ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

____

The first James Bond movie is modestly budgeted compared to the later films, but the basic formula was well developed from the start. Sean Connery was born to play the suave British Secret Service agent created by Ian Fleming, a role Connery won after the producers saw him in Disney's 1959 Darby O'Gill and the Little People.



In the premiere film of this long-running series, Bond goes up against a nefarious oriental mastermind (Joseph Wiseman) who operates from a Caribbean island stronghold which takes control of rockets being launched from Cape Canaveral. Connery and his gorgeous ally (Ursula Andress) manage to blow up Dr. No's fortress and escape in a small boat, where they make love until being rescued (a Bond tradition repeated in several of the subsequent films).







The recurring character of Felix Leiter is originated here by Jack Lord, future Hawaii Five-O star. A different actor played Felix in almost every Bond film. David Hedison (The Fly) is the only actor who played Leiter twice (Live and Let Die and License to Kill). Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell (as "M" and Miss Moneypenny respectively) stayed with the series through most of the Roger Moore films. Directed by Terence Young.

Composer John Barry found a steady job doing Bond music for the next thirty years, although he was occasionally replaced by others.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

I'm not impressed with Britished trailers for the early Bonds films. This one is a fairly good example of why. The Sean Connery narration was not a great idea.

__________________________________

__________________________ Dr. No - trailer


____________
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

__________________________________

After watching Angelina Jolie in Salt (a great movie), I found myself in a Bond mood, so I went looking for things to say about some of my favorites. (I also did one for Goldfinger.)

IMDB has some interesting trivia items for this landmark film.
__________________________________

All the sets and furniture were slightly smaller than they would be in reality, so that Bond would look larger.

After viewing the film, James Bond creator Ian Fleming reportedly described it as being, "Dreadful. Simply dreadful."

A Francisco de Goya painting of the Duke of Wellington, stolen in 1961, is found on an easel next to the stairs in Dr. No's dining area, which is why Bond stops to notice it as he passes it while going up the stairs. It was recovered in 1965.

The famous pose of Sean Connery holding a gun across his chest had to be redone at the last second. The Walther PPK was left at the studio, but the photographer had an old air pistol in his car. The gun in the picture is the air pistol.

(Note from me: Ironically the artist who designed the first 007 logo seems to have used the air gun instead of the Walther PPK as well! It was changed to look more like the correct pistol in later years. )

____________
___________

When James Bond sings "Under the Mango Tree" in this movie, it is the only time James Bond sings in a Bond movie.

(Note from me: Now ain't that just ironic? Sean's brief singing in Dr. No is pretty bad — and yet his singing in Darby O'Gill and the Little People is actually quite good!

And Connery was cast as Bond after the producers saw Connery in Darby O'Gill!

__________ Sean Connery Singing in Darby O'Gil


__________
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

"Doctor No" must have been a hard movie for Sean Connery. Not only was he EXTREMELY arachnophobia, to the point where he would not even allow the robo tarantula near him, he is also claustrophobic. So you know that the air duct scenes were fun for him. S. C. said that because of his claustrophobia, the SCUBA scenes in "Thunderball" were very difficult for him. The diving mask triggered his claustrophobia!

In the novel, the air duct escape turned out to be a trap, where Bond was put through all kinds of tests. There was no explanation for that in the movie.

David.

[Bud Brewster]

[Krel]

[Gord Green]

A Walther PPK

[bulldogtrekker]

A BTS photo of the two stars of Doctor No.

[Custer]

Nice - and here's a more crowded behind-the-scenes shot:

[alltare]

Dr. No is my favorite Bond movie, mainly because it was made before the "gadget creep" (and then the "completely unbelievable gadget creep") of the later crop of 007 flicks. In fact, I gave up on this series after Thunderball and have not seen most of the movies that came after it. Besides, if Sean Connery isn't the star, then it's just not a Bond movie.

(Bud's right. If you have not seen "Salt", you have missed a good movie).

[Gord Green]

Oh, this movie STARTED the Bond craze! Aside from it being revealed that it was President John F Kennedy's favorite reading material the story was FIRST introduced in the DC SHOWCASE comic (above) to the kid level reading audience.

