Guy movie made him Untouchable
Connery’s star shimmered in Prohibition film
For any star needing to graduate fast from sinewy matinee idol to grizzled elder statesman, the Sean Connery playbook has every single answer.
A few years before The Untouchables, which would win him the best supporting actor Oscar and bridge the two halves of his career immaculately, Connery had turned his back on Bond — for the third and final time. In truth, the whole business of Never Say Never Again (1983) had been a fiasco.
By all accounts, the experience was downright miserable. Connery described it as “a Mickey Mouse operation,” marred by an exasperating lack of professionalism — he even had his wrist broken in training by the fight choreographer — a young Steven Seagal.
It was clearly time to step aside from Bond. Connery spent the rest of the 1980s doing just that. First he played the immortal swordsman Ramirez in the time- bending fantasy Highlander ( 1986), then cast defiantly against type as a Franciscan friar solving medieval murders in The Name of the Rose. With this shift, Connery paved the way for Henry Jones, the tweedy dad in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
But fi r st came The Untouchables ( 1987) — a piece of casting no one saw coming. How was the very Scottish Connery to pull off the fictional role of gruff Irish cop Jimmy Malone?
It’s a classic example of an accent not mattering. There’s a vague burr of Chicago Irish struggling somewhere under that brogue, but in every way that mattered, it was a transformative star turn.
Malone’s main function, which Connery seized upon, is as mentor- in- chief, laying down the law of the jungle to Kevin Costner’s goody twoshoes Eliot Ness. Perhaps the most famous scene — a personal favourite of Connery’s — has him expounding on “The Chicago Way” of justice.
“You wanna get Capone?” he asks Ness. “Here’s how you get him: He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue!”
There are rueful admissions Connery isn’t so young anymore. “All right, enough of this running s---”, he wheezes. But his tough- guy credentials and history of violence are absolutely vital to the part. (Even amid praise for his acting, some detractors have also pointed to Connery’s personal history of alleged domestic violence.)
Connery might be wearing comfy cardigans and your dad’s flat cap, but he’s still a brawler, a burly bruiser who seems to have his fists up for the entire movie. That virility on screen is why — spoiler alert — Malone’s departure stings so much. In a seven- minute sequence that’s the suspense highlight, we see Malone from outside his apartment, as goons break in to end his life. He chases one out, only to be gunned down by a second.
With opera flooding the soundtrack, he drags himself back inside, and has a final scene with Costner where he gives up the ghost. Not since the famous laser scene in Goldfinger had Connery been made to look quite so vulnerable — or, to use the film’s lingo, touchable.
No one would have been familiar with watching him die on screen. As Bond tended to prove time and again, and Highlander only reiterated, wasn’t he meant to be immortal?
For the first time here, he picked a role that helped him admit otherwise. It’s no wonder he won the Oscar, from that one and only nomination. It’s because Malone made us love Connery in a different way, by hinting at new frailty. And for the first time, we were given the chance to miss him when he was gone.