Dr. No

Sebastian Peill-M
11/8/15

     There are many movie franchises for people to love, Marvel, Fast and Furious, and even the Twilight series. I however love James Bond films, they are my favorite movie franchise and I could watch any of them again and again (except maybe Quantum of Solace, that one was kind of bad). So I will start reviewing James Bond films and I am starting with Dr.No, the first Bond film. It was released in 1962 and had a budget of 1.1 million dollars, despite the lower budget the film made 60 million dollars world wide.

     Sean Connery stars as James Bond, one of the top spies for Mi6, he is called down to Jamaica to investigate the murder of a fellow agent. When he arrives he teams up the the CIA's agent Felix Leiter (Jack Lord) and they begin to work to together to solve the mystery and what it has to do with a man called Dr.No. Bond eventually is noticed by Dr. No, he is almost killed by a tarantula and decides to take action. He and a local man sneak onto Dr. No's island laboratory (very classic villain), where they meet Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) a local girl who is collect conch shells. She tells them that if they don't tell authorities about her illegal conch gathering she will sneak them around the island. As they slowly make their away around the island, the dreaded "dragon" which has kept locals in constant fear. It turns out to be a tank with a flamethrower, but that doesn't stop it from killing Bond's guide (not Honey). They are captured and taken to Dr. No who gives his whole, "I am a villain dialogue". Then he takes Honey to slowly be drowned by the tide and takes Bond to his area of evil activities where Bond against all odds escapes and kills Dr. No and rescues Honey all before the island explodes.

     The music of Bond films are one of my favorite things about every film, except Dr. No, features a famous singer preforming a song named after the movie title. You also have every Bond films' beginning with the famous theme which was written by Monty Norman. Up until recently all of the the other music in the films, was done almost entirely by an orchestra, this adds a really nice effect to the films and gives the film the classic feel.

     The camera angles in Dr. No aren't anything majorly special, mainly they are portraits when characters are speaking or landscape for transition. However the opening sequence (as shown above) is a first person point of view, and shows someone being shot in the eye which did cause some problems at the time of release. Of course as the film franchise continued there were many different angles utilized.

As for acting skill, I thought hat the acting was great. Sean Connery is often said to be the perfect James Bond (him and Pierce Brosnan). Honey Ryder is one of the most famous Bond girls and the picture of her coming out of the ocean is an extremely famous movie scene. Dr. No did a good job, I cant judge his acting skill as well as I have only seen one movie with him in it and Dr.No is it. All in all Dr. No was the start of one of the best movie franchises of all time and is certainly not a film that will be forgotten any time soon.

Interesting Fact: Sean Connery is morbidly afraid of spiders. The shot of the spider in his bed was originally done with a sheet of glass between him and the spider, but when this didn't look realistic enough, the scene was re-shot with stuntman Bob Simmons. Simmons reported that the tarantula crawling over Bond was the scariest stunt he had ever performed. According to Steven Jay Rubin's 1981 book "The James Bond Films", this tarantula was named Rosie