Ahh, so I’m actually not that much of a hardcore James Bond fan.
Do hardcore James Bond fans actually exist? Like are there people who obsess over the James Bond canon like people do with, say, the Star Wars films? Do people cosplay James Bond? I guess that’s not very hard, but even if it was, I don’t think people do anyway.
The biggest James Bond fan I know is probably my dad, who might stop channel flicking long enough to fall asleep in front of one at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon, but still, that’s not what I would call rabid fandom.
So why waste my precious time and effort reviewing all the Bond films in excruciating detail, when I could be doing something constructive with my life like kicking a can against a wall, or learning to cook meth in my basement?
For one thing, the James Bond franchise has been an incredibly resilient one, spanning over an incredible 6 decades. It’s one where not only I can have memories of Bond films as a kid, but people twice my age can as well.
I’m not really into superfluous, inane details like ‘the truth’ or ‘facts’ but I heard a guy on the train the other day say that James Bond is the longest running constant movie franchise of all time. Sure there’s shit like the Wizard of Oz which is still being regurgitated, rebooted, re-imagined and repackaged every few years or so which originated way before the first Bond film, but James Bond as a movie franchise has been more or less constant since 1962.
As of 2019 there will be 25 of the bastards. That’s a rate of a James Bond movie every 2.28 years, isn’t that fucking insane? James Bond was like the godamn Disney-Just-Bought-Star-Wars of the 1960s.
In fact, James Bond films were almost an annual occurrence, with no more than a year or two between releases from 1962 right up until 1989. There I guess it reached its Rehashed Idea Critical Mass and like a tired, flogged out old cart horse finally coughed, died and disappeared up its own asshole. There it sat dormant for 6 years until it was reinvented by Goldeneye starring Pierce Brosnan in 1995.
That’s a hell of a run for a movie franchise. If you were hoping that the glut of shitty Superhero movies and the vapid, soulless toy commercials that are masquerading as Star Wars movies these days would finally implode in on themselves and die so we can all move on with our lives, then I’m sorry friend, you might be waiting a long time. If James Bond can do it, then so can fucking Spiderface and Iron-bloke and all the other shit-cunts in leotards.
Drunken ranting aside, whether you’re a fan of the Bond series or not the fact remains that James Bond has remained a long standing, resilient phenomenon for decades, and that appears to be because it can adapt and role with the times. James Bond doesn’t really have an overarching storyline per se, except that it’s about British Spy Man who does something exciting. That’s about the criterion that is required to call yourself a James Bond movie. You don’t need to set it in a certain period, you don’t need to make sure you keep your continuity between films, and luckily you don’t need to watch the first 24 godamn films to understand the 25th.
In fact no one really puts a huge amount of thought into what is actually going on in the James Bond universe, and if you do you quickly run into trouble. There was an article that came out some time ago about a fan theory that, like, totally blew people’s minds, where it postulated the idea that James Bond wasn’t one dude, but it was just an alias for an assortment of badass British Spies through the ages!!
Did this really blow any minds? Like I actually thought this was kind of common knowledge, or perhaps a very simplistic explanation for the serious as a whole. You didn’t really think James Bond was one guy who seems to not age and appears to be immortal did you? Like the films in the 60s weren’t based in the future, and the ones made today aren’t based in the past. Plus they talk about current events like the Cold War for the 60s films or 9/11 for the more recent ones, so of course they’re different fucking people. Aren’t they? Just don’t think about it too much. And that’s the good thing about the Bond films, they don’t even try explain that shit themselves, so you’re free to just sit and fall asleep on your chair at 3pm on a Sunday in front of a self-contained spy film without the burden of knowing what the fuck is going on.
This article will progress like so. I am to give an overwrought, poorly written, poorly edited, vague at times, much too specific at other times run down of each film accompanied by anything of historical interest that was going on at the time, any pop culture tidbits and just any bullshit that I deem interesting. I’m also going to keep track of the Bangometer (how much women James bangs per movie), the Bangometer (how many people James kills per film) and the Bangometer (how many random items James bangs into) , as well as other pointless garbage, like actor shit, director shit and shit etc.
A small amount of backstory about me: I’ve seen ahh, like 5 Bond movies maybe? I’ve seen Goldeneye about 300 times, so forewarning, there may be some bias tilted toward that movie when I finally review it in 2036. That movie came out right in my nostalgia sweet spot, when you’re around the age of 10 to 13 and can start grasping the concept of things that are actually good and well-crafted but are also too poor-ass and young to be able to have much variety, so you tend to watch the same shit on repeat a lot. This was in the pre-internet days when you had to just hire the same flogged out VCR from the video shop each week or tape it when it was on TV if you were paying attention.
It was also when the N64 game of the movie came out which I had a clinical addiction to, so I either watched that movie or played that video game and that was about it for my early teens.
Also I’m pretty sure I’ve seen most of the other Pierce Brosnan garbage that came after Goldeneye, like the one where the newspaper guy kills everyone and the one where Bond has an invisible car or something and he surfs a tidal wave? Did that really happen? Pretty sure there’s a giant space laser in there somewhere as well but that’s not being very specific for James Bond.
I remember loving Goldeneye so hard that I thought all James Bond movies must be amazing, so I trawled the video shop for others and found License to Kill, the one that came out before Goldeneye. All I remember about that film is that my 12 year old brain found it boring and I think I watched it on a Sunday at 3pm and fell asleep as I remember literally nothing else about it.
I’ve watched some of the new ones with Daniel Craig and remember Casino Royale being good and containing poker and parkour, ha! Quantum of Solace I remember liking but everyone else hating. I think because the bad guy is trying to steal water from Bolivia or something and apparently no one gives any fucks about Bolivians. Rough. Then I watched the one after that and remember it being a bag of soggy dicks. I think the guy from No Country for Old Men crashes a train through a roof or something?
Or is that in those shitty Kingsman movies? Only time will tell. Also I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Goldfinger. I think it was on in the background while my mum was doing the ironing once and all I remember is Oddjob throwing his hat and it getting stuck in some prison bars. It’s a very specific mental image. To summarise, I really have no idea and am going into this thing pretty cold. Most of my Bond knowledge comes from the N64 game, so this will be an adventure and a learning experience. I’m especially looking forward to the one about the lady with the 8 vaginas. To the film!!!!
Title: Dr. No
Year: 1962
Order in Series: 1
Bond: Sean Connery
Director: Terence Young
Budget: 1 Million USD
Box Office: Approx. 60 Million USD
Run time: 100 Minutes.
IMDB rates it: 7.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rates it: 96%!!!
Ahh 1962, such a simple time. A year when Sean Connery, a young (31 year old) up and comer with just a few years of TV movies under his belt got given the role to play the character of James Bond from Ian Fleming’s book series.
Did you know James Bond started out as a book series? Can you also imagine Sean Connery as an up and comer or as 31? Like I’m older than that right now. The idea that Sean Connery was once not only my age but younger than me blows my mind.
We’re going to talk about Sean Connery at length, and the book series and Ian Fleming as well, but right now let’s rip into a godamn movie!
The film proper starts with the now iconic white circles flashing horizontally across a black screen. The final white circle opens up to show Bond pacing across frame and then turning and shooting at the audience, which results in red blood cascading from the top of screen.
It’s the classic start to the Bond films, but upon reflection it seems to make no fucking sense. Is the spiral thingy we’re looking through meant to be a gun barrel? If so why are we looking through it? You don’t look through the gun barrel when you shoot at things do you? And then why does blood cascade down between us and the gun barrel? Were we trying to shoot Bond? If so we had plenty of time to do so when he was strolling along beforehand. Pretty poor form, random benevolent gun toting observer.
We open with random, buzzing radio noises before the classic orchestral James Bond theme kicks in over an LSD inspired credits sequence of flashing neon lights.
Credits sequences in old movies are always odd, rambling affairs and Dr. No is no different. The credits persevere for 2 minutes or so before the Bond music abruptly fades out to a more island style theme. The visuals also diffuse randomly to dancing lady in a red dress silhouetted on a black background.
This random jungle drumming and acid nightmare dancing goes on for a good thirsty seconds or so before hey, the song and background abruptly change, again, to 3 blind dudes cruising along with walking sticks and begging cups.
This whole credits scene plays out like the editor was suffering from ADD/ boredom, although now we finally get down to business as we segue into 3 actual old blind men shuffling across a road in a random town in Jamaica.
They walk along for what seems to be several hundred kilometres as they now appear to be in rural Jamaica and have arrived at an establishment shown to be the Queens Country Club.
We cut to 4 British gentlemen playing cards and their banter informs us they’re military or government affiliated. One of them excuses himself to head home to take his nightly phone call from his General. He comes across the blind dudes out the front and chucks a coin in their cup. His tip must have been bullshit though for as soon as his back it turned they shoot him several times and then hurl his corpse into a car that pulls up and drives off.
