| Holden Pike | 11-07-20 03:15 PM |
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Originally Posted by AKA23 (Post 2138908)
Holden, I like Sean Connery, and a consequence of Connery's death is that I reviewed his filmography, and I learned that I haven't seen most of his movies. I've seen the Bond movies, his Indiana Jones movie, "The Untouchables," and most of the popular movies that he did from the 1990's until he retired, but I haven't seen his other movies. Since you know so much about movies and seem to be a Connery fan, I'd like to know your top 10 best Connery films/performances. I'll start watching them! Thanks for your guidance.
For me The Hill (1965) is his best performance, and a darn good flick. It is the first of his five collaborations with director Sidney Lumet, set in an African World War II British Army military prison. My favorite Connery movie period is John Huston's adaptation of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King (1975) where Connery and Michael Caine are perfectly cast as two soldiers of fortune who bite off more than they can chew. Connery did a lot of great work in the 1970s, lots of facial hair, lots of period pieces, but audiences at large seemed to be slow to accept him as something other than 007 until he aged into those older roles in the '80s and beyond. The Molly Maguires (1970) is an excellent historically-based piece about Irish-American Pennsylvania coal miners in the 19th Century co-starring Richard Harris. The 1800s is also the setting for Michael Crichton's gritty and fun The Great Train Robbery (1978) co-starring Donald Sutherland. Dick Lester's Robin & Marian (1976) is set even further back, though past the point of other cinematic tales of Robin of Locksley, finding Connery and Audrey Hepburn as the title characters a couple decades after the story that is usually told and ultimately clashing again with Robert Shaw's Sheriff of Nottingham.
Set just in the first few years of the 20th Century is John Milius' The Wind and the Lion (1975), a loose riff on a real incident, here it is Connery's Moroccan sharif who kidnaps an American (Candy Bergen) and interests President Teddy Roosevelt (Brian Keith). The ludicrous ethnic miscasting of Connery aside - something that would never happen in this day and age - when you get past that and the other tweaks of history it is a rousing Kiplingesque adventure and Sean is charming as ever. Going from the past into the future, Outland (1981) is sort of High Noon meets Alien finding Connery's marshall of a moonbase mining operation above Jupiter who must almost single-handedly take on some baddies, with a wonderful supporting turn by Frances Sternhagen. Not as action-filled as today's audience might want, it's a good B-movie.
All of the other Lumet films are worth seeing. The most famous is being aboard the all-star Murder on the Orient Express (1974) as one of the myriad suspects, of course. Lesser known are the funky, paranoid heist flick The Anderson Tapes (1971) featuring a young Christopher Walken, the tense back-and-forth British cop interrogation drama of The Offence (1973), and then the least of them - though still enjoyable, especially for Connery - is Family Business (1989) where after being ethnically miscast so often in his career it is not Connery but Dustin Hoffman who is the head-scratcher here, playing his son, with Matthew Broderick his grandson. The third act builds to a big fat nothing, but Connery has some fun, strong moments.
I'd recommend working one's way through those. Happy viewing!