Sexy Sean

When I saw this ad in the November 3, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, I thought holy cow. Sean Connery is still a sex symbol. Connery, who was born August, 1930, will be 79 this year. So I wonder how it feels to be sexy when you're too old for sex? (I don't know anything you don't know. For all I know Connery could be having sex every day.)

When he found out I was having surgery my brother gave me a set from the Ultimate Bond series. There are a representative sampling of James Bonds in these movies: Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and two movies with Connery: Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever. If Goldfinger is one of the peaks of the set then Diamonds Are Forever would be the low point of the valley. After this 1971 movie Connery quit (again), until Never Say Never Again in 1983 which was his final Bond film.

My top three Bond films with Connery would be From Russia With Love (that fight in the train with Robert Shaw), Dr. No (a science fiction fantasy), and Goldfinger, which began a more lighthearted approach to the character, Bond as superhero, but still dramatic and suspenseful. Diamonds Are Forever has a thin plot and the script is loaded with lousy characters: A couple of stupid killers who call each other Mister, Charles Gray as multiple Blofelds, Jill St. John as a sexy criminal who hardly ever wears clothes.

Last but worst of all, Sausage King Jimmy Dean as the Howard Hughes-like Willard Whyte. Do I have to go through everything that's wrong with this movie? It would take all day.

The sex is something about the Bond movies that made them popular, but I suspect it was with adolescent males, and adult males who hadn't outgrown their adolescence. Every woman Bond beds is beautiful and completely willing. He doesn't even take them to dinner before shagging them. Those are porn fantasies, fueled by the 1960's Playboy lifestyle of Hugh Hefner and his free love hedonism. With the Baby Boomers just coming of age in that era, millions of hormone-saturated teenage boys to buy tickets to see beautiful girls, car chases, and explosions, it was a sure thing. We're still paying for that today. The guys who went to the movies in the '60s are a generation making movies. The old, safe formula is still around.

I always wondered how 007 was able to get all those chicks, and as I was typing this out it struck me. Of course. "Q", the gadget-maker for British Intelligence, gave 007 a device. Maybe it's a ring. "Now, 007, when you get within range of a beautiful woman you push this button on the side of the ring. A cloud of pheromones will envelop you. By the time the pheromones have worn off you'll be gone, off dodging bullets, racing your Aston Martin down a mountain road, or playing Banco in the casino at Monte Carlo!"

And in every country in the world there are hundreds of James Bond Juniors running around who have never known their father.

When Sean Connery took the role of James Bond in 1962's Dr. No, he was a character actor, but 007 made him a star. He outgrew the role, he was skillful enough, talented enough, and sexy enough to transcend the Bond character, and the silliness of movies like Diamonds Are Forever.

I've got to admit; if I was to have what Connery has at age 79 I'd be modeling for Louis Vuitton, too.