I like the feel of this movie already. It’s got that old fashioned 60s colonial vibe to it where the cars and the clothes have that worn-in feeling to them, and the scenery is hot and steamy and tropical with an air of romance and intrigue. It almost has a kind of Hemingway-esque vibe to it even though he spent his time in Cuba, not Jamaica. But you get my point. (Same fucken area, innit??)
It’s also nice to be reminded that when you made films back in the day you also had to do things for real instead of just bullshit green screening everything; so the cars, the chases and most of the scenery and backdrops are real. This of course makes the action scenes seem quaint and slow compared to the disaster and explosion porn that pass for movies these days, but it’s nice to feel the realness of the movie immediately.
We cut to generic 60s woman using generic 60s communication equipment in the house of the guy who has just been murdered.
She gets in contact with London and says they’re ready to transmit, but old mate, (his name is Strangways) is yet to arrive. She looks at her watch anxiously. He usually isn’t late. Generic henchmen are suddenly at the window and she movie screams before they shoot her and break their way in.
They move her corpse out of the way before the camera pans to one of them looking over a filing cabinet. The music swells, quite loudly and ridiculously, as it is revealed that the file he has removed is emblazoned with the letters DOCTOR NO. Oooh snap, movie title!!
We cut to an establishing shot of London with Big Ben silhouetted in what looks to be night time. Then we cut to a busy radio control room with several operators on listening equipment. All these shots are actually really great, showing the old equipment and the protocol of how things might have really been managed in like some Cold War crisis situation.
Like we’ll get into in later entries, Ian Fleming was an actual Radio commander in the navy and quite the badass, and was commended for bringing a grounded realism to the spy genre. I’m not sure how close the films are to the books but all this communications stuff in the film is pretty cool and believable and has an air of realism to it.
It’s dawned on them they have lost contact with Strangways in Jamaica. The supervisor is alerted who then alerts a higher up.
We cut to some swanky casino called Le Cercle Les Ambassadeurs in London(apparently it’s still open to this day) which is established by a shot of its sign. A man walks in and tells the front reception guy that he’s looking for Mr James Bond.
The reception guy takes his card through to the game floor and we get a pretty neat establishing shot of rich folk pottering about in the lavish hotel.
We cut to some sexy rich lady in a red dress being dealt cards from some mystery man. This game is weird as fuck, especially because they’re also Frenching at each other. It’s actually the same game Peirce Brosnan places with Xenia in Goldeneye. The game is…well there you go, just googled it, it’s Baccarat. How boring. Wow, I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t know that. I guess it looks way sexier here because attractive people are playing it and speaking French instead of playing it in their tracksuit pants in Atlantic city.
Lady in Red gets her ass handed to her which makes her reach for her checkbook like a bitch. Here we get the first lines of dialogue from Sean Connery as James Bond. We’re still yet to see his face. It’s a pretty awesome exchange.
*While doing your best Sean Connery accent*
‘I admire your courage Mish errrrr…’ Reaches for a cigarette like a smooth motherfucker
‘Trench. Silvia Trench. I admire your luck Mr…’
Then bam! Cut to Sean.
‘Bond. James Bond.’ *Queue theme music*
They agree to raise the limit and for this she gives him the old fuck eyes. I’m guessing this would be tense if you knew what the fuck is going on in Baccarat. He wins and then ‘passes the shoe’ as the reception man behind him gives him his urgent message.
Also, I’m pretty sure there’s a lady in the shot wearing the same Metallica sunglasses that I have.
Bond works his magic as they walk together back to the entrance and scores himself a sexy rendezvous. ‘Golf tomorrow, followed by dinner,’ they agree. He gives her his number and stashes his massive wad of cash in his jacket pocket while she gives him more fuck eyes. What a sick cunt.
We cut to MI5 and James opens the door to Moneypenny’s office and throws his hat on the stand from a distance. It’s actually a great scene as Bond has the look of more of a smug, playful, prep school kid than a grizzled, stoic secret agent.
They have a pretty awesome, very classy flirt scene where they get in close and he says he can’t take her out for dinner as his boss will have him court martialed for illegal use of government property. Brilliant.
He gets summoned into his bosses office. He sits down and they shoot the shit about Jamaica and about how Strangways and his secretary have up and disappeared. Exposition ensues. Turns out Strangways was there as a favor to the Americans to investigate some interference coming from the Jamaica area that has been sending their Cape Canaveral rockets off course.
They talk about the concept of ‘toppling’ , throwing the gyroscopics of a rocket off balance by using radio interference. Apparently the last one was meant to hit the mid-Atlantic but ended up in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. Oops. This is actually a great scene. A young James Bond, with obvious respect for his superior have a good back and forth. Mid conversation the boss hops up to light his pipe. Bond offers him a lighter but he instead opts for his matches on the mantle. This piece is beautifully shot and well framed, honing in on M and removing James from the shot before pulling back to show the both of them again as they continue their conversation. It’s little flares like this that keep an exposition scene captivating instead of just delivering all of your shit in shot – reverse shot.
James is informed that he’s on the next flight to Kingston and that there’s a bloke from the CIA who’s also down in Jamaica that James needs to catch up with. The main point of the whole thing…find out what happened to Strangways.
We then get an interesting scene where Bond is berated for the kind of gun he’s carrying… apparently he’s still cruising around with a shitty Beretta when he should be knocking heads with the new Walther PPK, which also comes in a lovely box.
Character building! This establishes Bond as somewhat of a rogue, and a romantic, having gone against his superiors’ orders to change his gun as so far his Beretta has worked for him and is what he’s accustomed to. It’s quite funny how his gun gets an origin story, as from here on the PPK is the classic Bond pistol. The little gun dude who comes in to give him his new gun totally pwns him on his Beretta as well. ‘It’s nice and light…in a ladies handbag,’ He says. Hah! Burn!
We also get some backstory. Apparently James is relatively new to the 00 number, I’m guessing it’s like a rank or something, and has a License to Kill, not be killed. He also spent 6 months in some prison because his gun jammed on him. On threatened with going back to standard intelligence duties, Bond reluctantly takes up the PPK.
Upon getting accosted that he has no time to flirt with Moneypenny, he takes his leave.
The exchange between Moneypenny and James is all very sexy and classy, and it’s interesting that this is the first movie of the franchise and therefore the first movie where we see their dynamic, as their banter and whatnot already seems like an established trope. I’m guessing it’s a thing from the books, but it plays out here as if they’ve had a few movies worth to wear it in.
We fade in to Bond coming home to his …house? His hotel room? I’m guessing it’s a fancy hotel room as its all plush with pointless chairs and vases everywhere and whatnot. Using his uber spy intuition he immediately notices something is awry.
He dims the lights, removes his shoes and whips his piece out. (His gun you perverts)
He opens the door to his bedroom and gets on one knee to fire in anger and, holy shit, it’s the girl from the casino! She’s wearing one of his shirts and is hitting some practice golf balls with a putter, and man she doesn’t even bat an eye lid that she almost got shot.
There’s a lot to deconstruct in this scene. Did she know that Bond was a secret agent and was going to kick the door in with a gun? What if she thought he was just some rich dude and was like man, wtf is with the gun?? Or does she roll with thugs so much she’s just used to guns being waved around the shop? Anyway, she just continues on flirting like it ain’t no thing.
We get some great back and forth here. ‘You did the right thing, but you picked the wrong moment,’ he says. ‘I have to leave immediately.’
As in, I want to pound on that so hard but I’ve got a godamn plane to Jamaica to catch. That old chestnut.
They make out a little and he relents to the overpowering call of the vagina. 16 minutes in and we get shag no 1.
We touch down in Jamaica and pan back to see an Ominous White Guy In Sunglasses watching people deboard the plane and OMG, he’s smoking a cigarette…in doors!! That’s the real criminal here kids, second hand smoke.
We then get a super hilarious scene where Bond tries to snake a cab from two air hostesses who were obviously waiting at the cab rank in front of him and were clearly first. Fighting every chauvinistic, misogynistic fiber in his being, Bond disgustedly concedes the cab to them before they smear their eyeliner crying about how they were next.
He’s only got a few seconds to wonder what they were doing out of the kitchen though as an Obvious Badguy appears, masquerading as a chauffeur from government house to pick him up.
Bond isn’t easily fooled however. In some excellent sleuthing he goes and calls Government House from a payphone and is all, ‘Did you send a car for me, dawg??’ and they’re all ‘ Naw.’
But he goes and hops in the car anyway, for shits n giggles. He tells old mate that he’s not in a hurry though and to take him for a ride.
