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Ah, yes. Those were the days when you could still get away with the old "let's just cast a white actor and make him or her up to look Asian!" mentality. Take Mickey Rooney's role as a stereotypical Japanese named Mr Yunioshi [sp?] in Breakfast at Tiffany's, for example.
That all changed for the Bond series when the film adaptation of You Only Live Twice, filmed on location in Japan and co-starring Tanba Tetsurō as "Tiger" Tanaka, came along.
If Dr No were remade today, I could imagine Chow Yun-fat in the title role.
And it wasn't limited to "yellow" people, either. DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, infamous for its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, featured white actors in blackface, and the film Short Circuit featured Fisher Stevens as an Indian (Eastern Indian, not Native American) programmer named Ben Jabituya. Native Americans weren't safe, either. While there were some genuine First Nations actors, such as Chief Jay Silverheels (who was Mohawk, by the way), most American Indian roles were played by dark-skinned Italian/Sicilian-American actors.
How far we've come... and how far we still have to go (if the "race-bending" in the Last Airbender film and the white actors in "yellow-face" in the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas are any indication).