If I had ever met Sean Connery, who passed away the other day at the grand old age of 90, the conversation might have been rather awkward, especially if we had touched on the subject of politics.
Sean, being an expatriate millionaire who supported the SNP but stayed out of Scotland for tax reasons, while also advertising Japanese whisky (!), would have provided some soft targets for a churlish barb or two. But his political opinions—default Hollywood leftism peppered with Braveheart nationalism and a suspicion of Fenian Anglophobia (he was 25% Irish, on his father's side)—were mere baggage. What Sean was really all about was meta-masculinity combined with the tough discipline of early poverty, expressed in his very "Scottish" traits of penny pinching and driving bargains that made his agents' eyes water.
Iconic as Bond, a kind of colorful ghost of dead British hegemony in the 1960s, he also struggled manfully against his own co-creation. Indeed, even while he was in the process of building up the cult of Bond, he took on other parts that he believed would extricate himself from being defined by the role.
This is where serious articles and biographies of him like park their centre of gravity, detailing how the would-be "serious actor" took on "serious projects" with "serious directors" to recast himself as a "multi-actor," not just a Bond clone.
Yes, we get it, but films like The Hill (1965) and The Offence (1973), which he made with "respected" Jewish American director Sydney Lumet, while getting the "serious critics" to gush, make rather tedious viewing today. In general, they seem overwritten and overwrought, as indeed they are, and almost feminine in their claustrophobic—i.e. written for the stage—emotionalism.
In The Offence, for example, he plays the psychological stereotype of a sexually repressed police detective driven to violence against a suspected pedo by his own pedo fantasies. Yes....yawn! For film buffs the best of the five Lumet-Connery collaborations is probably the tech-driven crime caper The Anderson Tapes (1971).
The six Bond movies he made between 1962 and 1971, by contrast, still seem effortless and natural, and remain highly enjoyable. This signifies a case of perfect casting, as well as something classic in the role of Bond. My personal favourite of the six, for entirely subjective reasons, is You Only Live Twice (1968).
In contrast to the rather embarrassing "raw emotions" spilled over the screen in his Lumet collaborations, what we get with Connery's Bond is a believable mixture of dry cynicism and flinty stoicism. The essence of man is, of course, to keep up a relatively solid front, while having plenty in reserve—and to strengthen his emotions by keeping them chained.
This is the "alpha male" signal that Connery sent out so strongly on a broad frequency across a culture where such values were, like the post-Imperial power of Britain, rapidly ebbing away, and all the more valuable for it.
Just as Bond was a ghost of British power, so Connery, as a public figure, became increasingly a ghost of Western man's departing masculinity, which neatly brings us onto his famous, dare I say "notorious" comments on violence against women, which he expressed in a rare unguarded moment in a 1965 Playboy interview:
"I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman- although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man. An open-handed slap is justified if all other alternatives fail.”
Of course the feminists who point and sputter at such comments today are the same ones who rushed out to buy Fifty Shades of Grey when it hit the bookshelves, which is really all you need to know about that.
This aspect of the man is also one that makes Sean, irredeemable to the shrill, sexless harridans, like Nicola Sturgeon, who now run Sean's once beloved SNP. So, maybe Sean and I would have got on just fine after all.
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