Dr. No

After watching a movie with your children or students, we encourage parents and teachers to look for education opportunities to teach with movies. Here are a few discussion topics that can help with lesson plans or teaching in the home.

James Bond is a fictional character created by author Ian Fleming in 1953 and featured in twelve novels. When explaining his choice of a name for his hero, Fleming said in the 21 April 1962 New Yorker, “I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened. When I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought… (James Bond) is the dullest name I ever heard.” Fleming named his spy after American ornithologist James Bond who wrote the field guide Birds of the West Indies. Fleming is also said to have given the literary character many of his own traits.

Would you like a famous literary character named after you? What kind of character would he or she be?

How are women portrayed in Dr. No? Do the female characters play a different or similar role in today’s adaptations? In what ways does the hero of the 1962 movie differ from the current character?

Does smoking in movies influence people to smoke? Is it more appealing when the protagonist uses tobacco? How does the depiction of cigarette use in Dr. No compare with movies today?