50 years ago today Dr No was released and Sean Connery became a super star
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It's 50 years since the first James Bond film, Dr. No, hit the theaters in Britain. Fifty years since the James Bond film franchise began in earnest. An immediate hit in the UK, it took longer to catch on in the US, where it appeared in May 1963, rather un-ostentatiously released in theaters in Middle America before hitting the coasts. Movies often rolled out much more slowly in these days.
That's only one of the ways in which Dr. No is a veritable cinematic time capsule from the Mad Men days of the early 1960s.
It wasn't until the second Bond film, From Russia With Love -- which received a big boost when President John F. Kennedy listed the Ian Fleming novel as one of his 10 favorite books of all-time -- that the Bond film phenomenon got underway in earnest in the US and around the world. And it wasn't until the third film, Goldfinger, that it became the blockbuster series that we know it as today.
But Dr. No is the film that started it all. Incidentally, you can see my articles related to the 50th anniversary of the franchise here in The Bond 50 Archive.
It's often forgotten that that notorious womanizer James Bond (not nearly such a hound in his last three incarnations) had a girlfriend in the first two Bond films. Played by Eunice Gayson, who was also playing the baroness in the long-running London production of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music at the time, the very first "Bond Girl," Sylvia Trench, is the smart brunette playing baccarat across the table when we first meet Bond in the movies. Saying he admires her courage in betting, Bond asks her name; she gives it to him and notes: "I admire your luck, Mr. ...?"
"Bond," he replies, lighting his cigarette, "James Bond."
Now there's one of the more enduring catch phrases in cinema. He would be back.
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