They cruise along and we get a pretty cool driving scene with the old cars and the Jamaican countryside, but then another car appears off a side rode and begins tailing them.
His driver tells him they’re being followed and Bond, ever cool as a cucumber says ‘Well, I suppose you should try and lose them.’
Queue chase scene.
He hits a hard right and loses his tail so they pull over and stop. Bond then whips his piece out on his driver. (His gun you perverts). He asks him who he’s working with but old mate plays coy.
It’s actually a pretty tense scene as the music raises and the driver goes for a gun of his own in the glove compartment, but Bond is having none of it and puts an end to his plans quickly with a Judo Chop. He then tosses him out of the car like an old bag of bullshit.
A fight scene ensues where Bond manhandles him embarrassingly easy. After 1 punch in the face the guy is ready to talk. ‘Jus lemme have a cigarette,’ he breathes as he reaches in his coat pocket. Bond allows it and Inept Chauffeur pulls out a cigarette but bites the end off it, which results in him almost instantaneously keeling over and dying. Bit of an overreaction to a punch in the face if you ask me.
In a pretty funny scene, Bond arrives at Government House with the now dead chauffeur sitting up in the back. ‘Make sure he doesn’t get away,’ he quips to the guard as he strolls in.
Bond meets up with the government guy and they quickly establish that it was cyanide in the cigarette, and that the car was stolen and they can’t identify the driver as of yet. Bond changes the subject to Strangways, and the government dude gives him information on who he was playing bridge with that afternoon before he was murdered; a geologist guy named Dent and some other bloke named Potter who is an old ex-Indian army General.
In a pretty cool touch, the military chief that’s there with the Governor asks if Bond wants these two men brought in. ‘Lord no,’ Bond says in disgust, ‘I want to meet them socially.’ Knowing that he’ll get a lot more out of these guys if they’re drinking and smoking together rather than in an official stuffy interview. I thought that was neat.
Bond gets the military chief, who is established as the Commissioner, to take him to Strangways’ house in the meantime.
Bond pokes around in Strangways’ house for a bit and finds a receipt from ‘Dent Geological Laboratories’ as well as a photograph of Strangways fishing with the guy who tailed Bond from the airport.
We cut to Bond in his hotel room now, rocking some super dorky high waisted pants and we get our first vodka martini of the Bond movie franchise.
‘One medium dry vodka martini, mixed like you said sir, and not stirred.’ The waiter advises him, because fuck stirring, ya know?
I’ve had a few martini’s in my time and I’ve never been asked if I want it shaken or stirred. Kind of seems a bit pedantic if you ask me. Does it alter the molecular structure of the drink? Possibly. I’m not well versed on the subtleties of martini consumption.
Martinis are a strong drink as well, they’re literally just vodka and vermouth, and he’s sipping on one in the midst of a hot Jamaican afternoon. Like dude have a Cuba Libre or a daiquiri or something.
He then does some mad spy setup stuff in his room before he leaves; i.e. dusts up the locks on his briefcase to see if anybody meddles with it while he’s out and also places a hair over the door of his wardrobe for the same reason.
Weirdly this triggered a long forgotten memory in my brainhole of when I was about 8, where my sister would try and detect if I’d been in her room rifling through her shit by putting a hair on her door. Lucky for me however I somehow innately knew to check for a hair on the door and would carefully place it back when I was done with my rifling, but I never knew it came from this movie. There you go.
After having literally one sip of his Martini he fucks off out of the room to have his evening catch up with the Geologist Guy and the General Guy. That’s $19.50 plus tip he’ll never get back.
We cut to the 3 of them smoking and drinking and they shoot the shit about how much of a tidy biscuit Strangways’ secretary was and how he really liked to fish. Bond also nonchalantly gets the lowdown on who Strangways would charter his fishing boats from and heads down to the docks the next day.
The name of the fishing charter guy is Quarrel or something. He‘s a black dude with a really weird accent, like he’s putting it on maybe but I’m not sure what he was going for. It’s almost like he is trying to do dumb guy speak, but then at other times he isn’t and it seems to change at random during the duration of the movie.
Upon looking him up, the actor’s name is John Kitzmiller who is in fact an American native, but interestingly had huge theatrical success in Europe, starring in over 40 European films before unfortunately passing away at the age of 51 due to liver complications.
His Wikipedia picture is super pimp.
Quarrel tells Bond that he used to take Strangways ‘Out there, to the Caribbean’ and Bond says he’d like to go too. Quarrel tells him he ain’t keen and saunters off. Bond follows him with no attempt to be discrete, and we get some pretty cool Jamaican backdrop, with a big cruise ship in the background and Jamaican coastal folk going about their daily business.
Bond follows him to a bar and just plops down next to him
They chit chat and innuendo at each other for a bit and end up heading out the back together while asking the barman for privacy. To the casual observer it would like one had just successfully propositioned the other for a handjob, but luckily that isn’t the case.
Once they’re out back Quarrel whips out a tiny, laughable flip knife which luckily distracts Bond long enough for the barman to come up behind him and bear hug him. Apparently the barman ‘rassles alligators’ so there’s no use struggling.
Counter to the advice however Bond does in fact struggle and dispatches both of them with practised ease, flinging them into a tower of empty red stripe boxes
Bond whips his piece out (his gun, perverts) and tells them to get up and face the wall.
Bond goes to make his escape but Ominous White Guy From The Airport suddenly appears.
OWGFTA calms the farm though and says that he’s with the CIA and that Quarrel is on his team. Everyone is all hugs and kisses by the end of it.
We cut to a restaurant where there are people dancing and a band playing as we move in on Bond and CIA guy talking at a table. CIA Guy exposits that because of all the weird shit that has been going down with the rockets he’s here to make sure nothing goes wrong.
It’s weird, in this scene, Connery seems to be playing Bond a lot more tense and interrogative as he talks to CIA Guy than his usual suave self. Doesn’t have any bearing on anything, just something I noticed.
Anyhoo, CIA Guy says that Strangways thought that the interference wasn’t coming from the island they’re currently on. Quarrel says that they have checked all of the islands except for Crab Key as it’s owned by some Chinese guy. Just as this happens some lady in the background snaps a photo of them which gets Bond all pissed off. Bond tells Quarrel to get the bitch and her camera.
Quarrel twists her arm behind her back and leads her back to the table. She says that she’s a freelance photographer for a newspaper, but Bond is all whatevs and gets the bar owner to check with the paper. Meanwhile Quarrel gives her the stink eye.
She refuses to talk so Quarrel suggests he break her arm. Ahh the 60s. If this was present day she’d be all #metoo.
Bond however is all, ‘naw she ain’t worth it’ and instead destroys her film and lets her go. Him and CIA Guy get back to the subject of Crab Key. He says the weird Chinese guy who owns it won’t let anyone land, but they’ve done reconnaissance over it and there’s nothing but a Bauxite mine there.
Here Quarrel dips in and out of talking normally and putting his weird simpleton accent on, but he says that none of the local fishermen go near it because they’re scared of it, but he and Strangways went over there once to get some rock and sand samples.
Bond asks if they know anything else about the Chinaman who owns it to wit CIA Guy says…’just his name…Dr. No.’ Aww shit!!!
We cut to Bond arriving by cab back to his hotel where there are two Sketchy Black Dudes loitering in the carpark casing the joint. One of them attempts to use his pistol as a sniper rifle but a car driving past disturbs his aim and Bond walks into the hotel unencumbered by bullets.
Having established that dudes are out to murder Bond we cut to next day where Bond is off to visit the Geologist bloke, Dent, at his office. James schmoozes the secretary to call and ask where he is, but no need, Dent rolls on out into the reception area at his own behest.
Bond produces the receipt he found in Strangways apartment and is all, ‘what’s the deal brah?’ Dent says that Strangways wanted to test some rocks to see if they were valuable, but alas they weren’t. Bond asks if they could be from Crab Key but Dent shoots this idea down saying that wouldn’t be geologically possible.
After Bond makes his leave we see Dent hurriedly make his way down to the wharf and demand one of the boaties takes him to Crab Key. The dude who plays his captain does some good natural acting and holy shit actually has a Jamaican accent.
Dent rolls into Crab Key which is a big shitty Bauxite mine guarded by armed guards. I think off memory it was actually a real Bauxite mine in the area that they filmed at.
Dent makes his way down some decrepit rusted hallways but is then led into a super pimp room that looks like a minimalist living room on an episode of House hunters International.
He looks around a bit worried and defeated when an omnipresent voice commands him to sit down.
The voice is pissed off that Dent has come to see him during the day, to wit he replies that he had to because Bond is snooping around. Ominous Voice says that he is aware of this and wants to know why Bond isn’t dead yet.
