BEYOND BOND
Sean Connery’s middle period is full of odd experiments and unlikely collaborations. We hail his fascinating odyssey into the unknown
WWhen Sean Connery was awarded the American Film Institute’s prestigious Life Achievement Award on 8 June 2006, Steven Spielberg sent him a note. It simply read, “Sean, for you, they should have named it the ‘Bigger Than Life’ Achievement Award.”
Connery’s outsized presence has often been commented on. Terry Gilliam, who directed him as no less a mythic figure than the Greek King Agamemnon in 1981’s Time Bandits, says he was “bigger in life than he was on film”, an effect no other actor ever had on him. But ‘Big Tam’ wasn’t just larger than life. He was also too big for a certain single role — even though that role itself is one of cinema’s biggest.
By the time he was making Goldfinger, Connery was already weary of Agent 007, growling in one interview that he was “fed up to here with the whole Bond bit”. Despite making the character his own and the character making his career, he felt little personal connection to James Bond. Connery drank beer, not vodka martinis. He played poker rather than Baccarat Chemin de Fer. (Although, he admitted to Playboy in 1965, Bond did switch him from soccer to golf.) “Maybe the snobbish, eccentric, gourmet facet of the character has an appeal to a cross-section of people everywhere,” the former Fountainbridge milkman would shrug in 1983, when asked to explain Bond’s popularity. By the mid-’60s, Connery was driven not only by a passion to break away from the licensed-tokill Commander, but also to prove there was far more to him than suave quips, sharp suits and flashy violence. More fundamentally, he wanted to establish that he and 007 were not the same person. “One is not Bond… one was functioning reasonably well before Bond… one is going to function reasonably well after Bond,” Connery told Playboy. “This Bond image is a problem in a way, and a bit of a bore.”
Over the next two decades, it seemed Connery would try anything to solve that image problem once and for all. Play a hateful, grubby copper suffering a violent nervous breakdown. Make a kids’ film with one of the Monty Python guys. Wear a red nappy, and a wedding dress (in the same movie). Any. Damn. Thing.
Director Sidney Lumet was one of the first filmmakers to recognise Connery’s potential to reach beyond Bond. The 12 Angry Men director recognised his 007 performances were not indicative of Connery’s limitations, but proof of his skill. “What Sean was doing in the Bond movies is the best of high-comedy acting,” Lumet said in 1965. “It wasn’t the exploitation
of a persona. It was real acting. So when The Hill fell into my lap, the idea of Sean for it was sensational. I knew he was one hell of an actor.”
The Hill is a stark landmark in Connery’s career. Set in a North African military prison camp, it features Connery as a disillusioned, court-martialled Sergeant Major suffering punishment for refusing to lead men to their deaths. At the start, that sardonic, Bondian smirk and twinkle are present and correct, but by the end, audiences saw him as they’d never seen him before: battered, broken and weeping. It is also a film which de-stars Connery as much as it tries to de-bond him. Lumet’s camera initially passes over Connery, keeping him in the background, making the point that in this picture he’s just part of an ensemble, which includes Ian Bannen, Roy Kinnear, Ossie Davis and a towering Harry Andrews as the head screw. “The Hill succeeded for me,” said Connery at the time, “because I was concerned and fully involved in the making of it.” As opposed to those bloody Bonds, presumably.
Of course, 007 paid well, elevating Connery to the first $1 million actor’s fee, but from as early as From Russia With Love he tried offsetting its impact on his public image by taking other, markedly different projects in-between. Basil Dearden’s forgettable 1964 thriller Woman Of Straw, for example, or Alfred Hitchcock’s mid-shelf offering Marnie, which Connery only agreed to after making sure it wasn’t a Cary Grant-ish action caper. In 1966 he appeared as a womanising poet in Irvin Kershner’s icky sex comedy A Fine Madness, and two years later he even tried his hand at a Western with Edward Dmytryk’s Shalako, which was too old-school for audiences recently turned around by Clint Eastwood’s countercultural Spaghettis.
Connery’s early anti-bond experiments rarely hit big, and have since fallen into obscurity; hands up who’s seen his 1971 Soviet/italian rescue-mission movie The Red Tent? If he wasn’t shooting, quipping and flexing his muscles, cinemagoers weren’t interested. But Connery was undeterred, and secured his final exit (or so it seemed) from Bond by making his involvement in
Diamonds Are Forever dependent on a two-film deal with United Artists, allowing him a $1 million budget per movie to shoot whatever he liked.
The result was 1972’s The Offence, directed by Lumet, with whom Connery had just collaborated again in 1971 surveillance-themed neo-noir
The Anderson Tapes. Connery plays Detective Sergeant Johnson, a sheepskin-coated bully-boy whose threadbare sanity shreds during a hunt for a predatory paedophile, causing him to beat a
suspect (Ian Bannen) to death. It is a harsh, grimy affair that remains, even by modern standards, hard to watch. “Sean knew exactly what he was getting into,” said Lumet. “[He] shut his eyes and dived off the board without checking whether there was any water in the pool.”
