Sean Connery Created the Modern Action Hero
What’s the most important movie performance of the 20th century? The default answer among cinephiles and film historians would likely be Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, which heralded a permanent shift in movie acting, away from mannered theatricality and towards the more outwardly realistic, spontaneous style known as “method” acting.
But I’ve always had a different candidate in mind: Sean Connery in Dr. No. In his first performance as James Bond, Connery didn’t simply bring to life the immortal spy. He essentially created—fully formed—the modern action hero as we know it. Even now, 58 years after Dr. No’s premiere, almost everyone who plays an action-movie badass is doing a riff on Connery, whether intentionally or not.
It’s all there, right in his first go-round as Bond: the one-liners, the unflappable cool, the blasé attitude in the face of death, the sexual magnetism, the charm that could be turned off in an instant when it was time to fight, even a certain degree of cruelty. Dr. No doesn’t actually contain the now cliched scene in which the main character walks away from an explosion without looking behind him, but that moment is the archetype that Connery created in a nutshell: the hero who doesn’t so much as flinch when the flames are licking at his back.
Many of the classic film-noir detectives had a similar quality, but unlike them, Connery’s Bond wasn’t supposed to be a cynical or jaded man. When a Humphrey Bogart character reacted to murder or bloodshed with just a pithy one-liner, we understood that his hard-boiled nature was a defense mechanism against an ugly, corrupt world. But the world that Bond moved through—close brushes with death aside—was a bright and exciting place, a sort of permanent vacation.
He didn’t seem weighed down by his capacity for violence, but almost relished it: in one of Dr. No’s most iconic moments, he coldly tells a would-be assassin that the latter’s gun is out of bullets just before executing the man. Audiences weren’t used to rooting for this kind of cruelty before, and in lesser hands James Bond might have seemed like nothing more than a sociopath. But Connery’s wolfish charm and easy likability convinced viewers that Bond was a good guy comfortable with killing rather than simply a killer. For good or ill, the default movie hero from this point on was someone who dispatched his foes with a smirk and a wisecrack, moral ambiguity be damned.
Connery could get away with it because he seemed so effortlessly cool, even when he was doing practically nothing. Later movies in the franchise would go overboard on insisting that James Bond is the Most Awesome Man Alive, as if to compensate for lead actors who were appealing enough but still mere mortals. Dr. No, taking its cues from Connery, has the confidence to be a little more subtle. Take, for example, the film’s introduction to James Bond, roughly seven minutes into its runtime. He’s seated in a modest British casino, playing baccarat against a beautiful, elegantly dressed woman. We don’t get the full reveal of his face at first, just glimpses of his person—his finely tailored tuxedo, his hands maneuvering the cards, his gun-metal cigarette case. He keeps winning, frustrating the lovely young woman. After several losses, she asks the casino for another thousand pounds in credit, which prompts this classic exchange:
Bond: I admire your courage, Miss, uh?
Woman: Trench. Sylvia Trench. I admire your luck, Mr…..?
Then, finally, the close-up revealing our hero as he lights his cigarette and says the line: “Bond. James Bond.” It’s so simple—literally just a man saying his own name!—and yet Connery transforms those three words into a catchphrase that has epitomized cool for generations. The rest of the scene is similarly understated: Bond receives a message that he’s urgently needed, quits the table, asks Miss Trench if “she plays any other games” in her spare time" (Connery’s Bond would never be so gauche as to proposition a woman outright, but merely hints at the fun they could be having), and utters a droll “splendid” and leaves after a clearly intrigued Trench says she’ll think about a golf-and-dinner date the next day.
The scene as written and directed is a solid introduction to this globetrotting, bed-hopping superspy, but it’s Connery who fills in the details and somehow makes a character as ridiculous as James Bond not just believable but relatable, inviting everyone in the audience to imagine that his confidence and lust for life could be ours, too. It’s the sort of movie magic that only an actor of the first rank could summon up: making the hero both larger-than-life and human-scale, someone whose worldly sophistication is apparent in even the smallest of gestures, like the louche way he holds his cigarettes.
Indeed, Connery arguably deserves to be thought of as Bond’s co-creator, since his hugely popular portrayal was very different from author Ian Fleming’s conception of the character as “an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened.” Which, it’s fair to say, is not how anyone would describe Bond today.
James Bond lives on, of course, in new movies with new actors playing 007. And he has plenty of descendants, fictional characters like Keanu Reeves’ John Wick or Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde or Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer that all riff on the Bond archetype in interesting ways. But no one has ever given us a James Bond, official or unofficial, with the same charisma as Sean Connery, and I doubt anyone ever will.
Even though Connery is gone now, sadly, the influence of his performance in Dr. No is still so great that it’s almost impossible to imagine what our pop culture today would look like without it. He is still the suave hero our society dreams of being when we close our eyes: Connery. Sean Connery.
You Might Also Like