Dent says Bond knows that the rocks came from Crab Key and he will most probably roll in soon. OV is not happy with this and says he’ll be holding Dent personally responsible if this happens.
He is ordered to go to the table where there’s a giant fucking spider in what looks to be a cage it could easily escape from.
I’m guessing he’s to use the spider to kill Bond. Why they can’t just kick his hotel door in and shoot him in the face, or try shoot him from over the road again remains unclear, but the shooting approach seems like it would be much easier and much less prone to error than orchestrating a spider attack.
We cut to Bond arriving back at his hotel where he asks to send a cable and check his messages and we hold on the reception lady having a quick swoon over him.
He gives no fucks though and walks off aloofly.
Here we get to see him check all his awesome spy traps, like the ol’ hair on the wardrobe and the fingers on the briefcase action, both of which have been triggered. If people had to survive on fucks that Bond gives everyone would be starving as he just does nothing in response to this and instead goes to pour himself a drink.
He takes a whiff of his vodka on the table and, deciding that it smells extra poisony, whips out a spare bottle from his draw instead. He just achieved 100% in Manology right now.
We cut now to Bond sleeping where suddenly he’s awakened by something not right. Has he shat the bed? You’ll have to read on.
Holy shit, turns out it’s the spider!!
Like if you can sneak into Bond’s room and place a spider on his clammy, naked Body whilst he sleeps, just shoot him in the face.
But anyway, ominous music plays as Bond watches it crawl up the stunt man’s arm.
It is quite clever, but you can just tell if you look closely that there is a glass panel between Sean Connery and the spider in scenes where we can see both the spider and Bond’s face.
Anyway, the ominous music continues to wail as the spider putters innocently about before it just kind of crawls off him onto his pillow. Once it’s off him Bond springs up like a woman that has just..well.. found a spider in her bed and squishes the icky arachnid with what appears to be a shoe, as the music crescendos with each strike as if he’s just fought off a bear.
This scene is so bizarre that it is almost self-parody, like if you were making a Bond movie parody you would have a scene like this, where his arch nemesis is a spider and he squashes it with a shoe as the exciting orchestral music trumpets.
This says a couple of things to me. First, it reiterates to me at how quaint the Bond movies used to be, where even though he’s a secret agent and such, spiders are still cunting terrifying. I think in the last Bond movie I saw it featured Daniel Craig playing some drinking game where there’s a scorpion on his hand or something and my eyes rolled so far back in my head that I didn’t get to see the rest of the movie.
Also, hey, the first kill in the James Bond franchise, by James Bond, is an icky spider, that’s pretty funny.
Exhausted and frazzled, Bond goes to the bathroom for a trauma dump and the scene ends.
We open now on Bond visiting the British Ambassador guy and asks to give him all the info he has on Dr. No and Crab Key.
They talk about those two subjects and Ambassador Guy says all he knows about the place is that there’s a bauxite mine there. He whips out his pipe and book of matches and would not look out of place at a hipster café decorated with old bikes and shelves of vinyl.
He summons his secretary to get the files of Dr. No who.. for some reason looks ahh Asian? Even though she is meant to be British and working in Jamaica. Why did they try make her look Asian? Is she Asian in real life?
Turns out, no she’s not Asian. The actress’ name is Zena Marshall and she is British but was born in Nairobi, Kenya. Random.
In turns out that the files on Dr. No and Crab Key are missing, and the person to have them last? Commander Strangways! Bond is not surprised at all.
As he leaves, the government dude tells him that a package has arrived for Bond from Britain in the diplomatic pouch!! Ooh what is it? Awesome gadgets I’d imagine!
He goes to leave the room in one direction, but decides to quickly leave through the reception entrance where he catches Fake Asian Receptionist snooping at the door! Aah, maybe that’s why they made her Asian, I’m guessing she’s going to secretly be working for Dr. No or something.
He accosts her for snooping but she plays coy, saying that she was looking for the files.
Holy shit Bond works fast! A couple of sentences in and he immediately starts hitting on her. After some banter she ends up saying ‘maybe’ to his requests for a rendezvous, so he walks away as she looks at him longingly through the venetians.
We cut to Bond and Quarrel back on the docks tooling around with a Geiger counter, that thing that makes noises when you put it near radioactive shit.
He runs it over where the samples were in the boat and the machine goes loopy. I’m not sure, but has Bond had any reason to think the samples would be radioactive? I’m guessing the Geiger counter is what came from Britain? All this must have been decided off camera I guess.
CIA Guy rocks up as well and they’ve realized the Crab Key samples were bulk radioactive, even though Geologist Dent said they were garbage.
Bond tells Quarrel to take him to Crab Key and now Quarrel, in simple talk mode, tells him that it’s weird over there and there’s like, totally a dragon that lives there.
After all the hoopla though in the end Quarrel is just meh, I’ll be here at 7. That’s pretty much exactly the line he says.
Bond rolls back to his hotel and there is a phone message waiting for him. He calls it up and it’s Fake Asian Receptionist Lady, just swanning about in her underthings.
How she affords some mansion up in the hills with servants on a receptionist wage is anyone’s guess. She invites him to said mansion in the hills, and in a classic reminder of how folk used to hook up in the old days, just gives him the directions of how to get there over the phone. I would have been so sexless without Google Maps.
He drives there with haste, veering worryingly all over the road. He’s probably 5 or 6 martinis in by now.
This is the only part where the rear projection shots look obvious, but still leagues better than a lot of the green screen garbage you get these days.
Annoyingly for his blue balls, another vehicle comes out of hiding and starts chasing him. Even though the rear projection is obvious, the shots all blend together quite well which would have been a difficult sequence to shoot.
We get some awesome Sean Connery action shots here.
The chase scene is actually pretty awesome and continues until they round the corner and there’s a random piece of machinery in the road. Bond is able to scoot under it but his assailant won’t fit, so he veers off the road in a pretty cool car wreck scene where, after several medium sized jolts, the car inexplicably bursts into flame.
We cut to Bond and random crane operator dude and we get a pretty hilarious exchange.
Crane Operator: ‘How did it happen?’
Bond (smugly): ‘I think they were on their way to a funeral…’
Does this count as a Bond kill? I’m going to say no because he didn’t knock them off the road or anything, it was just their sheer retardation that resulted in their careening off the road. So far nearly 50 minutes in and no Bond kills. The restraint!
Bond strolls up to Fake Asian Reception Lady’s house and rings the doorbell. She looks perplexed as she comes to the door. Bond obviously wasn’t meant to make it there alive. A wave of worry crosses her face as she lets him in, like oh, I’m actually going to have to fuck this guy now.
She says she’ll go put some clothes on and he’s all, ’nah, don’t bother,’ and grabs her round the neck with her towel.
He pulls her in for a kiss and she’s all #metoo.
Luckily for her quivering vagina the phone rings. It’s obviously a corresponding bad guy as she’s all ‘I don’t know what went wrong, wtf!’
But she hangs up as Bond comes in looking like he wants to strangle her but he says he wants to dry her hair.
They banter for a bit and then he just goes for broke and unzips her dress. She grabs for it as he plays innocent like it was accidental.
She finally succumbs to his manly charms and they fuck like nasty pigs. Fade to black.
Lying in the bed post-coital and smoking while she re-applies her makeup, they start wolfing at each other like an old married couple.
‘I’m hungry,’ he whines, ‘let’s go out.’
‘No let’s stay here. I’ll cook you a Chinese meal.’
Bond opines that he feels like Italian and dancing so opts for Blue Mountain Grill. I’m guessing he’s thinking that a follow up murder attempt is most probably imminent. It actually does capture post-sex one night stand awkwardity very well.
He quickly gets bored of her bullshit and says ‘Forget it’ and reaches for the phone to call for a taxi.
She has a perplexed look like she’s just realized, OMG, men will use women…for sex! Preposterous!
After a weird exchange about his car not starting, hence the reason for the taxi, he decides he’d better give her one for the road and pulls her in for a kiss. She whinges about her nails, like a woman, but again succumbs to his manly charms.
She’s now in a slinky blue dress and he is back in his suit as they walk out together…I guess she’s going with him now and he opens the door of the taxi for her…but he’s pulled a fast one on her and the commissioner is in the back. Bond pushes her in the car and she angrily spits in his face which is probably 80% semen.
He cruises back into her pad and sets it up to look like they’ve been fucking and drinking all night long. He also does the ol pillows under the bed sheet to make it look like someone is in there, like I used to do to try trick my parents when I was about 5.
Happy with his handy work he grabs himself a deck of cards and settles in to wait for the gun battle.
A few hands of solitaire in and a silhouette comes in and fills the bed full of bullet holes, even though it could have been Fake Asian Receptionist in there. They do seem to be quite murdery when it comes to their own henchmen though, so the gunman probably wouldn’t have given any fucks if that were true. Turns out it’s Dent, the Geologist Guy who picked up the spider!
