My Year of Bonds, Vol. 1: Dr. No

December 2, 2008

Pretty much every famous movie series has come heavily across my radar, with the exclusion of horror films.  I've seen all six Star Wars films, all six Batman films made in my lifetime, at least half of the Indiana Jones series, most of Harry Potter, etc.  My one real blind spot in this area is when it comes to James Bond.  Sure, I've seen six Bond films, but considering there are 22 total, that's not that impressive a record.  Only partially on a whim, I decided to watch all 22 official EON Productions Bond films in order, starting from the beginning at Dr. No and working my way back to Quantum of Solace, which I actually just watched last weekend in the theater.  Better still, I get to review them all, Nathan Rabin-homage-slash-ripoff style.  I can't imagine I'm the first person to do this, but I can't imagine I'll be the last either.  Oh, and please bear in mind I'm going to deal heavily in spoilers for every single one of these reviews.  You've been warned.

To be honest, I was surprised (and perhaps slightly refreshed) at how little exposition there was in the film about the Bond character himself, as if the filmmakers expected the audience to know about him already (we certainly learn about him, but it's presented naturally rather than in didactic fashion).  Since Bond had been something of a worldwide sensation in print for most of the decade prior to Dr. No's production, maybe this wasn't unrealistic.  Things certainly kick up right away in the plot, with a British agent and his secretary being murdered in Jamaica, conveniently right as they were in possession of a file containing information on the mysterious Dr. No.  Either MI-6 knew the game was afoot or Bond wasn't quite so highly regarded at this point in his career, because he's dispatched to look into the case, almost like a detective.  And in fact most of the film plays out more like a film noir detective story than it does like the action/adventure films the series eventually turned into.  Bond heads for Jamaica and is intercepted by the bad guys at the airport; he quickly sniffs this out, only for the henchman to take cyanide rather than talk.  Bond also chats with the last men to see the late agent alive, including geologist Professor R.J. Dent, and makes contact with CIA man Felix Leiter (Jack Lord, in this film) and Leiter's local man Quarrel.

Everything points to Crab Key, which just so happens to be owned by Dr. No.  No tries to use Dent to bump Bond off, but jeez, never send a geologist to do a supervillain's work.  The scene between Bond and Dent is one of the best in the film - Dent grabs his gun to shoot Bond but draws an empty chamber; noting that Dent's gun is a Smith and Wesson and that Dent fired all his bullets into a pile of bedclothes he thought was Bond upon entering the room, Bond says, "You've had your six," and shoots Dent dead.  The film lags a bit at this point, as the next half-hour or so is spent slowly leading Bond into No's clutches while doing little else besides introducing Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress).  To be fair, it's a pretty good introduction.

Maxim, that bastion of critical thinking, recently called Quantum of Solace's Olga Kurylenko the hottest Bond girl ever, presumably because she's the most recent Bond girl ever.  She's attractive enough - but come on, can she hold a candle to an in-her-prime Ursula Andress (26 when the film was made)?  I say no.  Anyway.  Andress is mostly here just to serve as eye candy; while she mentions that she thinks Dr. No killed her father, the film never returns to this, and Andress actually spends the climactic scenes chained to a rock off-screen.  Bond and Honey are brought in by No, who apparently considers Bond a worthy enough adversary to hear about No's entire evil plans, even though earlier in the film he was happy to have his henchmen shoot at Bond from 50 yards away and slip a tarantula into his bed.  Having confessed that he is a member of SPECTRE, a criminal organization bent on ruling the world, and confirming that he plans to use radiation to disrupt American rocket launches, No has Bond beaten and confined, but Bond escapes his cell and finds his way to the room where No and his henchmen are preparing to disrupt the American launch.  Concealing his identity in a radiation suit, Bond assumes the duty of cranking up the radiation, but does so far beyond safe levels.  As the henchmen flee, Bond and No have a final standoff just above the reactor's cooling tank, which is now overheating.  Bond gets the upper hand and No, who has powerful but clumsy prosthetic hands, is unable to pull himself to safety and slips into the cooling tank to his death.  Bond rescues Honey and they escape just as No's lair explodes dramatically.  Leiter and the Americans arrive to give Bond a tow home, but Bond lets the rope loose, and if 1962 Ursula Andress was in your boat, you'd do the same.

It was kind of interesting to note how much funnier the first Austin Powers movie becomes in retrospect, particularly in the last half-hour when we finally get to Dr. No's lair.  Dr. Evil is pretty much a strict mixture of Blofeld and Dr. No, the latter from the name to the wardrobe to the actual line of "One million dollars!" (as Dr. No tells Bond how much his aquarium cost).  The tropical island setting is the same, as is the general depiction of the underground lair.

Dr. No certainly looks like a film made in 1962.  The effects are pretty cheesy, between the obvious scale model when Dr. No's weapon starts to deploy and the rear-projection used in the car chase as Bond heads for Miss Taro's apartment.  The two main Asian parts are played by non-Asians.  The fight scenes are by and large pretty awkward.  But it seems hard to fault the film for any of this, given that that's just the way things were; marking Dr. No down because some of the fight scenes look silly is like saying King Kong is a piece of shit because they didn't use CGI.  In contrast to the scenes with hand-to-hand combat, scenes with firearms go much more smoothly, and that's more key to the Bond mythos anyway.  It's a little odd to watch a Bond movie and see things that we just take for granted now - the presence of the Bond theme borders on overuse until you remind yourself that it had never been heard before this movie, and now-iconic lines like "Bond, James Bond" have that similar aspect of cognitive dissonance, a jolt from the desire to yawn at hearing the line for the five hundredth time back to the realization that this is actually the introductory moment for quite possibly the most famous character in the history of cinema.

The pacing feels slow at first, but Terence Young actually does a good job of ratcheting up the tension by keeping things in the dark for as long as possible while parceling out the plot points.  Neither we nor Bond really have any idea quite how high the stakes are until Dr. No actually makes his appearance late in the film; at that point it turns from straightforward mystery into something different, with Bond finally taking over as an action hero instead of just a detective who happens to punch and shoot people occasionally.  Obviously most films in the Bond series have at least an aspect of "whodunit" mystery to them, but the issue here isn't so much who, specifically, did it, and more who that person is, in a grander sense.  Dr. No is clearly the bad guy pretty much from the second his name is mentioned, but the scale of his operation has a lot more to do with "whodunit" than just his name.  Coming off of a period in film where straight-up film noirs were more common, Dr. No must have felt like something of a game-changer, and in that respect waiting until the last half-hour to really jump to supervillain-revealing hyperdrive feels like a brilliant move on Young's part (though the pacing probably owes a debt to the original Fleming novel as well).

As introductions go, Dr. No couldn't have done a whole lot better for Bond.  We get a good look at all aspects of his personality - his self-confident behavior on and off the job, his sense of drive and purpose when it comes to his work, his almost Holmesian levels of perception.  We get a first listen (and then several more) to the classic theme, we get the first "Bond, James Bond," we see the darkly-tinted sense of humor, we learn his characteristic drink order.  And we learn all this without burning out on the kind of drawn-out action sequences that have defined the series in recent years.  Could the film have aged better?  Of course, but name a film from 1962 that hasn't aged even a little.  All in all, it's a strong start.

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