The comic....and then the movie....started a thirst for the Bond legend! Heck, it even made me look for the PLAYBOY issues that serialized Ian Fleming's novels pre-publication in book form! (No...I NEVER looked at the pictures!)

Still, this movie was a precursor to the best of the Bonds, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE and GOLDFINGER.
As a first introduction to the genre it was a guilty pleasure!

[Custer]

Wikipedia mentions that "In 1962 the American men's magazine Stag serialised the story, renaming it as 'Nude Girl of Nightmare Key'."

In one of the footnotes, Wikipedia says "British publisher Gilberton Publications... approached DC Comics about publishing its adaptation of Ian Fleming's bestselling novel Dr. No in the U.S. The movie of the novel was a box-office smash in the U.K., so DC agreed to publish the James Bond story." I guess that the British branch of Gilberton outlived its U.S. parent, which had stopped producing new Classics Illustrated in 1962, and published British-made adaptations... hence the UK price on that cover reproduction. Unusual for DC to reprint a story like that - the Showcase issue, #43, has a cover-date of April 1963. The interior artist is Norman Nodel, while Bob Brown did the cover for DC.

Would the movie have been more successful in the USA if the distributors had used the Stag title, I wonder...?

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

When I first saw that several new comments had been added to the Dr. No thread my first thought was to share my opinion that the first James Bond movie is (forgive me for saying this) so badly dated it's hard to enjoy these days.

For me, it's difficult to understand how this relatively low budget movie managed to jump-start a world-wide spy craze that thrilled the world . . . including yours truly as a fourteen-year-old kid who constructed his own shoulder holster out of strips of elastic from Mom's sewing basket, thin cardboard from the package a new dress shirt came in, and black electricians tape to cover the cardboard.

I wore my crude creation to church under the coat of my Sunday suit, unbeknownst to my parents and the deceptively innocent-looking congregation who undoubtedly included Russian agents studying American social customs! Little did they know that I was among them, spying on the spies.

My name? Brewster. Bud . . . Brewster.

My gun was a blank "starter pistol" similar to this one.


_______________


As for the dreaded "gadget creep" alltare mentioned, I must confess that the generous supply of hi-tech gadgets which Bond was able to pull out unexpectedly — like Batman's bottomless utility belt — was the main appeal of the Bond craze for me!

It was a little like having super powers . . . in your pocket!

And as for Sean Connery being the James Bond, I agree that he was absolutely perfect in Goldfinger, and he did his best in all the rest of his Bond outings — but the only one which really shines is Goldfinger.

Unfortunately, I thought casting poor George Lazenby as Bond was like substituting soy milk for pure cream, and I didn't care for Roger Moore one little bit. He was like an Elvis impersonator who could say "Thank you . . . thank you very much" like Elvis — but he couldn't sing worth a damn.

Timothy Dalton didn't work either, although I'm not really sure why. Maybe it was because he was tough enough, but not suave enough.

However, Pierce Brosnan is absolutely perfect (in my humble opinion), and his movies combine the best of what made the Bond movies so successful in the first place.


__________
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Custer]

The first movie of the franchise does have its good points.

[John Thiel]

Sean Connery's facial features have always seemed disproportionate to me, the various parts not working together harmoniously. Perhaps this is due to the way he mugs a reaction to something in the film that's supposed to affect him. He is always shown in the publicity fondling a gun, which doesn't make him look really admirable. In this film Ursula Andress looked dowdy and plastered rather than gorgeous, which is apparently said over the same thing I'm looking at. She also seemed awkward most of the time. For me this makes the film into an existential situation in which the characters don't relate to their environment. Also the bullets when shown always are dum-dum bullets, which don't penetrate a body with very great ease.

Most every Bond film except Casino Royale (I have a copy of the book to prove this one existed) has a science fiction element, for example the atomic bomb in Goldfinger, the machinery in Dr. No, but the only one that came really close to actually being science fiction was Moonraker, which had a sort of science fiction plot going on. Dr. No was somewhat like a horror fantasy in the Sax Rohmer tradition, with that sf element where the doctor had space program interference equipment. But the important thing, as in all espionage books, is how bad he was and how he was messing with the government.
_________________
How do you do, folks? I sure am glad to see y'alls.