Sean Connery – Memphis Flyer

I’m starting a new, semi-regular feature for the Film/TV/Etc. blog. With Never Seen It, I’ll be showing interesting people a classic movie they’ve never seen before, and share their reactions in Q & A form. For the initial Never Seen It, I talked Memphis underground film pioneer John Pickle into watching Zardoz, the not-so-classic 1974 science fiction film starring Sean Connery. The film was directed by John Boorman, who was riding high on the success of Deliverance, the backwoods thriller which launched Burt Reynolds’ career. But Zardoz, an insane sci fi film which defies easy description, is today an infamous flop, probably most famous for Sean Connery’s outfit.

Sean Connery as Zed in Zardoz, because this is how genetically superior future men dress.

BEFORE ZARDOZ

Chris McCoy: What do you know about Zardoz?

John Pickle: I know it’s got Sean Connery in it, and he’s dressed like a who the fuck knows what. There’s a giant floating head vomiting rifles and pistols and ammunition all over this tundra of apocalypse. It’s telling the people that the penis is evil. It spawns life, and the gun takes it away. The gun is good, the penis is evil.

CM: So you have no idea where this is heading?

JP: None at all.

The giant head which dispenses assault rifles also flies.

Two hours later…

CM: You are now someone who has seen Zardoz. How has your life changed?

JP: It’s changed in that I can now stop seeking to watch that shitty movie. It’s not at all what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be an hour and a half of the opening scene. Not that it wasn’t weird…it was definitely fucking weird. I thought it was going to be more of a Holy Mountain weird.

CM: It’s big think science fiction, but it’s all kinda half baked.

JP: The purpose is so covered up by other…stuff, there’s no following the movie. Not at first watch, anyway. You might start figuring shit out by the tenth time you watch it, but that’s never going to happen with me.

CSM: There’s not going to a tenth time watching Zardoz for anybody.

JP: I thought this would be one of those movies, but it’s not.

CSM: That stuff with the projection was really cool. Boorman seemed to be more interested in just doing that kind of stuff than telling a story.

JP: He should have just made a music video.

CSM: So you liked Deliverance, right?

JP: Oh yeah! I’ve always loved that movie.

CSM: How do you go from Deliverance to this?

JP: How do you go from 007 to this?

Zardoz features many questionable sartorial choices.

CSM: It’s like they said, let’s rent an estate in Ireland and all trip acid, and we’ll make a movie while we’re doing that.

JP: Hmm… I’ve got an idea…

CSM: But there was a lot of cool stuff in there, like the kaleidoscope effects. Stuff that I’ve never seen before went on in this movie.

JP: And it’s the year 2239, right?

CSM: Exactly! The immortals have only had a couple of hundred years to get suicidally bored. I’m not an immortal, but I think could last a couple hundred years. Especially if I had a spaceship shaped like an English manor house with giant inflatable condoms growing out the back. There were so many little weird things like that. The “touch teaching” scene was the most visually coherent thing in the whole movie. It was a serious attempt to convey a concept. Here’s all this data that they’re learning projected onto people. But most of the time it was just like, “Let’s put 007 in the kaleidoscope again!”

JP: What was the bit with the guy walking into the room and talking gibberish?

CSM: I don’t know. He was just suddenly speaking backward. But I did like the bit where they unsmashed all the statues and jumped backwards…Would you recommend Zardoz to a friend?

JP: Certain things about it I would. The first five minutes is the best part of the movie. That’s the only thing that I saw, and I thought it would another hour and forty six minutes of crap like that.

CSM: So if it were more like Mad Max…

JP: I think it makes me want to go watch Deliverance again. Now, I’m a fan of horrible cinema. But this just wasn’t it.

CSM: It didn’t turn the so-bad-it’s-good movie corner for you.

JP: No.

Never Seen It: Watching Zardoz with Filmmaker John Pickle

In the new James Bond movie, Skyfall, Daniel Craig takes off his shirt and examines his wounds. There appear to be two of them — small holes on his skin from bullets fired at the beginning of the movie. He touches his wounds and winces. So do I. Bond is in pain from his wounds. I am in pain from all the hours he has spent in the gym.

Sean Connery

This Bond ripples with muscles. Craig is 44, but neither gravity nor age has done its evil work on him. Nothing about him looks natural, relaxed — a man in the prime of his life and enjoying it.

Instead, I see a man chasing youth on a treadmill, performing sets and reps, a clean and press, a weighted knee raise, an incline pushup, and, finally, something called an incline pec fly (don’t ask). I take these terms from the Daniel Craig workout, which you can do, too, if your agent and publicist so insist. Otherwise, I recommend a book.

Skyfall is a lot of fun — don’t get me wrong — but it still says something about our culture that, in the autumn of my years, I do not like. To appreciate what I mean, contrast this new Bond to Roger O. Thornhill, the charmingly hapless advertising man played by Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Like Bond, Thornhill pulls off some amazing physical feats — his mad frantic escape from the crop duster, the traverse of Mount Rushmore — and like Bond he wears an expensive suit. Unlike Bond, though, when he takes it off we do not see some marbleized man, an ersatz creation of some trainer, but a fit man, effortlessly athletic and just as effortlessly sophisticated. Of course, he knows his martinis, but he also knows how to send out a suit for swift hotel cleaning. He is a man of the world. He is, in short, a man of a certain age — 55 at the time, to be more or less exact.

In North by Northwest and other movies, Grant — for all his good looks — represented the triumph of the sexual meritocracy: a sex appeal won by experience and savoir-faire, not delts and pecs and other such things that any kid can have. He was not alone in this. Gary Cooper, in High Noon, wins Grace Kelly by strength of character, not muscles. He was about 50, and Kelly was a mere 23.

Maybe the best example of the unmuscled hero is Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Bogart was 15 years older than Ingrid Bergman, and it did not matter at all. He had the experience, the confidence, the internal strength that can only come with age. As he did with Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon — “I don’t care who loves who, I won’t play the sap for you” — he gives up the love of his life because age and wisdom have given him character. These older men seduce; they are not seduced. They make love. They do not score.

The new Bond is a zeitgeisty sort of character. “There has been a striking change in attitudes toward male body image in the past 30 years,” Harrison Pope, a Harvard psychiatry professor, recently told The New York Times. He said the portrayal of men in what amounts to the Bond image is now “dramatically more prevalent in society than it was a generation ago.” That same Times story reported that 40 percent of middle and high school boys work out with the purpose of “increasing muscle mass.” Many of them also use protein supplements.

This is all very sad news. Every rippling muscle is a book not read, a movie not seen, or a conversation not held. That’s why Sean Connery was my kind of Bond. He was 53 when he made his last Bond film, Never Say Never Again. Women loved him because he was sophisticated and he could handle a maitre d’ as well as a commie assassin. Western civilization was saved not on account of his pecs but on account of his cleverness and experience.

I know the movie market skews young and kids want action, and I take it as a good thing that Daniel Craig’s Bond is older, world weary, and, in sports lingo, has slowed a step. But he still triumphs physically, not cleverly. He does not woo women; they just come on to him. Still, I have great hope for him. In this movie, Bond’s drink is Macallan Scotch. It’s mine, too. The name is Cohen. Richard Cohen.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.