GANGSTER SQUAD…THE REAL ONE

 The other night, I watched—again—the 2013 Ruben Fleischer film Gangster Squad, starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn and Emma Stone. I often watch late-night movies. It’s a habit I got into when I had a great deal more work for hire than now, and was under constant stress during the day. My work is all “mind work”—research, writing, editing and translation—and when there’s too much of it, it can be exhausting. By night-time my eyes are usually pretty well shot for any heavy reading, although I do always read a chapter of whatever book I’m into, before shutting off my bedside light. So relatively mindless movie-watching is basically a way to chill out before going to bed, where, otherwise, I might spend a lot of the night staring at the ceiling in the dark. And as it is, at least officially tucked into bed, I can only sleep about four hours.

Some nights, and more and more often, as tastes in movies change and most of the films I’d like to see again go into the “obsolete box” at the distributor’s, I can’t find anything appealing to watch and end up sitting in front of the TV with my headphones on (so as not to keep my wife up) staring at the backs of my eyelids. But now and again, there’s something to hold my interest.

Examples? Ranking high among the least, but still occasionally, shown are what are now considered to be of almost Jurassic vintage: The Magnificent Seven (the one with Yul, not Denzel, although the remake will do if the other one isn’t available: just pretend it’s an entirely different movie…because it is); The French Connection (I or II, makes no difference, both great rogue cop stories, and no one can make you believe it like Hackman); The Great Escape (whenever Nazis are being outsmarted by their prisoners, I’m there, and nobody ever rode a nine-hundred-pound German motorcycle quite like Steve McQueen); Gunfight at the OK Corral (Burt Lancaster’s habitual stiffness made him a decent Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas was a convincing if too healthy-looking Doc Holliday), although I prefer Hour of the Gun (basically the same story but with a much more human Earp—James Garner—and with a stunning performance by Jason Robards as the moribund but still dangerous Doc Holliday), and Bullit (again, raw, quintessential Steve McQueen at his implacable finest).

I always have a real dichotomy running in my mind while I read books or watch movies involving street justice. As an op-ed writer and editorialist, I always had an unwavering stance in favor of strict adherence to the rule of law and pro civil and human rights. I still do. I support the idea that no matter how bad a criminal is, he or she has a right to an unbiased trial and proper defense. The law, I tell myself, should be steadfast and unwavering. If not, you get police abuse and kangaroo courts. You get Rodney King and George Floyd. And more recently, you get Kyle Rittenhouse and his (not) victims.

But when I hang up my journalist hat and sit down to read or to watch TV and find myself in the midst of a narrative about tough gangsters and even tougher cops, there’s a hidden savage that takes over and finds great satisfaction in the street justice that those stories dispense. Perhaps the best example is the 1987 Brian De Palma film, The Untouchables. In point of fact, I for one have always believed that Prohibition was the most flawed, most hypocritical and most self-righteously puritanical federal law ever enacted. It was, furthermore, a law that, far from ending vice, did an incredibly efficient job of promoting it by making mafia bootlegging a multi-million-dollar business. And yet, there is something really appealing to me about Eliot Ness and his handful of “Untouchables” taking on Al Capone, at the time not just a ruthless gangster but also the most powerful man in Chicago.

My wife is appalled by the fact that I can accurately recite by rote most of the lines in the script along with the actors as they say them. More appalled still is a writer friend and avid cinema buff who hates De Palma and despises David Mamet, who wrote the screenplay. His idea of truly great classics includes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—A Space Odyssey and, by the same director, the 1975 film Barry Lyndon. I’d have to beg off if he ever invited me to see either of them with him. My snoring would make it impossible for him to enjoy the performance. 

That said, I never miss a chance to see Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, a really extraordinary Vietnam Era story, in which the whole first half is devoted to the military training of the era and in which R. Lee Ermey—who once served as a drill sergeant in real life—not only plays the part of the platoon’s trainer well, but is, precisely, a carbon copy of my chief drill instructor in 1970 when I took Basic Combat Training at Ft. Bragg, NC. I so identify when I see the film that I find myself sweating right along with the other recruits as I watch him put them through their paces and tear them a new hole to breathe through.  

R. Lee Ermey, quintessential DI

But, with regard to The Untouchables, those lines that I’ve committed to memory are just so good! Like when the tough Irish beat cop, Malone (Sean Connery) takes Ness (Kevin Costner) to church—because, he says “these walls have ears” when they meet in the police precinct—to talk to him after the not yet famous Treasury agent asks him to help him “get Capone”. Malone asks Ness, in order to nail Capone, “What are you prepared to do?” Ness tells him, “Everything within the law.” To which Malone asks, “And then what are you prepared to do?”

He elucidates. “You wanna know how to get Capone? Here’s how. They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone.”

