Dr. No

From the very start the bedrock is Lang, the bogus blind trade white canes for silencers at the service of a space-age Mabuse. Ian Fleming wrote James Bond as a lethal jet-setter blithely adjusted to the atomic epoch, Sean Connery gives him traces of soigné thuggery—the hero's private smile as he sends a foe down a precipice, his metallic thrill in letting another think he's got a chance before shooting him repeatedly. (Bogart in The Maltese Falcon is a key model.) Global menace and neo-colonialism under Caribbean skies inform the tale, the villain (Joseph Wiseman) is a German-Chinese scientist and card-carrying SPECTRE member, Fu Manchu in modernist hideouts. "World domination. That same old dream." Bond meets his CIA counterpart (Jack Lord), dodges an arachnoid assassin, helps himself to the babe-buffet: Eunice Gayson and Zena Marshall are the apéritifs, Ursula Andress rises from the foam with seashell and knife. The island "run like a concentration camp" is the target for our man in Kingston, Dr. No keeps an aquarium and a stolen Goya and is disappointed in the spy brought before him, "just a stupid policeman." Terence Young combines Jamaican travelogue, Gropius-style architecture, and cardboard computers bearing "danger level" signs, a sturdy foundation for the franchise. (Even as introduced, M's dryness and Miss Moneypenny's flirtations have a practiced polish: "Forget the usual repartee, 007's in a hurry.") Cyanide cigarettes, radioactive rocks, diesel-fueled dragons. Humble enough to admit fear, Bond can't resist commenting on the Freudian implications of his opponent, "does the toppling of American missiles compensate for having no hands?" Shifting loyalties and pop lushness are set in place for From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, so is the "unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism" for Austin Powers. With John Kitzmiller, Anthony Dawson, Bernard Lee, and Lois Maxwell.