Beyond Bond films: remembering Sean Connery

Ian Fleming, who created Bond, was an Empire man but the wry actor who played Bond was his own man, writes Arul Mani

I haven’t been jerked out of the bleariness of birthday evenings like this in a long time. The last famous person to die on my birthday was Indira Gandhi, and I forgave her easily, because schools shut for two weeks after, even though the only violence we had in Bangalore was whiny music every day on television. I had forgotten about Sean Connery, partly because he chose to disappear, and partly because the wife-beating story that surfaced a decade or so ago had caused some withdrawal.

To remember is sometimes to forgive, sometimes to confirm a separation, and you might have to stay with me while I try to figure this out.

When I watched Connery playing Bond for the first time, I came away oddly underwhelmed. Because a couple of things had happened before that

One was the rapture of others. You couldn’t miss him in 1970s Bangalore. I picked up quickly the adulation of older boys, for whom it was style: suits, and gadgets, and cars, and what he said to women. When I got to know women who liked him, it was for his presence, his sense of timing, for his voice, for the funny things he said. One such lady fan lived behind Lido theatre, where the Bond films often played, and would shin over the compound wall into the theatre because she couldn’t bear the fact that three people might get ahead of her in the queue if she relied on the proper but unnecessarily roundabout way of getting into the theatre. The problem with hand-me-down rapture is that it keeps getting in the way of the first-hand experience.

The other complication came from the newspapers. In the 1970s, ours was the only household on the street which picked up Indian Express. The rest got Deccan Herald. My day, for many years, was organised around two high points. Waking up and racing to the gate, because Express had Tarzan, and I had to read it before everyone else. The other ritual, when I got back home from school, was to burst into the neighbours’ and then linger slack-jawed over the James Bond comic strip.

That strip was the first thing I re-read many times, tripping on the way it luxuriated in the naming of food that never quite appeared. How could a boy escape being smitten by tournedos in a bearnaise sauce, or grilled veal kidney with souffle potatoes? More often than the food, it was the stratagems by which the bad guys were foiled — the knife hidden in a heel, a cheque behind a name-plate, a laser-beam that could slice through a rope. The strip was also the first place where I came across the idea that women might wear skimpy clothes, though this detail didn’t hold me as long as the food did.

The comic strips were originally commissioned for the Daily Express, a British tabloid that no doubt saw sense in the way the ideological clarities of Cold War fiction made room for a Bond who kept Britain relevant in the fight against communism and spies.

At first glance, the films seemed to lack the commentary and signposting verve that the comic-strip had. The comic strip did a lot more explaining and this made things simple. The artists doing the strip also took Ian Fleming a lot more seriously than Connery ever did.

When my eyes eventually adjusted to Connery, I began to understand and enjoy the kinaesthetics by which he gave himself to the role without succumbing to it. Fleming was an Empire man; Connery was his own man.

He brought to playing Bond an emotional distance, a wariness about what the role seemed to entail. Maybe his Scots temperament, and working-class origins, put him at this distance. Maybe his sense of reality wrought a general incredulity about the upper-class values that Fleming wrote into Bond’s character.

Connery’s Bond is a master-class in wryness, never summering into smiles, or jaunty Wodehousian expansiveness. In Bangalore’s Cantonment, then a suburb of distant but definitely metropolitan London, this played out in different ways. For those given to uncritical Anglophilia, Connery’s sang-froid was indistinguishable from typical British stiff upper lip, and so watching him play the role in insulation was to watch the jagged insularity of the British Isles transfer from the map to screen. For those who were not so tone-deaf, his clear secessions conversed with our tentative separatism.

This distance would lead him to seek a career away from Bond, and also seems to explain some of the roles he chose. Doordarshan watchers may recall ‘The Wind and the Lion’, a pill of a film by John Milius. Connery plays Mulai Ahmed Raisuli, a Moroccan separatist who kidnaps an American family in order to force a confrontation between Morocco’s king and the West. If there is anything that lifts the film out of the casual US-aggrandizement genre that Hollywood favours, it is the Omar-Mukhtar-esque turn that Connery brings to his role.

In Jean Jacques Annaud’s film of the Umberto Eco novel The Name of the Rose, Connery is entirely at home playing a carefully drafted anachronism, a pre-modern anticipation of that extremely modern figure, the crime-solver.

His William De Baskerville is an outsider in his own world by dint of reading, reasoning and a careful attention to human foible. Annaud chickens out of the tragic intensity that Eco builds around this character, but Connery brings a magisterial reading to this circumscribed role.

Another kind of secession, towards integrity, away from the system, underpins his Jim Malone in The Untouchables. The role is written for easy melodrama, and that is probably why it won him an Oscar, but it must be conceded that the raging integrity he brings to the role is quite impressive, and all but eclipses Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness.

The film that stands out among all these choices where Connery revisits the line ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’ is John Huston’s retelling of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. The roles played by Connery and Michael Caine were originally assigned to Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, but I find it hard to believe that they could have brought the same edge to these roles of Celtic and Cockney outsiders playing at empires. Connery’s Daniel Dravot is a masterpiece of characterisation — an affable, avid, smiling rogue who overreaches because he ends up believing his own lies.

This second life as an actor eventually petered out into roles that were caricatures of his persona, and that seems to have caused the disgust which compelled him to retire.

Diane Cilento’s allegations that Connery was a violent husband in her autobiography ‘My Nine Lives’ erased the actor’s sheen quite considerably when it came it out in 2006, as did his comments in an interview with Barbara Walters. I don’t think there is any sensible way of excusing him except to ask if it teaches us anything about institutionalised misogyny and what men learn from it. If he learnt to do better in later life than he did as a young man, we could perhaps say he stumbled towards something substantial.