Dr No | 1962

Ian Fleming’s sadistic, humourless snob disappeared for all time when Sean Connery adopted the name James Bond, but a supercool, wisecracking screen hero was born.

First of a series of campy villains is veteran stage actor Joseph Wiseman hiding behind rubber eyelids, operating out of the fictional ‘Crab Key’ in the West Indies.

The opening scenes are in Kingston, Jamaica, where the ‘three blind mice’ amble through Harbour Street, downtown. John Strangway is gunned down by the ‘mice’ and spirited away after a bridge game at the ‘Queens Club’, now the Liguanea Club, 80 Knutsford Boulevard – a private sports club and hotel, and also the home of the Jamaican Squash Association.

Strangway’s cottage, where his secretary is offed and Bond later picks up a clue, stood on Kinsale Street, north of Kingston in the foothills of the Blue Mountains but, sadly, it’s now gone.

Time to bring in 007. Bond’s first big-screen appearance is at the chemin-de-fer table of Le Cercle, at Les Ambassadeurs, Hamilton Place, behind the Hilton Hotel, off Park Lane, in London’s Mayfair (recreated in the studio, though a couple of years later the Beatles would be bopping the night away in A Hard Day’s Night in the real thing). If you fancy your luck, the club is still going.

After a little banter with Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), Bond begins a long tradition by swanning off to the West Indies. He is met by the impostor ‘Mr Jones’ at Norman Manley International Airport, halfway along the Palisadoes, the ten-mile spit which protects the harbour at Kingston. Once Jamaica’s main international airport, it now mainly handles domestic flights.

The meeting with the Colonial Secretary, at ‘Government House’ was filmed at the Governor General’s mansion, King’s House, Hope Road, in central Kingston. The waterfront where Bond searches out Quarrel is Morgan’s Harbour, near Port Royal at the western tip of the Palisadoes.

Miss Taro’s bungalow on the fictitious ‘Magenta Drive’ is a villa at the Grand Lido Sans Souci Hotel, now Couples Sans Souci in Ocho Rios – a convenient location, since the crew were staying there – in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. 96 suites, eight deluxe rooms and seven penthouses. It’s been substantially changed since filming in 1962.

The waterfalls outside Ocho Rios provide ‘Crab Key’s’ shore, where Bond and Quarrel arrive. The beach where bikini-clad Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) famously rises from the the waves to grace countless schoolboys’ bedroom walls, is Laughing Waters, then a private section of Roaring River which was the hideaway estate of recluse, and Bond fan, Mrs Minnie Simpson. You’ll find the cascades a mile west of Dunn’s River, three miles west of Ocho Rios, near to the hydroelectric power station.

Dr No’s bauxite mine on ‘Crab Key’ is a real bauxite mine, the Kaiser Terminal on the A3 coast road near Ocho Rios on the north shore, and the mangrove swamp where the dragon tank captures Bond and Honey is Falmouth, about 40 miles to the west.

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