DOCTOR NO: That Suave Time JAMES BOND Joined DC Comics
A SEAN CONNERY BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE: Dr. Fate, Dr. Light, Dr. Mid-Nite, Dr… No? — UPDATED 8/25/23: The late Sean Connery was born 93 years ago! This piece first ran in 2017 but it obviously holds up just as well today. For more Connery features, click here! — Dan — It’s REEL RETRO CINEMA — where columnist Rob Kelly takes new looks at old flicks — and their comic-book adaptations! Now, Rob is also a podcaster and this week on The Film and Water Podcast — part of The Fire and Water Podcast Network — he’s put together an episode on the first and, in my mind, greatest James Bond film of them all — Dr. No. Coinciding with that, he’s written this piece on the movie and its relatively rare comics adaptation. You can click here for his podcast. BONUS! For 13th Dimension’s official, unassailable TOP 13 BOND MOVIES OF ALL TIME, click here. — By ROB KELLY Every James Bond fan has their favorite film of the series. Even casual moviegoers can rattle off a few of the more famous installments: Goldfinger. Live and Let Die. Casino Royale. But for whatever reason, 1962’s Dr. No, the first Bond film, tends to not show up on many “all-time great” lists. There are probably a couple of reasons for this but, make no mistake, Dr. No is a fantastic movie. The film’s producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, picked Ian Fleming’s book (the sixth in the series) as the first cinematic Bond adventure mostly out of budgetary concerns: the story mostly takes place in just two locations (England and Jamaica). which would ensure they could keep costs down, and the plot was straightforward. They hired relatively unknown actor Sean Connery to play 007, and gave Terence Young, a director they had worked well with before, the job of bringing the world of James Bond to the silver screen. Many people think of Goldfinger as the, er, gold standard of Bond films, and in many ways that’s true: It’s the first film of the series that featured many of the trappings that would come to define it, if not the entire spy genre. There’s a colorful super-villain, a henchman with a gimmick, a memorable title song. Goldfinger marks the point where the Bond series started being influenced by itself, but nevertheless many of the things we love about James Bond movies are present in Dr. No. First up is a colorful title sequence, designed by Maurice Binder. Usually spy films were reserved...
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