Unsurprisingly, The Offence bombed. Turned out there wasn’t any water in the pool. Within four days of opening at the Odeon Leicester Square, UA pulled it from release. But there’s no denying it’s one of Connery’s finest performances, toxifying his iconic masculinity while he plunges into this dangerous man’s shattered psyche. “The Offence is really important,” thinks Terry Gilliam. “He’s a really nasty bit of work in that. He’s not frightened. He’s an actor! Both that and The Hill had a big effect on me. I thought they were really powerful — Sean being bold, as opposed to just floating along on Bond.”
But The Offence’s failure really stung Connery. If pushing for hard-hitting realism wasn’t going to work, what could he do?
The answer was to go completely in the other direction.
John Boorman’s 1974 dystopian parable Zardoz was a box-office dud, which has become the cultiest of cult movies and a pop-culture joke. But it might just have saved Connery, in a weird way. At the time Connery took the role of the red-mankini-wearing Zed, Boorman tells Empire,
“he wasn’t getting many offers and he was very much at the point of reviewing his life”. He was also in financial trouble. “I went to see him at his London flat and he was in a terrible state. His monetary adviser had scarpered, taking the money with him, and suddenly he was kind of penniless.” But Zardoz also revealed Connery to be open to bold new concepts.
“He was terrific to direct,” says Boorman. “Fearless. At one point he puts on a wedding dress with a veil as a disguise. The woman doing the costumes said, ‘You really expect Sean will put that costume on?’ But he didn’t blink an eye. He just put it on and did the scene.”
Boorman’s bizarre sci-fi epic also introduced audiences to a new side to Connery, biographer Christopher Bray argues. “Zardoz was the movie responsible for discovering the magus figure in Sean Connery,” Bray wrote in 2011’s Sean Connery.
This was “hitherto hidden by the glossy veneer of super-heroism,” and something he’d “play over and over again throughout the ’80s and ’90s”.
Zardoz certainly signalled a broadening of Connery’s horizons, leading to some mid-’70s acts of quasi-historical derring do. There was Robin And Marian, which saw him embrace his age as a long-in-the-tooth Robin Hood, opposite Audrey Hepburn. There was The Wind And The Lion, where he played a Berber warrior in 1904 Morocco. And there was John Huston’s majestic Boys’ Own masterpiece The Man Who Would Be King. Here, Connery formed a pitch-perfect double act with Michael Caine as Rudyard Kipling’s pair of Victorian rogues who cheat their way into rulership of a small country in the Hindukush. “If I had to name a particular favourite [film],” Connery said in 2015, “it would probably be The Man Who Would Be King.”
He also headed to the other end of the Solar
System in Outland, Peter Hyams’ sci-fi reskin of High Noon, and went to war in Dickie Attenborough’s sprawling ensemble piece
A Bridge Too Far. Though for all the exotic expansion of range, one thing never changed: the way he talked. Boorman, who remained friends with Connery for years after Zardoz, once asked him why he never tried doing a different accent. “If I didn’t talk the way I talk, I wouldn’t know who the fuck I am!” Connery replied.
However, that otherworldly “magus” aspect cited by Bray wasn’t tapped again until 1980’s hugely successful Time Bandits, which established the on-screen Connery persona that would finally dispel Bond. Namely, the surrogate father figure. When time-travelling boy Kevin (Craig Warnock) tumbles into Ancient Greece, Connery’s Agamemnon takes him under his wing and starts to raise him as his own, teaching him magic tricks rather than martial arts — an addition to the script suggested by Connery himself.
“My theory is that he was feeling a bit guilty about not being a hands-on father when he was so busy doing films,” says Gilliam. “There was something going on there, but I can’t be sure because we didn’t talk about the film in that way. He was such a practical, pragmatic person. You didn’t get into backstories and all that shit talking to him!”
Gilliam and co-writer Michael Palin had jokingly described Agamemnon in the script as “revealing himself to be none other than Sean Connery, or an actor of equal but cheaper stature”, so Connery was clearly game. He was ready to spend this stage of his career having more fun on screen (which may partly explain his decision to make 1983’s Never Say Never Again
— well, apart from the $3 million paycheque). It is not hard to trace a line from Time Bandits to the entertainingly outlandish 1986 double bill of The Name Of The Rose, with Connery playing the sprightly Franciscan-friar Sherlock Holmes to Christian Slater’s novice Watson, and Highlander,
in which he was the Spanish-egyptian sensei to Christopher Lambert’s immortal warrior.
Then, of course, came The Untouchables,
which won him his first and only Oscar and, at the age of 57, put him firmly on the ’90s A-list. After 20-odd years of his most adventurous and varied roles, he’d finally done it: he’d proven to the world he was not James Bond. He was Sean bloody Connery.