News of Sean Connery’s death has brought out fond remembrances from film fans and Hollywood professionals alike. Apart from looking great in a tux and having a thick Scottish accent people love to imitate, realizing just how many classics Connery made has left many agog. Perhaps you are itching to spend some time right now revisiting his best work, but don’t know where to start? We are here to help.
To recommend ten titles from Connery’s curriculum vitae is to regretfully leave a lot by the wayside. (I’m sorry, Terry Gilliam, you are forever getting the short end of the stick.) Some real gold is missing from this list. Still, this represents a look at Connery’s persona from multiple angles, and ought to keep any movie buff busy.
From Russia With Love (1963)
This wasn’t the first 007 film (that was Dr. No) nor was it the original run’s biggest box office hit (that was Thunderball) but this is, in the opinion of the creator of this list, the greatest James Bond picture of them all. It has exotic locales from Istanbul to Belgrade to Venice, a chess master, Lotte Lenye’s poison-tipped shoe, Matt Monro’s theme song, a fight with Robert Shaw on the Orient Express, stashed cameras filming deceptive wooing, and Italian model-actress Daniela Bianchi as a Soviet cryptographer thrust into the Cold War’s theater of excitement to lure James Bond to his doom while wearing a choker. What a picture.
From Russia With Love is streaming for free on PlutoTV with ads, and rentable from most providers for a low sum.
Marnie (1964)
In the words of its director Alfred Hitchcock, Marnie, his follow-up to The Birds, is “a sex mystery.” Connery sought out the role, hoping to keep himself in the public eye in an occasional non-Bond role. (It was released just a few months before the Bond megahit Goldfinger.) Connery’s Mark Rutland marries Tippi Hedrin‘s titular Marnie, a kleptomaniac with additional psychological problems. Whether or not Rutland is a selfless hero who will stop at nothing to alleviate his new bride’s troubles or actually has nefarious ulterior motives keeps viewers guessing in this unusual (and a little icky at times) film.
Marnie is streaming for free on Peacock with ads, and rentable from most providers for a low sum.
You Only Live Twice (1967)
Connery made seven Bond films if you count the non-Eon production Never Say Never Again (which you should; it’s terrific.) With them he and 007 achieved a kind of singular cultural hegemony no other film franchise has matched. (The MCU is too scattered, and Harry Potter’s glory is spread out among his cohorts, his school, that talking hat, etc.) It was with this entry, though, that the series, already silly, went full-bore ludicrous. Pussycat-stroking archenemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s secret lair inside of a volcano, from which he fires off rockets with kidnapped astronauts, is a fever dream of big, dumb production design, yet the movie is still somehow riveting. Bond’s decision to go undercover as Japanese results in some rather unfortunate makeup, but denying racist tropes in classic film is no way to ensure they do not continue.