Wordless Wednesday: Par for the Course

Wordless Wednesday : Truly Bonded!

Great Scot

Sean Connery

Pictured in his finest performance, that of the detective in Sidney Lumet's psychological thriller from 1972 The Offence

Love To Hate : Robert Shaw

Normally with a Love To Hate post I'd cite the actor and a specific villainous role.

But you're rather spoilt for choice with Westhoughton's finest, Robert Shaw.

King of the villains you can't help but be impressed by or secretly root for, I suppose you have to mention his magnificent turn as Red Grant, an emotionless hardened killer in the employ of SPECTRE in the second James Bond film, 1963's From Russia With Love

In that he gets to face off opposite Sean Connery's Bond in a wince inducing bout of to the death hand to hand combat aboard the Orient Express. 

Thirteen years later, and you could say Connery graciously accepted a rematch. 1976 saw Shaw play the Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Connery's Robin Hood in Dick Lester's elegiac Robin and Marian

One of the definitive adaptations of the legend, Robin and Marian tells the story of an aging Hood returning to Sherwood after a time spent fighting in The Crusades. Reuniting with his weary old band of outlaws and reigniting his love with Marian (Audrey Hepburn) he proceeds to do battle once more with a jaded and cynical Sheriff, who occasionally seems pleased or at least entertained to have his old foe back - a worthy opponent he can grudgingly respect to a certain extent.

Going face to face again, Connery's outlaw narrowly defeats and kills Shaw's Sheriff, but not before he delivers a fatal wound that Hood succumbs to at the film's close.

So let's call that 2-1 to Connery on aggregate eh?

Perhaps my favourite villainous turn from Shaw though is in 1974's The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three in which he used his now trademark darkly muttering and constantly irritated style to great effect as Bernard Ryder aka Mr Blue, leading his gang of hijackers (Mr Green, Mr Grey and Mr Brown - Tarantino take note) across the New York subway system.

It's an absolutely definitive performance and utterly influential - every single classy British villain/terrorist to grace the plethora of action movies from Die Hard in the following decade to Star Trek Into Darkness in the present day, owes a debt to Robert Shaw.

The Best Bond Poll Results.

Yes the results are in.

And it appears nobody does it better than.....

Sean Connery

The original proved to be the best coming in at 001 by a country mile with 41% of the vote. Was it ever truly in doubt? Shurely not, as the big man might say. He helped create not only an icon but also a template, for each of his successors to be caste from and hopefully even beat. Not yet though clearly.

Timothy Dalton

The brooding Welshman hit 002 in the poll and was a clear favourite from the off; at one brief point he was even ahead of Connery! Dalton's short tenure saw a return to Fleming's original intentions in terms of the character, but was regrettably still saddled with the naff gadgets and worse, political correctness. This was safe sex Bond, and for the audience at the time it was something of a turn off. Time has been kinder to Timothy, clearly, with 17% of the vote.

George Lazenby

Old Big Fry himself was perhaps a surprising entry at 003. Whilst OHMSS has long been my favourite Bond movie, Lazenby - whilst utterly looking the part and screaming the definition of late 60s Swinging London action man - didn't really have the acting chops of his predecessor, Connery. Some bad behaviour and even badder advice saw George leave the role after just one film but 12% of you rate him, imagine how much more votes he could have garnered had he had all the time in the world?

Daniel Craig

Two films in and one about to be released on Oct 26th makes Craig our 004. His debut was nothing short of brilliant; a rollicking adventure, mature and heady, it was what every Bond movie should be and underneath all the crashes and bangs, our stone faced Bourne-esque Bond proved he had a heart, with more than a nod to the style of OHMSS. A slightly faltering, but no less stylish step with A Quantum Of Solace hasn't dampened your expectations or faith, and he walks away with 14% of the vote.

Roger Moore

For a certain generation of mid thirty somethings and forty somethings, Roger Moore is James Bond, gracing our TV screens in the Bank Holidays of our 1970s and 80s collective youth. But clearly that time is fading and fashion changing and it is with a little eyebrow raising surprise and disappointment that the Bond with the lightest of comedic touches could only secure 005 in our poll. Moore played the part in a staggering seven films, all with his tongue firmly in cheek and a wink tipped knowingly to the audience as he seamlessly stepped into the place of his hard working stuntman following any number of extravaganzas. 9% of you still think the Moore the merrier.

