With Daniel Craig’s fifth and apparently final outing as the famous British superspy due to arrive…sometime, given various delays thanks to the current global pandemic, Greg D Smith undertakes his most challenging mission yet – watch the entire Bond Movie Franchise and see how each entry stands up to a modern viewer. As somewhat of a novice, Agent Smith will be viewing most of these with Fresh Eyes Only. Starting at the beginning, with 1962’s Dr No…

Of course, I’ve seen most Bond films at some point or another. Growing up as a kid in the 1980s, there was usually a Roger Moore Bond movie on the telly at Christmas and on other holidays. I grew up with them in the same way my generation grew up with Star Wars and Superman – they were things that were on, and there were exciting bits to catch the eye of a young Greg – car chases, gunfights and so on. But very few of them stuck with me much beyond the recall of a particular scene or fleeting impressions of theme songs. From Dalton onwards, as I grew older, I began to watch them ‘properly’, but as an adult there were still many I could barely recall, and one or two I’d never seen at all.

Dr. No falls into that latter category. I had never once sat down and watched Sean Connery’s maiden outing as 007, and so having acquired a Blu Ray boxed set of the entire EON series, I settled down to treat myself to a bit of movie history.

The first thing that strikes one overall about the movie, as someone coming to the series with more of a sense of its modern guise, is that it’s rather sedately paced, almost quaint, by comparison to later entries. The opening plot, of a British Intelligence chief and his assistant going radio silent (killed but only the audience sees this) and Bond being sent to investigate, is miles away from the hi-jinks, action-packed sequences I’m used to seeing at the start of a Bond movie. The title credits sequence too, seems very modest in hindsight, with minimalist visuals and only the Monty Norman/John Barry ‘James Bond Theme’ playing.

Bond himself, played with a sort of effortless swagger by the late Sean Connery, is introduced to us by way of a card game around the eight minute mark, in which he inevitably charms his female opponent who we somehow just know is going to end up as another entry on his list of conquests. That she does and then completely disappears from the movie, never to be seen or mentioned again, tells us that not only are we dealing with a Bond movie, but a movie made in the early sixties.

Yes, the film has several female characters. One of them even gets some vague attempts at a background story and character, though even she ends up falling into Bond’s arms as the credits roll. Aside from Ursula Andress’s Honey Rider (the first of a long line of questionably named female characters in the Bond movie canon), the female characters mainly serve as aesthetic distractions for the men. Moneypenny may well be an incredibly efficient administrator in MI6 (or MI7, according to the one and only mention by M here) but what the movie really wants us to know is that she (like every other red-blooded woman) rather fancies James and spends most of her time pining after him, when she isn’t directly flirting with him. Miss Taro presumably must have a range of talents and skills to have worked both as a senior secretary at Government House and a spy in Doctor No’s organisation, but all that really matters is that she’s good at getting men to go to bed with her. Heck, Honey must be reasonably adept to have been avoiding Doctor No’s tight security for so long but all that’s really relevant here is that the camera can linger on her in a bikini and Bond can tell her to be quiet when he’s busily getting them both into trouble.

But James Bond movies being fairly sexist isn’t exactly news. Even the more recent movies have struggled with this side of the character, so it’s not really a surprise that this is how we began. So what about Bond himself?

Connery is clearly having fun with the part, though for all his rugged handsomeness and that distinctive burr, he doesn’t really settle into the character as we would know him in future movies. Perhaps it’s just a part of all this being new and an unknown quantity at the time, but there’s always a faint feeling that Connery is still feeling his way into the role. Not that it’s a bad portrayal by any means – he has the cheeky, though never quite arrogant self-assuredness and the effortless way with the opposite sex down very well, but it’s hard to ever feel like he’s really in charge of any scene in which he appears. It’s an impression not helped by a reference early on by M to his last mission, in which he was so badly injured that he was off active duty for six months. Perhaps it’s just the fact of watching this movie in hindsight, set against the institution that the movies and this character have become, but he just never quite feels like he’s there yet.

