You’d never know the James Bond franchise is 47 years old after watching the Blu-ray disk of “Dr. No.”
The 1962 film first introduced us to suave superagent James Bond, but its resurrection on Blu-ray last year makes it look as if it were shot last week.
Working from the original negatives, the Blu-ray release offers a beautifully resurrected Bond treasure, and that’s long before Ursula Andress makes her bikini-clad debut.
“Dr. No” introduces us to James Bond (Sean Connery, never more charismatic), a British agent tracking down the murder of a fellow agent. That quest sends him to Jamaica where he meets up with a shady scientist, a shadier shutterbug and a remote island everyone is too afraid to visit.
It all leads to the home of Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman), a mysterious inventor with designs on world domination.
In 1962, you could get away with that kind of grand thinking without sounding like a cliche.
Bond fanatics can have a blast parsing “Dr. No” for the dawn of the franchise’s signature elements. No, Bond doesn’t have a wealth of gadgets at his disposal, but he does surround himself with a bevy of beauties, none more ravishing than Andress as Honey Ryder.
Anyone who came of age with the older, easily mockable Connery will be aghast at how young and dashing the earlier model truly was. It’s hard not to watch a few scenes from “Dr. No” and come away realizing he remains the quintessential Bond – and a movie star of the first order.
“Dr. No” doesn’t deliver grand action sequences, and it falls far too easily back on the Bond theme music – Bond enters the room – cue the theme!
The disk features a segment detailing how workers restored the entire Bond franchise as well as other extras including a look at the Bond character through the years.
“Dr. No” remains a far cry from today’s Bond outings. No crazed action sequence to kick the story off, and Bond doesn’t defy physics with his acrobatics like Daniel Craig’s version.
But future Bond movies would be wise to emulate some of the sophistication spy work found throughout “Dr. No.”
(Photo: Ursula Andress and Sean Connery meet cute while battling Spectre in “Dr. No.”/MGM)
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I'm an award-winning journalist and film critic with more than a decade of experience in newspapers, magazines and the Web. I'm a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Washington, DC Area Film Critics Association and the Denver Film Critics Society.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m finding that for non-blue ray DVDs on a 1080P TV you can see the graininess from the fast film they used for darkened scenes. Is that true for Blue Ray as well, or have they used a smoothing algorithm to take care of that? It’s something that you never noticed when shown using a non-HD TV, or even at the movie theater.
And yes, Dr. No sets the standard for James Bond. Connery is absolutely spot on and the movie preserves the ruthlessness of the Bond from the Fleming books. But Bond may be ruthless in shooting the scientist and making love the a girl whose life depends on him staying in her flat, but he was never obviously a thug. Something which the modern Craig version seems to emphasize.
Actually, the end of Quantum of Solace made me think of Dr. No. It seems to me that Craig’s Bond is evolving, getting close to the Bond we first met way back when. And the bad guys in QoS, at the moment, bear more than a superficial similarity to SPECTRE.
Not to take anything away from Connery and Dr. No. He remains THE James Bond, and this film was an excellent launch point for the franchise. Damnit, yet another reason to save up for a Blu-Ray player….
I don’t have enough Blu-ray savvy yet to respond, K. Gimme a few weeks with the format.
The problem with the modern Quantum version of Bond is the shortage of acceptable villains. Let’s face it, we live in a post-modern Obama world. Therefore, the old villain standbys are unacceptable in this multi-culti, politically correct culture. So who can we turn to? In Quantum it turned out to be a shadowy cabal of middle aged, white CEOs, clearly representing the colonialist, capitalist West. Quantum was a major muddle of a mess after the seeming return to basics in Casino Royale. Before we spend money on the next installment, we’ll be closely parsing the reviews to see if the “evil villain” is, surprise, us again. If so, no thanks.