Bond gets him to turn around and drop the gun. They talk, but almost immediately and quite negligently Bond turns his back on Dent to light his cigarette, allowing him to reach for his dropped weapon.
After some dialog, old mate goes for his piece, picks it up and fires. It’s empty though. ‘Smith n Wesson, you’ve had your six,’ Bond wryly explains before filling him full of lead. This is Bond’s first (human) kill.
Bond rolls down to the docks now in darkness to meet up with CIA Guy and Quarrel. After crying that Bond is late they zoom off to Crap Key.
They park up just off of Crab Key and Bond and Quarrel hop in the row boat they’ve brought with them. Randomly, Quarrel takes a big swig from a cask of rum he’s brought along. CIA Guy then makes fun of his crippling alcoholism which is waved off drunkenly by Quarrel, before everything proceeds as normal. Interesting micro-subplot.
Bond and Quarrel row into a little river inlet and then hide the boat. After taking all this effort to get there Bond is all, ‘Whelp, we’d better get some sleep, I’ll be down this end.’ and promptly strolls off, leaving a perplexed Quarrel to his own devices.
Quarrel takes this chance to hit the piss, I’m guessing to facilitate him passing out maybe.
Bond awakens in the morning to the sound of a woman singing and spies a bikini clad beauty coming in from the beach.
This is our first Bond Girl, which is played by Ursula Andress who, according to Wikipedia, got the part because of a photo sent to the producers by her husband. See sometimes nude selfies do pay off.
Back in 1962 this scene of Andress emerging from the beach in a (back then) skimpy bikini with a knife strapped to her waist caused a sensation and rocketed her to stardom. The bikini was sold in an auction in 2001 for around $60K, most probably for sniffing, and her beach exit was named No 1 in a ‘Top 100 sexiest movie moments’ survey conducted by channel 4 in Britain in 2003. Meh, it’s ok, surely there’s sexier. The surveyed people obviously haven’t seen the threesome in Wild Things. I’m guessing most of the people interviewed must have been in the late stages of their lives to remember a scene from a movie made in 1962. Dirty old bastards.
She also won a golden globe for best new talent because of Dr. No, which, if you watch her incredibly inept acting must have been completely political and not at all sexually driven.
She had a pretty successful acting career in the 60s and early 70s, playing alongside Elvis and Sinatra in various roles and appearing in Playboy 7 times over the next 15 years.
She’s still alive actually, at the ripe old age of 81 currently. She toned down her workload into the 80s and there’s probably not much the average movie goer would have seen her in since then, except for maybe if you’re familiar with the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans, or the 1978 crapola, Italian exploitation knock off film Mountain of the Cannibal God.
Anyway, Bond allows himself a good ol’ perv and gets his eyebrow going on as well.
She’s too busy checking out her shells to notice Bond standing there ogling her which allows him to try out several palm tree leaning positions.
He starts singing where she left off and jovially scoots over to her. She looks fucking pissed at this.
Hilariously, she’s apparently meant to be Jamaican according to several sources, and her voice was dubbed over due to her strong Swiss-German accent, but the person doing the dubbing doesn’t sound particularly Jamaican either.
She is trepidatious to see someone else is on the island and thinks Bond is looking to pinch her shells. He tells her his intentions are strictly admirable. Yeah right you sly dog. He edges forward but she whips her knife out, not having a bar of his bullshit.
She ends up relenting though and sheathes her steel and goes about washing her shells.
They walk n’ talk along the beach and it turns out her name is Honey Ryder. She says she comes to the island loads to pinch shells so there’s nothing to worry about, but he’s like ‘naw, they would have seen your sail this time.’
Quarrel rounds the corner, most probably savagely hungover and warns them of a high powered boat coming. They run for cover in the bushes as the boat rounds the corner.
There’s a pretty hilarious scene from one of the soldiers on the boat using the megaphone who bizarrely sounds like a carnival operator or something. It’s weird.
He yells at them if they come out he’ll let them go, but Bond and co aren’t having a bar of it, so he and his men fire wildly into the bushes. They give up pretty quickly and say they’ll be back with the dogs.
Quarrel and Honey start talking about the dragon again and that they should get the hell off the island. Bond shuts them up though and tells them there is no such things as dragons, which is quite funny as Sean Connery would go on to voice a dragon in the terrible 1996 film Dragonheart.
Honey decides to go on a full blown tangent about the nature of reality and asks if Bond has ever seen a Mongoose dance or a scorpion sting itself to death or a praying mantis eat its husband after ‘making love.’
Bond gets bored of her bullshit and tells her she needs to leave the island quickly, so they run over to her boat but its full of bullet holes. She says she knows of a good place to hide, so they frolic off to into the jungle together.
They head down river for a bit while Bond cries about the mosquitoes like a bitch. She tells him they’re after the salt on his skin so gives his manly forearms a rub down. You can see Bond immediately try calculate where they can have sex but unfortunately Quarrel rolls in to ruin the mood to alert them that someone is coming.
They cut some reeds and do the ol’ use-reeds-to-breath-while-hiding-under-water trick, just as a guard with a dog walks by. They get close but for some reason birds or monkeys or something throws the dog off the scent and they run off the other way.
Hold the phone though, there just happens to be some other random guard cruising down the river toward them, possibly on his evening stroll. Instead of just hiding and letting him pass Bond sneaks behind him with Honey’s knife and stabs the fuck outta him (off screen). He contemplates sex with the corpse but instead unceremoniously stows it under a rock, possibly for later.
Honey is like ‘Whoa, wtf.’ But Bond is like, ‘yeah, had to,’ a maniacal glint in his murder hungry eyes.
They continue on to Honey’s hiding place as the ominous music swells and the camera zooms out to show a Keep Out sign drawn by a five year old.
They’re now washing themselves and flirting at a majestic waterfall when Quarrel alerts them of tire treads right next to the river. Obviously an awesome hiding place then. Honey, like a moronic woman, says that they’re dragon tracks, and then Quarrel does his weird, folksy, unplaceable accent for a bit and says that he’ll take first watch while the other two get some sex, er, sleep.
Honey and Bond now have a bit of alone time which allows for a bit of exposition. She calls Bond a detective, which is interesting, and then says that she’s pretty sure Dr. No killed her father, who was a marine zoologist. Personal Vendetta!! Apparently they came to the Caribbean so he could study shells, but then he made the mistake of visiting Crab Key and just up and disappeared.
She brags about how she’s lived all over the world and didn’t need any fancy schooling since they had an encyclopedia. She started at A when she was a child and now she’s at T, so don’t ask her anything about Volcanos, the X-Ray, Zebras, etc.
Apparently the police investigated her father’s disappearance but couldn’t find anything. Then we get a tidbit about her landlord molesting her and instead of just #metoo’ing, she put a black widow spider in his bed which killed him nice n’ slow. Bond is like, this chick is fucken crazy, but then she gets her fuck eyes on and he forgets all about it.
She asks him if he’s got a woman right now, but to save him having to answer Quarrel butts in and says something is coming, again. This guy could cock block for his country.
They traipse about through the jungle again for a bit, and I’m guessing they walk for about ten hours as it transitions into night when they come to some muddy plains.
Some weird truck is parked up a ways from them and suddenly calls at them to stay where they are. It hoons over to them, shooting out fire from its front like it’s a decommissioned Destruction Derby novelty car.
Bond tells Quarrel to ‘Go for the driver’ while he ‘goes for the headlights and the tires’ and they start shooting aimlessly with their revolvers at the giant fire breathing death car.
Quarrel just sort of stands there and watches it get closer and closer before he shits his pants and gets completely fried by a giant fireball.
Sounds dudes in ridiculous suits hop out of the destruction derby car and tell them to drop their weapons.
They handcuff Bond, but they don’t bother with the broad, because of her vagina and all, but they get in a bit of biffo when they try and take her knife. These two chumps almost lose a fight to a handcuffed guy and a woman but luckily for them they manage to get the upper hand and drag them off to the flame car, probably to do some burnouts in a nearby paddock.
They park up at Dr. No’s secret lair where a Rastafarian guy in another ridiculous suit says to ‘Keep an eye on the man’ (because women are weak and inferior) and that they’ve been in the swamp and are contaminated.
Here we get a pretty cool scene where they’re radioactive according to the Geiger counter, so they go through a washing process not unlike the scene from Austin Powers. Actually a lot of Austin Powers stuff is from this one movie, including Dr. Evil’s ridiculous plastic suit that he wears in one of the films.
First they get a going over by some guys in pink suits operating what looks to be a petrol bowser.