Adding to that impression is the distinct lack of many of the general tropes so intimately associated with the character now. The line ‘shaken, not stirred’ is never uttered by him, though hinted to by others. There are no gadgets at all – this is a more sober, serious Bond in that regard relying on mundane equipment, physical prowess and simple cunning. Though we do get to see the armourer Major Boothroyd, head of Q-Branch, he isn’t called Q and all he brings Bond is a Walther PPK, as M insists on it replacing Bond’s apparent preferred weapon. Even the car which is supplied to Bond when he gets to the Island is fairly mundane – no powerful Aston Martins with an array of gadgets here.

That said, we do establish some of the fundamentals early on. Bond is suave, confident, a serial womaniser and a tough, effective operative. He rarely gets caught off guard, meaning that when he is, as he and Honey are captured and Quarrel is burned to a crisp, it has more impact, even if the off tracked vehicle with a flamethrower that everyone has been insisting is a dragon does feel a little comical when revealed. Still, before that point, in several scenarios, Bond shows himself capable of thinking quickly and outwitting any attempts to get the drop on him.

As for the villain of the piece, it’s perhaps here that the movie feels the least ‘Bond-like’. Doctor No is a shadowy figure only spoken of or once remotely heard from for the majority of the movie’s run time. Even when Bond and Honey are captured, there’s still a sequence of them being marched to their room, drinking drugged coffee and then waking up and getting dressed before we finally get to meet the titular nemesis.

And it’s…slightly disappointing. Doctor No is clearly the original template for Mike Myers’ Dr Evil in the Austin Powers series. Eccentric and given to monologuing about his evil plans (in this case the use of a nuclear energy-powered device to send American space rockets off course as part of a scheme which seems partly about personal revenge and partly about his membership of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.), the fact of his prosthetic limbs is one of the enduring mysteries (for me) of the movie. Though he demonstrates their apparent power by crushing a metal figurine, they’re also clumsy and seem to serve no actual practical use.

If that weren’t bad enough, the way in which Bond is able to defeat Doctor No’s evil scheme (dressing up in a rad suit stolen from a henchman and then simply slamming the ‘Nuclear Energy Output’ dial to max to overload the reactor) feels like the very definition of an anti-climax. There’s no massive showdown, the actual physical conflict between Bond and his nemesis is over in seconds, as the latter simply finds himself stuck in boiling water, and then Bond simply goes to find Honey (bizarrely tied up for no apparent practical reason by a vent) and then they escape in a boat as the base explodes behind them (with presumably would involve major nuclear fallout but the movie doesn’t bother addressing it so neither will I).

The ending at least feels like the Bond I have come to know – Bond and Honey being rescued by Felix Leiter (who has done very little else in the film to this point) and then settling down for a snog and letting the rope tying their small boat to their rescuers go again as the credits roll.

In hindsight, it’s difficult to imagine that this is the movie which began a fifty-eight year, twenty-four and counting movie saga, let alone one which looks like it does today. While many of the basic ingredients were there, so much was not, and the rather relatively pedestrian nature of Bond’s exploits here – no gadgets, no tailor-made fast cars, very little in the way of direct conflict or action – made me wonder how a sequel ended up being made. Doing research for this piece, it turned out that at the time the film was well received by the public, if given a mixed reception by the critics. Clearly the box office dollars talked louder, and here we are.

Dr. No is not a bad film by any means, in context. It’s sexist, treats anyone who isn’t white with a kind of casual disregard and lacks much of the high stakes action and big budget effects the series would become known for. But there’s an undeniable appeal to Connery’s portrayal, even though he does feel like he’s not quite nailed on the part yet. The ease with which he switches from affable charm to no-nonsense threat and back again is quite something to behold, and it’s possible – even probable that it was this star quality as much as anything else which helped propel the film to the heights it achieved. It’s also reasonably sensible, at least in its early part, in the way it portrays the world in which Bond and his comrades operate. The third act, with its secret lair, monologuing villain and revelation of a far-fetched evil plan, almost feels like it belongs to a different movie entirely, but to that point it mostly feels like an only slightly-exaggerated portrayal of a secret agent in the field. I look forward to seeing where From Russia With Love takes things next.