Pierce Brosnan

Languishing at the bottom (rightly, in my opinion) in 006th place is the once 'great white hope' of Bond; Pierce Brosnan. When the series was resurrected in the 90s with Goldeneye Brosnan was hailed the best since Connery. Three films later, the realisation that the spymaster's role is a marathon and not a sprint sunk in as moviegoers deemed Brosnan's world was too much rather than not enough. A smugness that stuck in the craw, invisible cars, Python cameos, and a Madonna song that was only marginally more preferable than listening to Paul Shane fart into a wet football sock for three minutes meant inevitably 90s man Brosnan's day had come. He manages just 4% of the vote.

A big thank you to all 41 who voted in this poll. Feel free to share your reasons why you voted as you did, or if you feel the results are right in the comments below. I'll get round to looking on Sunday I guess - no blog tomorrow as I'm off to that there London for the day.

A New Career In A New Town

Sean Connery had called time on James Bond in 1967, thoroughly sick of the role that made his name and determined to prove himself as an actor.


However following George Lazenby, the enfant terrible of Eon's dismissal of any further Bond films in 1971, United Artists had to lure Connery back to the role. They did this by pledging to finance and produce any two projects of Connery's choosing. 


Which is what took Connery to the new town of Bracknell in 1972 for The Offence

At the risk of sounding like Sir John Betjeman, I hate new towns. I have never been to one I liked. 

Such ugly bleak architectural crime chiefly occurred in the post war years to clear out slums and bomb damaged areas, re-homing communities in concrete warrens and walkways that had previously been rich green and pleasant land. It's primarily a South of England offence (geddit?) however the North did suffer some (Runcorn, Skelmersdale and Wythenshawe) but the main examples are south bound;  Milton Keynes, Stevenage, Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield,  Basildon and of course our setting here, Bracknell in Berkshire.  

Grim hmm? 

Apologies to any Bracknell or new town readers! 

However, the locale suits the mood of the film. Connery stars as DS Johnson, a hard nosed policeman of twenty years service, hunting a child rapist and killer. He's tormented by all the evil and horror he has seen in his line of work and as the dark thoughts start to seep out into the open, the bleak, brutal and sparse architecture around him becomes a character in its own right; too new and too fresh looking to be anything but innocent, but too ugly to be anything but evil. It's a claustrophobic unrelentingly hard and grim film and as we see Connery traipsing through the rain drenched concrete precinct, harassing homosexuals and known kiddie fiddlers or heading home to his tower block flat at gone two in the morning to his plain wife played by Vivien Merchant (as he asks of her "Why aren't you beautiful? You're not even pretty") we feel he's as much a prisoner as any of the felons he has captured.

Balding, bullish, haunted and weary; married to a dowdy woman and living in a drab tower block in a new town...James Bond he isn't!

The film was directed by the excellent Sidney Lumet (who had got a similarly brilliant performance from Connery in The Hill) and based on a stage play by Z Cars scriptwriter John Hopkins. It's a heavy film but with dialogue that crackles and spits like bacon in a frying pan. A solid police procedural that doesn't flinch from portraying what demons our public servants must face and one that hasn't dated, standing up splendidly today. For my money it's the best film Connery did, yet on release it bombed and failed to find an audience. The result being, UA decided not to fund Connery's next project an adaptation of Macbeth giving Roman Polanski a clear field to push ahead with his own version of Shakespeare's classic.

I'll not give too much away about the film, because I feel it's one that needs to be seen and to discuss it will give a lot away. Needless to say it's a brilliant psychological exercise that really heats up when the police arrest a man they feel responsible for the rape and kidnapping of a twelve year old girl played brilliantly by Ian Bannen, who forces Connery's character to take a good look within himself.

It's a film with a genuinely unnerving tense atmosphere. Once watched, never forgotten.