Apparently their Geiger readings are high, so they’re probably in for a painful, cancer laden death, but luckily its nothing a bit of soapy water won’t fix.
Literally one swipe of the broom knocks their reading down about 10 points, but that’s still too high apparently, so the guy in charge quickly suggests they should get nude. Pretty sure this is all a ploy to get them naked.
Unfortunately we get to see no titties at this juncture, just the convenient-bit-of-machinery-in-the-way trick as they’re washing Honey down.
They keep puttering along this weird conveyor belt shower system that is luckily just long enough for them to get clean and then holy moly, we get some sneaky cheeky full blown vagina shots.
I – Is this a mistake? Have I stumbled onto gold here? Hmm, according to the internet, no. Unfortunately, apparently she is wearing a skin coloured bathing suit, but I will be getting a Blu-ray copy, just for due diligence and fact checking. Anyway I’m pretty sure if she was wearing nothing she’d have a massively hairy bush seeing as it’s the 60s and all.
But yeah, masturbation fodder aside, they have been scrubbed of all radiation and can now cruise into whatever is behind the ornate bronze vault door.
Said door leads to a cave with yet another vault door which then leads into what appears to be a day spa run by some Asian lady. The hostess apologises for the inconvenience and offers him a cigarette, like this is a totally normal non-weird way of running a day spa.
They’re of course doing that thing where the bad guy treats the good guys really well to show that he is a dignified, refined bad guy, and also to show that he has total and utter control over the situation so does not need to throw them in a dirty cell.
That is now an old trope now but must have been new and fresh back then I guess, and everyone watching this in the cinema back in the day would have been all ZOMG!!1
It is a pretty cool concept though, I’d love to go to some rich, crazy guy’s secret lair and eat his good food n shit. He probably has a pool table and everything.
Bond fires up a dart with no dramas, and instead of enquiring too hard as to what the fuck is going on he just rolls with it as the hostess says they’ll be shown to their rooms where they’ll get breakfast and then get to have a nap. Thoughtful! The real bad guy in the world is being a poor host.
Host lady tells him that Dr. No would like to meet him for dinner, to wit he says he would be delighted to attend.
They get shown some super pimp rooms, complete with ornate marble bathrooms, most likely with two sinks. (He was definitely thinking about resale during fit out)
They’re shown a wardrobe full of clothes as well where she says, ‘we didn’t get your sizes until last night,’ all clever ribs to show how Knowing and All Powerful Dr. No is.
She says they can request anything at all, to which he replies ‘What about two air tickets to London?’ She gives him a look of utter contempt and disgust and audibly winces before leaving the room.
She leaves them alone so they can shag like filthy wild bison, but instead he opts for some breakfast. Can’t do much fucken on an empty stomach.
He pours Honey and himself a coffee and they sit on the couch and are all, ‘how are we going to get out of this hellhole!?’ as they sip their freshly roasted Arabica special. To everyone’s utter lack of surprise however, the coffee has been drugged with sleeping pills and they both promptly pass out.
We fade in to ominous music as the door to their room slides open to reveal some white panted legs and a silhouette of a man. Is it Dr. No? Nope, it’s only Attending Physician Abrupt-Affirmative making his rounds.
White Shoed, White Socked, White Panted Mystery Man walks on in and prepares to invent the moonwalk before Michael Jackson
WSWSWPMM walks over to Bond’s helpless form in bed and places a black, latex gloved hand near his face, showing that this guy is some kind of a FREAK.
He lifts up the sheet and pauses for a moment, as if contemplating to suffocate Bond there and then, either that or he’s Right-Click, Save As’ing Bond’s naked, clammy form for his wank bank later.
Having possibly shot his load in his white pants our mystery man quickly loses interest and walks off, and we fade to Honey picking a dress.
Bond appears behind her in the mirror and they discuss that, duh, the coffee was drugged. Smug reception lady rolls in and tells them it’s almost time for dinner with Dr. No, so they walk off, Bond looking pretty sharp in one of those Japanese/Chinese style overcoats with the weird buttons.
They’re shown to an elevator where they go down I guess, into the depths of Dr. No’s lair where they get out at some weirdly decorated cave room.
Actually, I take it back, Dr. No’s personal floor is super pimp, equipped with candles, leather bound books, fur rugs and a fireplace even though he’s several miles below sea level.
Bond snoops around looking for an exit but Honey calls him over to an aquarium thing in the wall to show that Dr. No’s room is under the ocean. I think the aquarium is like a small one that they somehow made look bigger, but none the less it looks pretty impressive.
They marvel at its ingenuity saying that it must be bulk expensive, when we finally meet Dr. No who says, ‘One Million Dollars, Mister Bond’ (Serious). Then we cut to a very un-Chinese looking Dr. No with two random henchmen.
Is he meant to be Chinese? I thought that was why his name was Dr. No. Either that or he just disagrees a lot. Anyway, a quick lookup shows that the actor’s name is Joseph Wiseman and yeah he definitely isn’t Chinese, which isn’t really surprising for this film, given the vast amounts of white folks playing other nationality folks they have going on.
They have their man-on-man banter as Dr. No walks over and he asks Bond to forgive him for not shaking hand, being unable to do so because of some weird injury that forces him to wear black sex gloves.
Dr. No goes on to say that, wham, he invented the cunting aquarium and the fish look bigger because of the ten inch thick glass. Worked into the story bitch!
Bond then manages to work in a sweet referential burn.
‘Minnows pretending they’re whales, just like you on this island Dr. No’
Always keen for the thrust and parry of biting banter, Dr. No says that it depends on what side of the glass you are on.
Dr. No then has one of his man-servants bring Bond his signature drink and rattles it off to him just to show he knows everything about everything. It’s actually a pretty awesome scene.
‘Medium Dry Martini, Lemon Peel, Shaken Not Stirred.’
‘Vodka?’
‘Of Course.’
I love that, I love how Bond checks if he’s got the alcohol right, like Dr. No has gotten everything right to the most minute detail but then fucks up the main ingredient.
‘Aww shit, its gin!! Are you a vodka drinker? I didn’t even think to check that!! I feel so stupid, I’ll make you another one! OMG, #eggonmyface!!
They sit down to an opulent dinner and then Dr. No diatribes about how a handicap is what you make of it, in reference to his mangled hands, and that he’s half German, half Chinese. He exposits that he became the treasurer of the most powerful crime family in China before fleeing to America with 10 million of their dollars. (They’re going to be pissed when they find out a tenth of that has gone on a fish tank)
They kind of shoehorn in that Dr. No is working with atomic power on the island and that his accident was from fucking around with radioactive shit.
Bond tries to pull a fast one and says that he has sent a complete report of Dr. No’s hideout and power source back to base. Dr. No decides he’s bullshitting although looks a bit worried nonetheless.
Dr. No says he doesn’t really give a fuck and that when he’s finished with the island he’ll destroy it and move on.
Dr. No hints to Bond that he’s about to give a Bad Guy Speech where he divulges every detail of his secret plan, but before he does so he has Honey removed. She cracks the shits as she gets dragged off and Dr. No says that the guards will amuse her. This makes Bond pissed off as well, I’m assuming because he doesn’t want to stir Chinese-guard porridge when he pounds on that later on, but he almost immediately calms down and sits back down while Honey is violently sexually assaulted in the next room.
Gutted that Dr. No has called him out on trying to steal a table knife, Bond goes for the jugular, er, hand jugular and says, ‘Tell me, does toppling American missiles compensate for having no hands?’
After crying a little inside Dr. No enigmatically replies that the missiles are the first step in proving ‘our’ power. Then finally Dr. No whips out that he’s a member of a secret organisation called SPECTRE, and take a breath because its actually an acronym:
SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, Extortion.
Now let’s hold up a second because there is a lot to deconstruct here. You can see that this acronym is patently terrible in more ways than one. Firstly, it doesn’t even fucking work. Really it should be SECITRE or SECTRE, but that doesn’t have quite as ominous a ring to it. It feels like they decided on the word Spectre first and then tried to shoe-horn an acronym into it, like they were sitting around the boardroom having a brainstorming session and were like, ‘ok, guys, we’re an Evil Organisation, but we can’t just call ourselves Evil Inc., that’s too on the nose.’
Bad Guy 1: Hmm, what about something like The Badasses?
Leader: Eugh, no, that sounds too much like we’re a band or a crappy biker gang or something.
Bad Guy 2: What about an ominous sounding work like, hey..Ominous.
Leader: Hmm, not bad, I do like the idea of just a cryptic ominous word, but not a fan of Ominous itself…
Bad Guy 3: ooh, ooh, Spectre!
Leader: Spectre. Spectre. Yeah I like it, that pops. But actually now that I think of it, do you think that’s a bit pretentious, going the one word thing? I’m beginning to have second thoughts.
