On October 5, 1962, Dr. No opened at the London Pavilion, and the film series that has run for six decades began. Sean Connery, a 32-year-old Scot who had done mostly television and a handful of films, played Bond, and Ursula Andress played Honeychile Ryder. It cost about a million dollars. It took roughly 60 million on first release, and United Artists, which put up the money, found itself with a franchise it had not known it was buying.
Ian Fleming had been writing Bond since 1953, and the novels were popular in Britain and barely known in the United States until 1961, when President Kennedy listed From Russia with Love among his favourite books and Life magazine ran a piece on it. The film rights had bounced around for years, and Albert Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman formed Eon Productions in 1961 to make a series of them properly.
Connery was Fleming's own objection. The author wanted someone aristocratic and thought Connery, who had been a milkman, a coffin polisher and a bodybuilder, was too rough, and he suggested David Niven or Cary Grant. Broccoli and Saltzman went with Connery anyway. Terence Young directed and is largely responsible for the tone, since he spent weeks with Connery on how the man walked, sat and held a cigarette.
The film is small by later standards. Its mechanics are visible: a villain with a lair, a nuclear reactor, a tarantula, a torture scene, a boat chase. What it established was the structure, the gun barrel opening, the theme music, the pre-credits sequence, the gadgets, the quip after the kill, and the assumption that a spy film is a travel advertisement with murders in it.
Twenty-five films followed. The series has taken more than 7 billion dollars worldwide and survived the death of Fleming in 1964, the departure of Connery, and the change in taste that made the later films more violent and less plausible. What it has not managed is a Bond who is not a British man working for the British state, and the argument about that has been running since the first casting.