ELEBRATES TURNING 60
He was the most ruthless of all the Bonds and it’s interesting how very dark Dr No is compared to later outings.
Look at the scene where Bond shoots Professor Dent in his hotel room. Dent is unarmed. There’s no particular reason to kill him.
But Bond fires his weapon remorselessly and without a second thought.
It’s a murder as cold-blooded as the one that opens the film when an unnamed female secretary is gunned down by gangsters masquerading as blind men. It’s truly nightmarish.
Flame
Later on, Quarrel dies a particularly horrible death at the end of a flame thrower and Bond himself is brutally beaten, burned and half-drowned before almost being dumped in a radioactive tank.
Dr No sticks closely to Fleming’s original novel and perhaps that’s what gives it its edge.
There are no gadgets in the film. The character of Q – played for 36 years by Desmond Llewelyn — appears for the first time in the second film, From Russia With Love, in 1963, and it could be argued that the gadgets rather took over the action — becoming ever more unbelievable as the franchise continued.
In Die Another Day, for example, Pierce Brosnan even drives an invisible car!
Underneath the glamour, it’s a tough, serious film which was condemned by both the Vatican and the Kremlin for its sadism and sexual licentiousness.
Which brings us, of course, to Ursula Andress, the relatively unknown Swiss actress who played Honey Ryder — the name that would inspire my own teenaged spy Alex Ryder many years later.
I will never forget the scene when she emerges from the water in that famous ivory bikini, just over an hour into the film.
You have to remember that in 1962, the bikini