Huge spider used unsuccessfully by Professor Dent (Anthony Dawson) to assassinate James Bond (Sean Connery) in Dr. No. Sweating out the insect’s agonizingly slow crawl up his body, Bond waits for it to momentarily rest on a pillow, then dives off the bed, grabs his shoe, and pounds the spider to pulp. Traumatized by the event, 007 staggers into the bathroom and shuts the door—providing one of the film’s best laughs.
The tarantula was portrayed by an arachnid actor nicknamed Rosie, who actually crawled on the body of stuntman Bob Simmons, pulled along by a string. If you watch the sequence closely, you can see that a sheet of glass separates Sean Connery from the tarantula in the final close-up, a similar effect to the one used in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones finds himself staring at a deadly asp.
In Fleming’s original novel, the tarantula was actually a deadly giant centipede.
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