Bad Guy 1: What if we have it stand for something and the abbreviation just happens to be something awesome like Spectre?
Leader: …You’re a fucking genius.
Then after several hours or word-clouding and several grams of cocaine, that garbage is the best they could come up with. Also, his delivery of it is bizarre. He actually says it like I’ve written it, and by him saying the ‘for’ in Special Executive FOR Counter Intelligence part, they’re obviously not slavishly devoted to abbreviating every single word, much like the United States of America being just USA. But then at the end there he doesn’t doesn’t say an AND between Revenge and Extortion, like a normal person would say it, he sort of rattles it off like there’s going to be something else but isn’t, like what the fuck?
Did he just make that up on the spot? Does he work for Spectre but Spectre isn’t actually an acronym and he just riffed that out on the spot to be cool in front of James Bond? Because that’s what it feels like. Also what does the Special Executive part mean? Is there a Normal Executive division that just does things like robs banks or racks up a lot of parking fines but the Special Executive unit does the stuff like steal nukes?
What’s more baffling is he then goes on to say: ‘The four great cornerstones of power.’ As in Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion are the four great cornerstones of power.
I did a quick bit of research to make sure that this isn’t some kind of old philosophical doctrine from Sun Tzu or something but that does not appear to be so. I couldn’t find much on the definitive cornerstones of power, but I’m now pretty well versed on the 4 cornerstones of a good sales team, which are Customer Knowledge, Product Knowledge, Communication and Time/Goal management.
But yeah, they’re the 4 cornerstones of power you say? Interesting. Like I kind of get the Counter-Intelligence, terrorism and extortion ones sort of, but revenge seems to have snuck in there, like the weak kid who somehow has made the A-grade baseball team. Like how’d he get in there? Revenge?
Doesn’t revenge seem kind of petty for a massive, secret organisation? Like wouldn’t it be counterproductive to go out revenging things when you should be trying to control the president or something? Like sorry gents, I know we should be stealing that train full of depleted uranium, but I first really need to show Scott from high school that I’m more successful than he is.
I guess you could say exacting revenge on people who wrong you could instill a sense of fear or loyalty in your allies and enemies, but then shouldn’t loyalty and/or fear be a cornerstone of power?
Also for some reason I’m imagining the Council for Revenge as two kids who start up a club to get back at the girl who dobbed on them at recess.
Anyway…Bond pries at why Dr. No became a criminal, like surely you could get loads of money/pussy working for the government, he opines. But No says he was turned down by both the East and the West, probably something to do with his resume references.
Bond tries to prod at Dr. No by telling him he has a Napoleon / God complex, but No calls him on it and then shows how hardcore he is by crushing some plastic ornament on the table with his bare sex hands.
It goes to show that every villain has to have a thing, which will also become a trope of the Bond franchise. He couldn’t just be some reclusive weirdo that lives under water on an abandoned bauxite mine that disrupts missiles, but he also has to have the vice-hands add-on for an extra 5 strength-points.
Back then it would have been a cool twist to the character though, suddenly making him a lot more dangerous than previously thought. Lots of Bond Villains of course will go on to have a thing, or at least a henchmen with a thing, and it will be fun listing / examining them all over the next 10 to 20 years when these articles are finished.
Bond actually looks a little surprised by this, but of course maintains his cool.
They talk about why Dr. No has kept Bond alive at all, and Dr. No says he wanted to meet the man that has cost him so much time, money and pride but now he realizes that Bond is a bit of a shit cunt and isn’t worthy.
At this time some other scientist comes to the door and says that its time to steal or derail another missile so Dr. No tells his guards to, yikes, soften Bond up a bit while he’s busy. Luckily this just involves Bond getting pounded on for a bit and is not entered in anyway.
Bond awakens in a cell this time but is luckily relatively unscathed from his beatings, save for a small dash of makeup over the eyebrow
Bond winces as he gets up and will probably piss blood for a couple of days but he immediately bounces into action, searching his room for an escape.
Luckily for him there’s a massive, man sized vent just above his bed, literally the only other item in the room.
To make this obviously insane design flaw a bit more easier for the audience to swallow, the grate is booby trapped, letting off a kind of flash spark thing as Bond grabs it, throwing him back.
It appears to be a single use booby trap though as he manages to belt the grate off with his shoe and climb on in. I’m guessing the designers were hoping you’d get the point after one warning.
Bond crawls around for a bit in the tunnel but it turns out to be an insanely massive ventilation system, yawning off in every direction into the infinite beyond, the existential dread setting in as the musical stings emanate from the background. Is Bond contemplating that he could spend the rest of his life trapped in this unforgiving maze of steal and bolts?
Nah, he’s like fuck it, I’ll jump in the next tunnel that goes downwards, and lowers himself in. He is progressing well but then some weird sci-fi noise happens that makes him panic and rush to the bottom and land heavily in the next tunnel. What was that? Like a little ray gun or something? Or did Sean Connery actually stumble and fall but they couldn’t be screwed reshooting so just threw a little noise in there. Either way, it’s weird.
He crawls around a bit more but it looks like the pipe under him in the direction he is going is getting super-hot, too hot to touch, so instead of turning and going the other way he de-shirts, wraps it around his hands and keeps on trucking .
Suddenly a rushing, water-through-pipe kind of noise can be heard and a veritable tsunami of water can be seen churning towards him.
Bond holds on for dear life, but when it hits the water surge is actually comically small.
The pipe immediately starts steaming, which is pretty hardcore, and shows us how hot it’s meant to be, but Bond perseveres nonetheless and comes to another grate. He kicks the shit out of it and manages to escape and the room he’s in just happens to be the conveyor belt cleaning room from when they first entered Dr. No’s lair. Cool!
A henchmen wearing a radiation suit rounds the corner so Bond strangles him behind a frosted glass barrier thing. Does this count as a kill? I’m going to say yes as it looks to be played out in that kind of way, shielded behind the glass and all. So that brings our Bond kill tally up to 1 spider and 3 men.
Bond rolls in wearing the radiation suit and manages to walk around undetected.
It turns out he’s in a big power station thing with everyone suited up.
He looks around at the various things going on before seeing Dr. No at the main control station. They’re watching an American missile launch on television and are planning to intercept or sink the missile or whatever it is they’re doing there. I still am not 100%
Bond acts all incognito and picks up a file so he looks like he’s not slacking off.
Dr. No says all the processes out loud that they’re going though which is pretty cool and sinister and Bond just sort of chillaxes up the back, trying not to draw attention to himself.
He spots some chubby guy with a shittier suit than everyone else turning a big steering wheel.
Obviously he has the most important job out of everyone there, lowering the radioactive rods into the coolant so they don’t overheat.
Dr. No calls to all of his minions to sign off to wit they reply generic sciencey shit.
‘Converters stabilized at 1- 1 -3, dickcheese nozzle on overdrive’. Etc.
It’s actually a really cool single take tracking shot which shows the size of the place they were in and the cool 60s tech they had strewn around the place.
Suddenly, like the roll call scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dr. No is all ‘Fuel Elements? Fuel Elements? Fuel Elements? Where the fuck is Chang??’ They look around and spot that he’s been standing behind them this whole time, doing fuck all as per usual.
Dr. No is pretty chill about the whole deal though, he’s just like ‘What are you doing here?? Get over there, hurry.’
I guess Dr. No is in the middle of something right now but later on, sometime before lights out, he’ll go and sit on Chang’s bed and tell him how he wasn’t angry, just disappointed with him today, and how Chang really needs to pull his head in and be the best Chang he can be.
Bond runs over to his station which is with the fat guy in the shitty suit. He watches chubs do all the work for a bit while he stands there uselessly with his clipboard as the reactor is turned down.
They continue going through their checks and sciencey jargon and whatnot, the TV in the background saying that the American missile is about to begin its countdown.
At the two-minutes-to-go mark Dr. No alerts everyone to synchronize radio beam for toppling, where we cut to a robotic dickhole opening up.
He tells them to crank the fuel elements up so Bond just goes for it, making the elements glow and boil. He purposefully overloads it, wanting to create a nuclear meltdown which definitely won’t irradiate the entire Caribbean Sea in the process.
The fat guy realizes that something is amiss and goes to tackle Bond but is shrugged off, although this captures the attention of Dr. No.
Everyone bails as the alarm goes haywire and the ‘Abandon Area’ sign flashes.
We now get our Epic Battle between Bond and Dr. No as they fight on the platform above the fuel cells.
They both get close to being submerged in the goo, like something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when Bond manages to climb up just in time.
Dr. No claws at the steel frame but he is pulled down into the boiling, radioactive water as his robot hands fail him. I guess the moral that this story is trying to tell us is that handicapped people really are inferior, no matter their wealth.
