Weird Scenes 4/4/19: Sean Connery - Beyond Bond

Our late in the run At Eye Level correspondent from Scotland regularly brought up, as a sort of bemused reality check, the fact that his grandmother's milkman was none other than Sean Connery. A prophet has no honor in his own country...

Supposedly an amateur bodybuilder (though you'd probably never know it from what we see on celluloid) and ex-Royal Navy man, Connery was a milkman both as a youth and an adult, a truck driver, a grave digger, an artist's model and a laborer. But that all changed.

Turning down all manner of blue collar jobs and manual labor (supposedly even a shot at being a pro footballer), he made a crucial right turn into acting...and give or take ten years working his way through inconsequential bit parts in westerns, Disney pictures and such, the rest is history.

Because in 1962, he took on the role of Ian Fleming's superspy James Bond, one rejiggered to the fantasies and hopes of its day, all tech gadgets and Cold War gravitas kneaded into a pulp action adventure series unlike any other...but which spawned literal hundreds of imitators globally, most notably the krimis, Edgar Wallace and Mabuse films and Jerry Cotton series out of Germany and ridiculous numbers of Italian, French, British and Spanish Eurospy pictures. Hell, even washed up crooners like Dean Martin and tongue in cheek types like Tony Randall and the James Coburn In Like Flint series got in on the act, domestically...

Tonight, we're going to tackle some of the notable films he's been front and center for, from poorly sung Irishmen chasing leprechauns to taut thrillers, from bizarre Eurowesterns and gritty, soul searching 70's cop dramas to weird allegories about sex and society, lousy disaster films, midgets, monks, evil knights, badly Russian accented sub commanders, awkward Alan Moore adaptations...even Indiana Jones' father!

We've taken on his more famous series twice over, but this is virgin territory...

So stay tuned as we tackle the (non-Bond) films of Sean Connery, only here on Weird Scenes!

Week 62: Sean Connery - Beyond Bond

 

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