Leaning Into the Disney Version
In 1962, producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had hoped to bring Fleming’s very latest Bond thriller Thunderball to cinemas, in spite of misgivings about the cost of elaborate underwater battles. Word of pending litigation over the novel decided the issue. They would adapt a five-year-old title, Dr. No as their modestly-budgeted first try at making a James Bond film.
Yet to some degree the producers managed to have it both ways. They transplanted the nefarious criminal organization and the particularly amoral Bond of Thunderball, plunking them down in another part of the Caribbean for what is essentially an updating of Disney’s live-action Jules Verne adventure film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Surprisingly, most of Fleming’s many hints about having used 20,000 Leagues as the template for his thriller, made the translation from book to screen.
In the film Dr. No we see a glimpse of an ominous vehicle sometimes mistaken for a monster (a role played by Nemo’s submarine in the Disney film), while the wonders of the deep are on display for the mastermind’s dinner guests in both films, along with some of the loot that’s been acquired.
The inclusion of a recently-stolen painting of the Duke of Wellington in Dr. No’s salon was an inspired touch, even if its faded topicality may leave modern audiences perplexed. The crime was solved and had faded from memory by the time I first saw the film at a drive-in in 1971.
In each case filmmakers approached Dr. No and the Disney film it’s based on, essentially as the story of a jailbreak, with a long introduction. The Disney team came up with the concept after discovering that the Verne novel is essentially a plotless underwater travelog, and Fleming seems to have followed their lead. There may be interesting side trips, but breaking out of jail is the main prize. Captain Nemo’s prisoners scheme to escape from the Nautilus to return home; Bond needs to bust out of Dr. No’s gauntlet to save the girl.
The debt to Disney is more apparent in Fleming’s book, where Bond, like Kirk Douglas’s Ned Land, has to fend off a giant squid with a knife and a spear. Bond’s singing of a few bars of a suggestive calypso in both the book and the film may be a winking reference to the salty “Whale of a Tale” sung by Kirk Douglas, a song about unfaithful lovers.
The limited field of view afforded by the radiation suits which some of Dr. No’s men wear might remind us of the way Nemo’s men lumber about blindly on the ocean floor - whether that was the intention or not. After struggling with Bond above the reactor pool, Dr. No slips beneath the surface of the water, staging that suggests a captain going down with his ship, even if reluctantly, clawing and scratching the whole way.
After Bond makes his getaway there’s a catastrophic explosion for no comprehensible reason, except perhaps to match the ending of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues, where Nemo’s island is destroyed under a mushroom cloud. In both films the heroes make their escape on a tiny boat.
As for Fleming’s probable second source, Green Mansions, with its jungle goddess Rima the Bird Girl, Ursula Andress in the role of Honeychile Ryder certainly looks like a goddess, and that’s probably enough.
While Fleming’s book and its Disney model are both easily recognizable in the finished film, it is Bond himself who undergoes the most notable alterations. The filmmakers take pains to establish at the outset that despite his savoir faire, 007 sometimes behaves like a callous brute. He seduces a secretary simply to keep her busy until the cops arrive, and then not only shoots an unarmed man, but plugs him again in the back just to be sure.
It’s true that the Bond of Thunderball makes some questionable choices when nuclear annihilation seems an imminent possibility, but he’s haunted afterwards by the harm he’s done. Fleming’s books in the wake of Thunderball, chart his climb back from the abyss.
The movie Bond, on the other hand, was just getting started on a long career of sometimes acting like a jerk.