From the moment the words “Bond, James Bond” left the mouth of Sean Connery in the debut Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), moviegoers were never in doubt about what to call him.
The Scottish-born actor, who died on Oct. 31 at the age of 90, spent the balance of his life sometimes confirming but often complicating our early impression of him as a gadget-wielding spy. Connery’s insouciant masculinity enlivened four additional Bond movies in the 1960s, plus one, Diamonds are Forever, in 1971 and another, Never Say Never Again, in 1983.
But Connery’s career did not consist of simply biding time between Bond films. To the contrary, from the earliest phases of his career, Connery signed up for a series of bold, imaginative movies that stretched his talent and enriched his on-screen persona. Few of these could have been considered wise career moves, but Connery took more risks more freely than almost any other major movie star.
While still in the thick of the Bond series, for instance, Connery starred in the last fully realized Alfred Hitchcock film, Marnie (1964). Sounds like a natural fit, right? But instead of playing a suave romantic lead on the order of Cary Grant, Connery was cast as an outwardly genteel but inwardly warped Philadelphia society scion, Mark Rutland. In this portrait of an old-money dalliance with a member of the lower orders, Mark fancies a shameless thief, Marnie (Tippi Hedren), because she so unapologetically violates the rules of his well-ordered world. The admixture of love, fascination, and repulsion that passes across Connery’s face as he ponders her is genuinely troubling.
Connery was always willing to half-alienate his audience. On the heels of Diamonds Are Forever, he turned up in a red leotard, woolly mustache, and braided ponytail to star in John Boorman’s insane science fiction extravaganza Zardoz (1974). The film is notably unrestrained by the laws of storytelling or taste — it is one part anti-feminist agitprop and one part Wizard of Oz-inspired hallucinatory trip — but Connery, playing dress-up in the Irish countryside circa the year 2293, never betrays condescension or self-consciousness about the endeavor. After all, he read the script and must have had a notion of the project’s profound craziness.
Not every Connery vehicle was as weird as Zardoz, and the actor still made time for conventional leading-man roles in films such as John Milius’s The Wind and the Lion and John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (both 1975). Increasingly, however, Connery exhibited a keenness to appear as he did in life, as a kind of burly, Scottish-accented, Ernest Hemingway-type figure. In Richard Lester’s masterly Robin and Marian (1976), Connery, then only in his mid-40s, played an aging Robin Hood, conveying strength in his shambling, unfussed-over appearance, a quality much praised by film critic Pauline Kael. “There’s something really grand about the way Sean Connery will appear bald, will look frazzled, will appear half-naked, so you see the gray hair on him, and see that he’s an aging man,” Kael said in an interview. “He, really, is a great masculine image.”
As Kael perceived, Connery’s confidence in who he was and how he looked allowed him to render empathetic characters who might not ordinarily be so. In what is arguably his greatest non-Bond film, Fred Zinnemann’s Five Days One Summer (1982), Connery starred as a mountain-climbing physician in an illicit romance with his grown niece (Betsy Brantley). Theirs is an unworkable relationship, yet Connery is so magnetic, so charismatic that we mourn its seemingly inevitable dissolution. Watching him capably and credibly grapple with the tools of mountaineering is a reminder of what a force of nature he remained as he turned the corner on middle age.
Connery was not above appearing in films opposite younger leading ladies — Michelle Pfeiffer in Fred Schepisi’s brilliant The Russia House (1990) or Lorraine Bracco in John McTiernan’s Medicine Man (1992) — but he actively began to seek grand-old-man roles, too. In Brian De Palma’s film version of The Untouchables (1987), which netted the actor his sole Oscar, Connery’s authentic machismo compared favorably with the yuppie-era posing of co-stars Kevin Costner and Andy Garcia. It is Connery, as a beat cop helping out the federal officers during Prohibition, who heaves an ax into a door to instigate a liquor raid.
Then came his greatest part: In Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), we were asked to accept Connery as Harrison Ford’s Holy Grail-studying father, professor Henry Jones. Thanks to Connery’s convincing projection of paternal strength, the gambit worked. Before we even see Connery, we hear his firm, resonant voice shushing his young son after being interrupted, commanding him to count to 20 in Greek. The relationship between the grown Indy and his father has a sort of sitcom repartee, but, in moments of action or conflict, we believe that the elder Jones actually could tame, confront, or steal away a girl from his son. Here, Connery played something like his most fully rounded part: a bookworm, a taskmaster, and, finally and crucially, a religious believer.
The film’s final stretch, unfolding in a temple purported to house the Holy Grail, displays not just Spielberg’s facility with complex action filmmaking but Jones’s unwavering faith, enunciated with extreme discretion by Connery. Was Connery ever better than when, wounded, he murmurs that “the penitent man will pass” while Ford attempts to fetch the Holy Grail? For a generation of moviegoers, Indiana Jones was something like a cool older brother, but in this film, Connery showed us what a patriarch looked like.
Let us be grateful that Connery was cast as James Bond, not only for the joy he gave us in those movies but for the glorious later career they helped make possible.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
