventure.

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