Somehow I'd managed to avoid seeing the first Bond film until a few days ago. I'd picked up the impression that it would be hokey and dated, and it somewhat is, but I found it quite enjoyable. The franchise clearly got off to a solid start.
My biggest fear was that Dr. No would be a straight-laced spy drama, but instead, it hit an appropriately ironic tone straight away. The best Connery Bond movies (henceforth just "Bond movies": I don't regard the post-1969 movies as being in the same series) are a subtle spoof of the spy genre, with their innuendo, outrageous villains and glamourous locations. They are adult cartoons, played straight. There's a fine line between spoofery and lameness, a line that's not always treaded successfully in the series, but Dr. No for the most part gets it right. (That the Bond movies are themselves spoofs is often missed by parodists. Austin Powers has its appealing moments, but when you spoof a spoof, the joke is on you.)
Bond movies were never really about action and gadgets, but about style, style, style. They were the apotheosis of early-60s cool. And despite its low budget and the absence of a John Barry score, Dr. No has plenty of style. Indeed, I was quite unprepared for the coolness of Connery's famous "Bond, James Bond" introduction, with the Bond theme striking up in the background, which simply went off the cool-meter. (Somehow, it never sounds the same when I say it.) All the other style ingredients are there too -- cars, casinos, Saville Row suits, that studied precision everyone has about their drinks. It's all a kind of geekery of course, but a different kind of geekery to the one we're accustomed to seeing now. It's an early-60s, pre-Beatles male geekery -- a geekery grounded not in Marvel comics, but in Playboy magazine, a geekery centred on the tobacco shop and the gents' outfitter instead of Toys R Us, a geekery that looks forward to a sexually assured adulthood, and not back to infancy.
Which brings me to the other thing Bond movies were about: sex. They were remarkably candid and liberal about such matters for their time, and are still much sexier than the average sexy movie today. Much of this appeal, it must be said, is down to homoeroticism. Bond fans are mostly male, and Bond himself is an obvious male fantasy figure, who found a perfect realisation in Sean Connery. Connery has appeared in nothing but crap since 1986, but he's always had a remarkable screen presence: a rich voice, an aura of virility that extends about five feet from the screen, and cojones made of solid granite. It's not hard to see why so many guys in the 60s saw Dr. No and wanted to be Sean Connery. Hell, I still want to be Sean Connery, tall, dark, handsome and irresistible, though as it is I'm not very tall.
And as for the scene where Connery struts on the beach in a tight blue polo shirt -- well, I would have gone gay there and then if Ursula Andress hadn't also been on the screen. Has a better-looking couple ever appeared on celluloid? And it's not just her chest -- she has curves in all the right places. When confronted with the awesome Ms. Andress, I am forced to say that when it comes to sex objects, they really don't make 'em like they used to. Most of the starlets I'm supposed to fancy today either look like anorexics or welterweight boxers with implants.
Its attitude to women might have been one of the aspects that dates Dr. No, but the awful truth is that in these enlightened times leading actresses are still treated as sex objects. While has-beens like Harrison Ford are still fronting movies, how many leading actresses' careers last beyond their first wrinkle? Once beyond a certain age, it seems that every actress is now forced to get her tits out for the lads, but I can guarantee you that we will never see the naked tumescence of someone like Tom Cruise. At least Andress in Dr. No is served as a straight-up sex object, and the film is honest and good-humoured about it, with an irony that the average humanities postgrad would conveniently miss. No, the area where the film has really dated is in its patronising treatment of the token expendable black character, which made for uncomfortable viewing at times.
Nevertheless, I'd rate Dr. No as the third best in the Bond series, behind From Russia With Love (the best) and On Her Majesty's Secret Service (which would have been the best if it had starred Connery, and not some male model impersonating him). The other Terence Young films (Goldfinger and Thunderball) are worth seeing if you like that sort of thing, and the rest are truly fit for the trash. Bond should have hung up his hat for good in 1969. Now he's just a dinosaur, being played by an insect.