Out In The Riverdale Drive-In Night-With 007 Jame Bond’s “Doctor No” (1962) In Mind-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Special Guest Film Critic Bart Webber

Doctor No, starring Sean Connery, Ursala Andress, 1962

Hey, me, Bart Webber, I was the guy with the car my father’s passed down 1956 Chevy (two-toned with the classic fins that people today are ready to die if they have enough dough to grab one at some high-priced automobile auction). Usually that would mean nothing except that recently Sam Lowell, the now retired film critic in this space, called me up one night after watching, or rather re-watching after a fifty-five year hiatus, the film adaptation of Ian Fleming’s 007 James Bond thriller, Doctor No (1962) the first of what would appear to be an endless number of sequels and asked me to do a review (after he sent over the DVD for me to watch). See Sam, the Scribe, Jack, Frankie, Alex and I watched that film the first time in my car, in that 1956 Chevy two-toned, cherry red and white, at the now long gone and converted to an open air park along the river Riverdale Drive-In. (For those who don’t know what a drive-in is or are too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia that was an open air place where you went in a car to see movies on a big screen and heard through a speaker places athwart the driver’s side care window, usually a double feature and cartoon with intermissions in between to stock up on food and drink from the refreshment stand at night, the first feature starting at dusk so sometimes hard to see). A cheap way for a family or more importantly in the time frame I am speaking of cheap date with lots of promise at least starting out of foggy car windows before the night was over (and an inability to tell mother what the plot of the movie had been about.       

But the night I am talking about was not such a cheap date night although as usual with the gang who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor some dreams of girls and foggy car windows entered into it. But mainly we were there that night to see this Doctor No film because the Scribe (the late Peter Paul Markin who was the guy who had more zany ideas than anybody else)  had, as usual read the Ian Fleming book and had heard that this guy Sean Connery who was playing the lead character 007 James Bond was very cool. Who am I kidding we went because we also heard through that same Scribe that this cool chick Ursala Andress was going  to be running around half-naked in some scenes. Hey we were sixteen, maybe seventeen years old, without dough, and most of the time dateless because of the no dough so what did you expect. If we ran into some real live girls at the refreshment stand so much the better.    

So that was where the car deal came in (and sometimes I think I got to be in the Tonio crowd because I was the only one with a car and I am sure that was the Scribe’s motivation but he is no longer around to confirm the truth of that statement. Here is how the thing played out that night and many other drive-in nights. This little con courtesy of the Scribe who was a combination saint, brain and con artist all wrapped into one explosive package. He figured out, or maybe I had better say he had heard about this scam to get into the drive-in cheap. Since those of us who lived in the Acre section of North Adamsville where Tonio’s was located were always hard pressed for dough we would listen to any scheme that would get us what we wanted. In those days before I think the drive-in theater owners got wise and started charging by the carload there used to be individual admissions. To get around this problem the Scribe suggested that a few of us, maybe three of the six who went that night hide on the floor of the back seat and in the trunk of car. That way we would only have to pay for three admissions and would have money enough for some stuff at the refreshment stand (and give us reason to go there to check out the girls. This idea always worked and I have often wondered why until one day I figured out that the ticket-taker could have given a fuck about who was in the car all he or she cared about was moving the line of cars forward.    

See though the Acre girls would do the same thing although maybe they wouldn’t throw somebody in the trunk. Beautiful right and that is where the boy-girl mingle would get started and wind up at the refreshment stand. Needless to say single daters didn’t do this, at least I never did on cheap date night. Needless to say as well that we Acre kids, boys and girls alike, had our own meeting section far away from the parents with their young kids (conversely what young parents would subject their sweet charges to the bombast of high school mad monks and sisters).   

Frankly I don’t remember what happened on the boy-girl front that night because I was enthralled by the film. I had always liked action adventure films so this was like catnip to me. Funny after a fifty-five hiatus this one unlike a couple of other later Sean Connery-starring Bond vehicles that I have watched, re-watched, does not seem dated. Certainly the theme of good guys battling evil genius bad guys who want to take over the world is as fresh as today’s headlines.

Here’s the play as Sam Lowell always likes to say when he is giving his take on the plotline. A British intelligence agent in Jamaica is missing and presumed dead and government paid killer agent James Bond, Sean Connery’s role is sent to find out why and why as well why there is some interference with the booming American rocket program then in its early stages. Once landed Bond is on the case and finds out that some serious skullduggery is happening in an off-shore island by the nefarious evil genius bad guy Doctor No and his minions. So Bond has to see what is what on that island. As it turned out this No was some kind of nuclear physics freak who had associated himself with a criminal syndicate first in Tong China and later the nefarious SPECTRE international crime organization. While discovery all this information about what was being produced on the island up pops this Honey, really a honey, nothing but a fox as we used to say played by Ursala Andress who looked just fine in skimpy bathing suits. While this pair were are playing footsies they were captured by Doctor No’s security apparatus. Bond and Honey took a beating for a while but in time-honored good guy tradition the bad guys must take a fall-and they do. No is no more. At the end Bond and Honey make their getaway on a small craft and that was that.

So you can see why I was involved in the film to the exclusion of checking out the girls at the refreshment stand that night. When we left we only had four guys since Jack and Frankie had hit pay-dirt with a couple of girls who said they were bored by the movie and had only come because their girlfriends needed to fill up their car for that cheapjack caper at the admission booth. Nice, right.