IN the end, the news reports said the death of Sean Connery was hastened by his dementia. Sean Connery was dead at 90 years of age on the last day of October. That was the news, the regular news. Memory, which is greater than any news, will, of course, keep Sean Connery and James Bond alive for eternity.
In my generation, there were the Marvel Comics heroes, and there was James Bond. Or Sean Connery.
I was in elementary when he burst upon us—classmates from a local Catholic school—from the big screen in one of the moviehouses in our city. I have to stress “Catholic” because when I was older, I saw how “objectionable” the many scenes in that first film we viewed. The film was Dr. No. And we were allowed to watch it.
When historians of cinema write about censorship and control in the industry, there would be the gaps and fissures abounding in the narrative. The fact that we saw many of James Bond films long before we turned 18 was a giveaway—there was a different sense of moral gatekeeping in those years. Or could it be because the adult society then were assured we would not understand anyway the double meanings and dirty wit in James Bond films?
Let it be said that we never distinguished “James Bond” from Sean Connery, the role from the actor. They were one and the same.
It was the first time for us to witness an action star who moved with such ease and elegance. We looked at Sean Connery as the model for good manly dressing. Whenever our older cousins and uncles wore a suit or jacket and tie, it had to be in the manner of Sean Connery—impeccable with sleeves that did not hoist up, white shirts immaculate, and ties that were tied without sin.
He could fight without breaking a sweat. His clothes never crumpled even after jumping from walls, or kicking enemies. He knew how to handle guns and they were in that cool, cold, chilly way. The endpoint of that gun, however, was the bad man falling without grace, and our James Bond standing tall as if no killing ever took place.
The generation that witnessed the birth and rise, and continuing rise of Sean Connery saw also the renaissance of the cowboy. But while in the person of Sean Connery his James Bond never wavered from being a dapper gentleman, the cowboy went through an inverse correlation in terms of evolution. The self-righteous man of the Wild, Wild West became dirtier and unkempt as the years went by. Think Franco Nero as Django, think Clint Eastwood in all those Sergio Leone classics.
In the early years, no one really talked yet about the Bond Girls. That came much later to us fans from the late 1960s. It was in the late 1970s when we realized how Sean Connery always was perfect with women. He could make love to them. He could fight them as enemies, equal in strength to him. That served as a tricky contribution of the Bond movies to the discourse of empowered women. The duplicity in the narrative of wily, technically adept women was in the scenes of their defeat, which always took place in the deadly embrace of Sean Connery.
Women wilted when kissed by James Bond/Sean Connery. And the feminists and critics protested.
And yet, when one talks of iconic moments in James Bond movies, it involved always the women—from Ursula Andress rising like Venus from the sea in Dr. No, to the mercilessly murderous Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love with shoes that revealed hidden sharp spikes—a proto Wolverine, if you may. Ms. Lenya, of course, was the better half of Kurt Weill whose songs she immortalized. Or go back to Goldfinger where Shirley Eaton has her body painted in gold.
Then there were the names of those Bond Girls: Ursula Andress was Honey Rider and there were Maud Adams as Octopussy and Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore.
Those women survived the names; more importantly, Sean Connery came out unscathed from those acts of bad or funny taste. He would go on to make seven Bond films, all making a killing in the box office. In between, he acted in a Hitchcock film, Marnie, but fans ignored that infraction. He would always be James Bond, and nothing could change that.
He continued making non-Bond films, some earning critical praise for him. He would be back in 1983 for his last Bond movie in 1983, Never Say Never Again. It is unconfirmed but people talk of the title as attributed to an earlier negative attitude fostered by Sean Connery, a mood that urged him not to act again in a Bond movie.
The Bond movies continued with different actors playing the suave secret agent. Whether people forgot about Sean Connery as James Bond can never be determined. What is true is that good actors made the role their own and Sean Connery went on to make damn good movies.
In 1986, he would win a Best Actor from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for the role of a Franciscan friar, William of Baskerville, in the film The Name of the Rose. Interestingly, the role was that of a friar-sleuth investigating deaths in an abbey.
Sean Connery would star in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables in 1986. He would act alongside Robert de Niro, Kevin Costner and other big names but Sean Connery would more than hold his own by winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor the next year.
In 2000, Sean Connery received Knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. Not bad for someone who, it has been written, was tutored by Terence Young, the director of James Bond films, on how to walk, talk, dress and eat like a nobleman in order to be Bond…James Bond.
Sean Connery was born on August 25, 1930, and died on October 31, 2020.