Not my Bond, but my icon just the same

I didn't see Sean Connery in a James Bond movie until 2006. The second of January, 2006, to be exact, when at long last I cracked the seal on Connery's long career as 007 with Dr. No.

This is not a technically accurate statement. I did see Never Say Never Again around the time it first came out, on a plane I think. But I was always confused about why this interloper was playing Roger Moore's role. I have no idea if that's actually a good movie or not (my sources say no) because I was too distracted by Connery's presence.

Many people eulogizing Connery, who died at age 90 this weekend, will naturally focus their attentions on him giving birth to one of cinema's most famous figures, who is still with us today, and would have had his own most recent movie in 2020 if not for the pandemic. 

Not me. But that doesn't mean I didn't love Sean Connery.

I've chosen for this memoriam post a still from my highest ranked Connery film on Flickchart, Time Bandits (#29), which I happened to have watched just a few months ago on the occasion of the death of Ian Holm. I guess I was preparing for Connery's death for a while now -- it's something I've thought might be coming soon, knowing that he had entered his tenth decade of life -- as I also watched The Untouchables back in September.

For many people, these would be considered secondary roles that paled in comparison to his work as Bond, even if he won an Oscar for the latter. (And when you look him up on IMDB, The Untouchables is the title the site uses to distinguish him on first glance: "Actor, The Untouchables.")

For me, they were primary texts.

Something about the warrior's strength and extreme paternal warmth of his King Agamemnon in Time Bandits just typified, for the eight-year-old me, the type of pure magnetism we expect of our great cinematic stars. So even though he's in no more than 15 minutes of that movie, he is one of its most memorable parts. 

When I rewatched The Untouchables, I was reminded of how little of that movie he's actually in as well. He might not come into it until the 20- or 30-minute mark, and he dies earlier in the narrative than I remembered. But again, he makes a huge impression in just a short amount of screen time. My friends and I used to always quote to each other his unforgettable "that's how you get Capone" speech.

It would be absurd to suggest that Connery was better as a character actor than a lead, as indeed, his personality in a leading role could sell tickets with the best of them. But even in my third-ranked Connery film on Flickchart, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he's more appropriately considered a supporting actor than the lead. Co-lead, maybe.

It's not until my fourth-ranked Connery film that we get to both James Bond and a film in which he undoubtedly was top billed, which was my favorite of the four proper Connery Bond films I've seen: Goldfinger. It was in this film that I feel like the Bond we still love today was born. That was thanks to Connery, whether he was "my Bond" or not.

I've seen 16 Connery films, according to Flickchart, though I have yet to add my most recently watched Bond film, Thunderball, so that will make 17. Yet only those four I've mentioned so far make my top 1000 films. That would suggest that maybe Connery wasn't really "my movie star" either.

Except that whenever Sean Connery appeared in a film, I was excited for it. Whether he was a Russian submarine captain in The Hunt for Red October or an immortal in Highlander or even a gonzo warrior in the extremely goofy Zardoz, he always brought a presence, a charisma, and an absolutely ripper Scottish burr to his performances. When he effectively retired from making movies nearly 20 years ago -- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was his last major role in 2003, if you can believe it -- it always felt premature to me, like Connery had left us adoring fans with a palpable absence on the cinematic landscape.

And now he's left a palpable absence in the world at large.

To honor Connery I plan to continue working my way through his Bond movies on Monday night, though it's sad to note that I'll have only one left after this one. You Only Live Twice will be an appropriately melancholy choice, I think, as this is the one whose premise features at least a fake-out of the character's actual death.

After that, only Diamonds Are Forever will remain. The good thing about the medium of cinema, though, is that movie stars are also forever. So even if we don't have him anymore, in another sense, we'll always have Sean Connery.

Rest in peace.

The right amount of Capone

Josh Trank's Capone didn't do much for me, as you know from this post, but what it did do is whet my appetite to revisit for the first time in yonks (to use the Australian phraseology) one of my favorite movies as a teenager, Brian de Palma's The Untouchables.

