They came back out onto Piccadilly afterwards, the usher wedged the doors, and none of them had any idea they'd just sat through the first of twenty-odd more. That was the London Pavilion, 1962.
Back up. Lights down, and before you get a frame of Jamaica there's a white circle gliding across, a man turning to fire, red running down the screen — Maurice Binder's gun barrel — and then those bouncing dots, which cost almost nothing and do more work than most of what follows. The whole picture was made for something like a million dollars, which even then was modest. Terence Young directing. Saltzman and Broccoli putting it together out of Fleming's 1958 novel. A lead nobody in the business was sure of: Connery, thirty-two, a Scotsman most of the audience couldn't have named that morning. Joseph Wiseman doing the doctor with those hands. Jack Lord from the American side. Ursula Andress coming out of the water with the shells.
And the plot is a radio beam aimed at a rocket going up from Cape Canaveral, which in 1962 wasn't fantasy to anybody — people read about those launches at breakfast. I think that's why it held. You're in the dark watching a film about a thing you half believe is happening that week, a few hundred miles of ocean away.
Ken Adam had almost nothing to spend and it shows the other way round — the reactor room reads as money because he built the idea of money: one big curved shape, a lot of empty floor, a grille, and your eye fills in the rest. Cheap, and then painted and lit so you stand back from it.
That guitar figure was Vic Flick, a session man, one afternoon's work on a John Barry arrangement — played it through a studio amp and went home to the next date. Listen for how dry it is, no reverb to hide behind, just the strings and the thumb.