Movies Abroad: No, No, A Thousand Times No

It is almost a certainty. One evening next winter, at perhaps 1930 hours, the President of the United States will enter a small room. For two hours a machine will play with his emotions. He may groan, but he will not be physically hurt. If he is disappointed when he leaves, he will at least emerge into a world where his job seems relatively tame, for he will have seen Doctor No, the first attempt to approximate on film the cosmic bravery, stupefying virility, six-acre brain, and deathproof nonchalance of Secret Agent James Bond—the President’s favorite fictional hero, and Writer Ian Fleming’s generous gift to literature.

Produced by Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, Doctor No has just opened in London and is scheduled for release in the U.S. early next year. To Fleming fans, the dark hood looks of Scottish Actor Sean Connery were somewhat disturbing; they do not suggest Fleming’s tasteful pagan so much as a used-up gigolo. Bond would never speak with a cigarette dangling from his urbane lips, for instance. But his lines are not contra-Bond: “It would be a shame to waste that Dom Perignon ’55 by hitting me with it,” says Doctor No. “I prefer ’53,” retorts Bond. And the producers had the sense to take Bond comically. “All good, and, I am glad to say, not quite clean fun,” said a critic in the Sunday Times. The Evening Standard called it “sadism for the family.”

True to the book, the movie’s impervious hero is machine-gunned, drugged, almost electrocuted, pressure-cooked, and licked by a flamethrower. Exaggerating the original’s single conquest, he makes love to three women. But in two notable instances, the filmmakers felt a need to tone down Author Fleming’s unbuttoned imagination. In the book, the heroine is walking a beach nude with a knife-belt strapped about her when Bond first sees her. In the movie, Actress Ursula Andress fills a wet bikini as if she were going downwind behind twin spinnakers. In the book, the villainous Doctor No is buried alive inside a 20-ft. mound of bird droppings. In the movie, he is cleanly boiled in a nuclear reactor.

Ian Fleming seemed pleased enough. ”Those who’ve read the book are likely to be disappointed,” he said modestly, “but those who haven’t will find it a wonderful movie. Audiences laugh in all the right places.”