A Doctor No More: A Tribute to Joseph Wiseman (1918-2009)

With the death of stage and screen actor Joseph Wiseman, who played the first big-screen Bond villain Dr. Julius No, another unique link to the Sean Connery Bond films of the 1960s has now sadly gone. Mr. Wiseman, who passed away last Monday (19 October), aged 91, set the precedent for future EON Bond villains and gave the character a highly memorable machine-like quality, combining both menace and ego with a brief ironic nod towards culture and civilization.

According to the New York Times, which first broke the sad news, his daughter revealed that Wiseman had recently been in declining health.

The Nature of ‘No’

With the creation of Dr. No, Bond author Ian Fleming had embodied his villain with all the cruelty of a psychotic torturer but also the trappings of a very modern villain, who had particular a fascination with science and technology. Wiseman captured the essence of this very well. In EON’s film version, agent 007 (played by Sean Connery in his debut Bond film), having been ‘decontaminated’ and temporarily drugged, and now trapped in Dr. No’s multi-million dollar lair deep underground, at one point spots Goya’s oil painting of Wellington, and realises his dangerous host still has a taste for culture (of a kind).

This was an inspired touch by the filmmakers. The painting had recently been stolen from the National Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square and a copy was added to the Pinewood set at the last minute, to the bemusement of early British audiences who immediately got the in-joke in the film. Even more successfully, the script, which explored No’s plans to disrupt the Project Mercury Space launch through ‘rocket-toppling’, played skilfully upon early 1960s ambivalence about science, atomic power and super-technology. What now seems to us quaint and strange, with odd ideas about ‘atomic’ energy and satellite disruption, was to an early 1960s audience exciting and even a little frightening, given the Cold War tensions of the time. But EON’s Dr. No also gave people in the audience exotic adventure, colourful locations and what seemed like lashings of permissive sex. It also appeared to herald the beginnings of a new decade of optimism and materialism, especially when compared to the drab years of 1950s rationing in the UK and a series of gritty but bleak domestic dramas produced by British TV.

Wiseman’s Career: Stage, Screen
and TV

Wiseman was a multi-talented actor whose numerous film credits included ‘Detective Story’ (1951), ‘Viva Zapata!’ (1952), ‘The Silver Chalice’ (1954), ‘The Night They Raided Minskys’ (1968), and ‘The Valachi Papers’ (1972). He was often cast as a villain but also had a flair for comedy, such as in ‘How To Steal a Million’ (1966). On TV, he took roles in ‘Law and Order’, ‘The Streets of San Francisco’, ‘The Untouchables’, and ‘The Twilight Zone’. When he was cast as Dr. No in December 1961 by Bond producer Harry Saltzman, Wiseman had already carved out a highly respected career as both a stage and screen actor. Born in Montreal, Canada, in May 1918, Wiseman moved to the USA as a boy and his first Broadway stage role came in 1938. In fact, he saw himself primarily as a man of the stage and loved to be in front of a live audience, carving out a series of memorable stage performances and gaining much respect within the world of theatre. He appeared on Broadway as recently as 2001, playing a witness for the prosecution in the stage version of ‘Judgement at Nuremburg’.

Wiseman was apparently uncomfortable with his fame as the first big-screen Bond villain and is said to have later viewed the part with disdain. His daughter told the LA Times: ‘He was horrified in later life because that’s what he was remembered for – stage acting was what he wanted to be remembered for’. Nevertheless, he could still be at times very generous towards Bond fans and was particularly pleased when they showed interest not just in the evil Doctor but also in his diverse range of other roles.

The Visual Impact of ‘No’

When the scriptwriters were putting together early drafts for the EON version of Dr. No, it was quickly evident that the screen interpretation of the character would have to be very different from the version in Ian Fleming’s novel. Fleming had described the half-Chinese Doctor as ‘at least six inches taller’ than Bond, with an elongated head, completely bald, and wearing a kimono, who glided along like ‘a giant venomous worm’, and brandished metal pincers in place of his hands. This version was first given visual form in the strip-cartoon series appearing in the UK’s ‘Daily Express’ newspaper at the time. Fleming had probably taken some inspiration for Dr. No from Sax Rohmer’s famous villain Fu Manchu, and apparently wanted his cousin Christopher Lee (of Dracula fame) to play the role on the big screen.

The EON film version of No, however, was dressed in a relatively neutral fashion, with Chinese-style gentlemen’s suit and metal hands instead of pincers. Although he was ambivalent about the role in later years, there is no doubt Wiseman’s interpretation contributed to what became the standard template for the strange and menacing Bond villains who appeared subsequently on screen. As John Brosnan noted in his early study of the Bond films, ‘James Bond in the Cinema’ (1972), although Wiseman did not have much physical resemblance to the novel’s version of Julius No, on an emotional level Wiseman’s performance ‘was flawless’.

Reflecting on Wiseman’s portrayal, Brosnan observed: ‘He captures perfectly the inhuman, machine-like quality of Dr. No. Every movement is careful and precise, the face remains blank and the voice as bland as something produced by a computer. The overall effect is one of supreme confidence mingled with total ruthlessness – the “Grand Inquisitor” of the novel’.

There is also good evidence that Fleming himself was won over by Wiseman’s portrayal, and President Kennedy (a fan of Fleming’s novels), before he was tragically assassinated, enjoyed some private screening’s of Dr. No at the Whitehouse, courtesy of United Artists.

The visual impact of Wiseman’s No was also undoubtedly aided by the visual style and hugely creative talents of set designer Ken Adam. In recent interviews, Adam has revealed that he took inspiration for Dr. No’s HQ from some of the photographs of Nazi lairs published in style magazines in the 1930s, which combined a sense of evil menace with a backdrop of Germanic ‘culture’ (warm fireplaces, rugs on floors, classical oil paintings, silver cutlery, etc).

In hindsight, Wiseman’s performance, Connery’s sheer energy as 007, Ken Adam’s sets, and Monty Norman’s immortal Bond theme, all combined to make Dr. No one of the ground-breaking films of the early 1960s.

Joseph Wiseman (1918-2009), R.I.P.