After dispatching his foe Bond bails out of there, leaving the place in nuclear meltdown as we cut to a TV showing the US rocket being launched successfully and unmolested.
Bond goes back to the weird Day Spa area and looks around for Honey as everyone is running around in a panicked frenzy. Unable to find her he picks on some completely random and very unlucky henchman to rough up and interrogate as to her whereabouts.
Hilariously Bond gives him a full blown haymaker to the face and drops him like a sack of shit, completely ruining that guy’s day.
He then, and more rationally, grabs the lady that looks to be in charge and she shows him to her room.
She seems to be handcuffed to some kind of damsel in distress rape wall. Apparently this is ‘Room 12.’
Some other poor sap trying to flee also gets the shit punched out of him as Bond enters.
Bond knocks him the fuck out and the poor bastard is probably a paraplegic as well after his horrific fall off the stair case. Bond spots Honey who is rigged up to some sadistic Thing-Slowly-Filling-With-Water drain trap, which should really warrant some more time and explanation but instead is just there.
Like is that room built for that exact torture/slow death? Or did someone just hastily rivet some manacles to the floor in the rising water room? Why do they even have that room? It seems to be a ramp to launch some kind of aquatic device but then the room just goes nowhere. There also seems to be a bench there to the left for additional seating as well, what’s that about?
Anyhoo, either way you swing it Room 12 definitely sucks.
He frees her and then we cut to an outside shot of everyone fleeing from the facility and scurrying over the old bauxite mine.
There’s a pretty funny scene as everyone is fleeing where it looks like a guy is going to try jump on the boat, but they’re all, ‘Nah, we’re full mate,’ and just bail, leaving him behind.
There’s lots of fleeing and running and jumping in the water everywhere which is all pretty cool, but Bond spies a boat that fortunately no one else has tried to jump on to yet and quickly helps himself to it. Fair enough there are 2 guys already on-board but Bond, again, punches the shit out of these losers and throws them in the water like sacks of old bullshit.
The place finally explodes in what I guess is a miniature, given the odd angle they chose, but it looks great, all of the facility exploding in a plume of fire and black smoke.
We cut to our heroes in their boat which is now in the open ocean, and just to make matters worse they’ve run out of fuel. Honey looks at Bond with utter contempt.
‘What do we do now?’ She says
‘Well,’ he replies, ‘we can swim or ahh….’ And gives her the fuckiest fuck eyes he can muster.
She finally snaps. ‘Will you just knock it off James, OK?? I’m getting pretty sick of the fact that every word that comes out of your gob is dripping with sexual connotation and vapid innuendo. I’ve just survived a gang rape, a slow drowning, a radioactive explosion, a kidnapping and a drugging, so currently I’m feeling just a little bit dirty and tired and stressed. So no James, to be honest I’m not really in the mood right now for fucking you – a man whom I’ve only known for 1 day and who is bleeding and stinks – in the back of this rotting old boat…is that OK WITH YOU???’
Only joking, she just looks at him in quiet astonishment, and incredibly he says ‘Come here.’ Hypnotically transfixed by his sheer confidence and arrogance she robotically does his bidding and comes to him, where luckily we cut to a rescue boat, leaving them to fuck like nasty dugongs.
Old mate from the CIA is on the rescue boat and calls to see if Bond is ok over the megaphone. Bond quickly zips up his pants and pops up, quipping that the rescue boat must need their help, but he’s obviously perturbed that he has been cock blocked yet again. To be honest Honey looks a bit toey to get down herself.
Bond throws them a rope so the CIA boat can tow them to shore.
They then snuggle together in pre-coital anticipation, and then no fucking word of a lie she readies to give him a blowjob.
CIA Guy turns to cop a big old eyeful of Bond’s hairy balls
But then so this film doesn’t get an R or X rating we cut back to see that they’re both on the floor now making out and there’s no blowjobs going on…yet. But fuck it’s a funny couple of scenes. For a split second there it really feels like that’s what is about to happen.
As they make out Bond decides to let go of the tow rope, leaving them to starve and die in the now irradiated wasteland of the Caribbean peninsula.
Until then though, he finally gets to put his sea cucumber into her starfish.
Conclusion
I’m surprised at how much I loved this movie. I went into Dr. No pretty cold. I had no idea as to the plot or the tone, I simply knew it was the first James Bond movie so I kind of imagined it to maybe be campy or corny but definitely boring. It wasn’t any of those things by a long stretch. It still holds up fantastically today and isn’t just a good Bond film but a good film in general and definitely worth a watch if you haven’t. Real care was taken in its production and the performances, settings and execution of the film are all great.
You can see why James Bond propelled Sean Connery to megastardom and that he is still seen as the ‘real’ James Bond to this day as he’s absolutely captivating. I’d say he’s not overly handsome in like a conventional manner, but his swagger and confidence certainly make him sexy smoldering. It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to see a man like that, holding himself the way he does, getting in all manner of sexy predicaments with women, whereas seeing a portly, 55 year old Roger Moore pottering about makes it slightly harder to believe.
The Dr. No story is a pretty simple one and easy to sit back and enjoy, with a few small hints that there is something bigger afoot with Spectre. The early films such as this one show that James Bond isn’t meant to be a super hero who can do literally anything and survive everything. True he’s a government agent who can fight and shoot a gun etc. but the allure of the Bond character has always been his suave sophistication. He can play cards, he’s goes to exotic places and stays in nice hotels and shags beautiful women, he drives awesome cars and wears nice suits. He’s the male fantasy lifestyle made flesh and it’s obvious why Bond has been such a long standing and resilient pop culture figure over the years.
They got the series off to a good start with Dr. No, and I’m not sure if they had the follow up films already in the pipeline before they made this one or not, but this film’s success coupled with the charisma of Sean Connery made a sequel all but a certainty. Who would have guessed back then that James Bond would still be going strong 56 years and 25 films later. The Bond franchise has ebbed and flowed in and out of gritty realism, cringeworthy silliness and pure insanity over the decades, but it’s good to see that the first film started things off by being a fun watch as well as pretty believable and grounded. Especially the part where even James Bond is afraid of giant fucking spiders.
Additional Crapola
Kills: (1 Spider) 4 men.
Fucks: 4 from 3 girls.
Looking at the box office takings of this film that are reportedly 60 Million dollars compared to its budget of One Million dollars, it seems on paper like this movie was a roaring success, the veritable Harry Potter / Star Wars / Fast and the Furious of its day. After all, a film that is able to make 60 times its budget is definitely nothing to sneeze at. In truth however those numbers do lie a little. It turns out that figure of 60 Million is from multiple theatrical releases, as Dr. No was often re-released in theatres as a double feature with other Bond films, hence its inflated box office takings. So that figure of 60 Million can be seen as its total box office takings to date, not just the amount it made during its first theatrical release.
Cinema was an altogether different beast in 1962, and British films often didn’t see a huge release in the US. Dr. No did do well in its first 2 week run in Britain, clearing $840,000 which is pretty funny when you look at the bullshit figures movies these days rake in on their opening weekends. I haven’t been to the cinema in a while, but I’m pretty sure a single ticket for the movies these days is probably close to $840,000 so yeah, inflation and all that.
To give you an example of the insanity in the modern era, Star Wars The Farce Awakens had a worldwide opening weekend of $528 million!! That’s half a billion dollars in 1 godamn weekend. As of writing this that figure has only been topped by, you guessed it, The Fate of the Furious. Who the fuck are these people who watch the Fast and the Furious movies anyway? I’ve never met one. Maybe they all live underground or something. Or in China.
Anyway, James Bond appears to have been quite popular on its release and Bond quickly became a pop culture icon, but it wasn’t a manic, instant runaway success like say Star Wars was. Even in Britain it was only the 5th most popular film of the year. In America it didn’t even make the top 20 highest grossing list for 1962 and it didn’t receive a single Academy Award nomination.
In terms of cinema in 1962 there was actually some good stuff that came out in that year such as Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a Mockingbird, Gypsy, The Manchurian Candidate, Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Billy Budd, Cape Fear, Days of Wine and Roses, How the West Was Won and other old shite you’ve never heard of.
What was going on in 1962? The World was deep in the most tense parts of the Cold War with the Cuban Missile Crisis kicking off that very year and the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion just the year before. The hippie movement was just starting to gain momentum, especially in California. The Beatles were still a year away from releasing their debut album Please Please Me in 1963.
Err, what else? John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth from space. Marilyn Monroe sings a raunchy happy birthday to president Kennedy and just as exciting and memorable, Henry Macmillan was prime minister of the UK and ol Bob Menzies was prime minister of Australia.
Thanks for reading, check back in about 3 godamn months or so for my excruciatingly long review on From Russia With Love.
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