This is the amount of Al Capone we need.

Robert De Niro appears on screen for less than 15 minutes of a two-hour movie, but you know what? Each and every one of his scenes is memorable.

There's the opening scene, where he talks about crime in Chicago while getting a shave, and you wonder if the barber nicking his neck with his razor is going to be cause for the man to be immediately killed.

There's the famous baseball bat scene, where he murders a capo who disappointed him in front of all the other capos, to send a message to them all to stay in line, to "play for the team."

There's the scene where he talks about wanting Elliot Ness and his family dead, and keeps hitting the word "dead" so you know how serious he is.

There's the scene where both parties have to be held back on a staircase so Ness and he don't get into a fist fight with each other.

There's the scene where he's sitting at the opera and gets a big grin on his face upon learning that one of the untouchables has been taken out.

There's the scene where he starts punching his lawyer during his trial when the lawyer changes his plea from not guilty to guilty.

And there are no more scenes.

This is a stark contrast with Capone, where Tom Hardy is on screen for nearly every damn shot of the entire movie, excepting for a very few brief scenes between federal agents discussing their surveillance of him.

Now, the performances these actors are giving is one of the things that makes the contrast so stark. In The Untouchables, it's the great Robert De Niro, who can make a role iconic just by playing it. Notably, he doesn't strain for some kind of absurd accent. He just plays Robert De Niro, and if you think that's a criticism, have you ever seen a Robert De Niro movie? He's menacing without even making a specific effort to be, with just a look from those steely eyes. He leaves us wanting more.

Tom Hardy's performance in Capone is nothing but accent. Joe Morgenstern, in a review tabulated to equal a rating of 10 on Metacritic, describes him as "growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking's synthesizer." (This is a hilarious description even though I don't know who Lionel Stander is.) In my previous post I suggested Hardy should win an award for most acting. He's all flinches and ticks and drools. You know the type of performance I mean, the type that makes you want way, way less. (In another review, which I can't seem to locate at the moment, the critic referred to him as showing a curious disregard for the normal binaries of good vs. bad acting.)

The real problem, though, is that by spending so much time with Capone in Capone -- and Trank's artistic choices don't help -- it's clear we are meant to sympathize with this man on some level, almost like it's a tragedy that he's lost his physical and mental faculties from neuro-syphilis. The film sets the tone by opening on a scene of Capone playing hide and seek with his grandchildren, in which he appears loveable and easygoing. I actually found this to be the film's most effective scene, as it overturns our expectations -- Capone is shown carrying a blunt instrument through his silent mansion, as though he's paranoid about an intruder trying to kill him, only for it to be revealed that he's playing the role of villain in a game with these children. However well it works on a narrative level, it lays the groundwork for us to see this monster as human.

In The Untouchables, it's clear Capone is a monster in every moment. He demonstrates nothing but malevolence, which I think is correct. Oh, I'm sure Al Capone loved his family and maybe helped an old lady across the street once or twice. But I think it's correct that our takeaway should be that this man is evil and was responsible for a great many ruined lives, while not paying nearly the price he deserved to pay for his crimes. In Capone, there's a line of dialogue where one of the feds says "What's the difference between Al Capone and Adolf Hitler? Adolf Hitler is dead." And while that line is potentially problematic in some respects, comparing ethnicity-based genocide to a much smaller scale mass murder driven purely by business interests, it does indicate the extent to which people at the time considered Capone a menace.

Capone as a movie, though, does not make us believe it.

The Untouchables as a movie was not as beloved to me in 2020 as it was in 1987, though it certainly didn't suffer the same kind of hit in my affections as another Kevin Costner movie I recently rewatched, Field of Dreams. I still like this movie quite a bit and really enjoyed watching it, but it probably doesn't quite deserve the five stars I had given it on Letterboxd as a retroactive estimation of my affections.