Director: Terence Young
As of 2015’s Spectre there have now been a total of two dozen films to star the now iconic James Bond, who in 1962 was first introduced to the movie-going public in Dr. No. Although all of Bond’s mannerisms are now cultural staples, one needs to divorce themselves from that fact to appreciate what a firm foundation Dr. No laid out for the series. It is a fairly grounded, low-key affair—its action sequences mainly limited to small, efficient fistfights, with the focus more on the intelligence gathering spy aspect than on the spectacle of outrageously choreographed set pieces. The early-goings do well to establish a world in which no one is to be trusted, and yet as viewers we can take solace in the fact that Bond tends to be one step ahead of both his adversaries and the film audience. Director Terence Young, a regular of the early films, does well to incorporate surrealism once Bond reaches the private island—the image of the feared “dragon” is memorable in its sheer audacity, and one that predicts that the emperor has no clothes (Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman), despite being built up as a menace throughout the picture, ultimately isn’t remarkably impressive). The third act is borderline incomprehensible, playing as a hodgepodge of loosely baked action movie tropes while failing to get across the sense of stakes, but everything leading to that point is irresistible fun.
Director: Terence Young
In a telling exchange from Corridor of Mirrors, a nostalgic artist (Eric Portman) promotes the merits of living in the past, expounding that, “We don’t know whether the future will be good or bad, but we gamble on it. Well, I’ve given up gambling. I prefer the certainty.” Set just before the war, this adaptation of Christopher Massie’s novel (previously reworked by Ayn Rand as the Jennifer Jones vehicle Love Letters) suggests the precariousness of sentimentality in a time when the world was undergoing vast, irrevocable changes. In the film, Paul Mangin’s (Portman) fixation on the past leads him to begin dressing a lounge singer (Edana Romney) to more closely resemble one of the paintings in his well-preserved Venetian mansion. The makeover fetish narrative has led many critics to cite the film as a potential inspiration for Vertigo, but perhaps the better Hitchcock comparison is Rebecca (there’s even a Mrs. Danvers stand-in with a creepy housekeeper played by Barbara Mullen). Future Bond director Terence Young never made another film quite like this one, which plays like a British response to the Poetic Realists (a comparison further encouraged by the score by La Belle et la Bête composer Georges Auric) by way of Daphne du Maurier. At the time of its release, the New York Times scoffed at Corridor of Mirrors, describing it as, “melodramatic” and “preposterous”. It is just that, and gloriously so!
For Reel 