When he asks Ness if he’s ready to do that and Ness says he’s sworn to get Capone using all legal means at his disposal, Malone sighs and says, “Well, the Lord hates a coward.” And then, “Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?”
“Yes,” Ness answers.
“Good, ’cause you just took one.”

Later, as Malone, twelve-gauge pump in hand, is leading Ness to Chicago’s South Lasalle Street Post Office to carry out their first successful raid on Capone’s operations, which work out of the backroom warehouse of that federal property, the tough Irish cop says, “How do you think Capone knew about your raid the other night?”

To which Ness says, “Somebody on the cops told him.”

“Right,” says Malone. “Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.”

Malone convinces Ness that he can trust no one on the police force.

“Then, where are we gonna get help?” Ness asks.

“If you're afraid of getting a rotten apple, don't go to the barrel. Get it off the tree.”

And THEN what are you prepared to do?

Enter a young Andy Garcia as Stone. Ness and Malone go to the pistol range where police recruits are practicing and Malone asks the instructor to send out the consistently two best shots. But one at a time.

The first guy is a straight-arrow blithering idiot who, when asked why he wants to be a cop, stutters, stammers, searching for the textbook answer and finally says he thinks maybe he could help…the force. Malone thanks him and sends him back to class before turning to Ness and saying, “There goes the next chief of police.”

Now wise-guy Andy Garcia comes out. 

“This kid's a prodigy,” says the instructor.

“Why do you want to join the force?” Malone asks.

Stone, with an ironic grin, “To protect the property and...”

“Oh, please, don't waste my time with that bullshit! Where are you from, Stone?” asks Malone, cocking his head and scrutinizing the recruit.

“From the Southside.”

“Stone? George Stone, that's your name? What's your real name?”

“That is my real name,” says Stone.

“Nah! What was it before you changed it?”

“Giuseppe Petri.”

“Geezus, I knew it! That's all you need, one thieving wop on the team!”

Cuffing the towering Malone on the shoulder, Stone says, “What's that you said?”

Malone, shoving his clipboard into the other man’s chest: “I said that you're a lyin' member of a no-good race.”

Standing toe to toe with Stone, as Malone feels him making a move, he pulls a sap from his coat to hit Stone with, but Stone already has his .38 drawn and the barrel shoved against Malone’s throat right under his chin. “That's much better than you, you stinkin' Irish pig,” Stone says.

“Oh, I like him!” says Malone with a grin over his shoulder to Ness.

“Yeah,” says Ness, “I like him, too.”

“Congratulations, son,” says Malone. “You just joined the Treasury Department.”

This is classic cop-story cinema, and excellent writing. And the outcome is a classic ending of good triumphing over evil. Ness bends the rules he said he would uphold. He even, technically, commits murder by throwing gangster hitman Frank Nitti (chillingly played by Billy Drago) off the roof of the court house to his death, but only after the other man has murdered two members of his team, one of whom is Malone. We get the feeling that the end has justified the means, a corrupt judge is forced to do the right thing, and Capone goes to jail. It’s a question of fighting fire with fire.

The real Eliot Ness

Gangster Squad is the same kind of story, but with way fewer constitutional guardrails. The Untouchables is, in the end, almost totally fictional, except that there really was an Eliot Ness, who after Prohibition, became Cleveland’s Safety Director, placing him in charge of the police and fire departments. There he had as remarkable a career as he had in the Treasury Department, but when he started flirting with a mayoral run, his career went south, he divorced his wife Edna and he became a notoriously heavy drinker. He did work for the federal government out of Washington after leaving Cleveland but never recovered his past glory, and died of a heart attack in 1957, at the age of fifty-four.

There was indeed also an Al Capone who was every bit as flamboyant and larger-than-life as Robert De Niro played him in the movie. Even the scene where De Niro-Capone bashes one of his men’s brains out with a baseball bat is a reasonable facsimile of a real-life occurrence. And, as in the film, Capone did actually go to prison on tax fraud charges. But the rest of the film is almost totally a fabrication.

Capone...not exactly De Niro

For instance, the only time Capone and Ness actually met in person was when Ness was one of the federal officers who accompanied the convicted gangster to prison after sentencing. And in real life, Ness had nothing to do with Frank Nitti’s death. After a grand jury was convened to look into allegations of his organization’s extorting the Hollywood film industry, many years after Prohibition, Nitti, who didn’t want to die in prison, committed suicide—incredibly, by firing three shots from a .32-caliber revolver because he was so drunk that he missed his head with the first shot, fired the second through his jaw, with the small-caliber bullet exiting his skull but not killing him, and finally,  firing a third shot directly into his brain and finishing the job.

De Niro as Capone...baseball!

But Gangster Squad is a much more grim and true-to-life film. There’s no scintillating dialogue or memorable quotes. It’s pure action and raw violence. There’s no bending the rules—they get broken all to hell. And—exception made for certain literary license—it is a true story.

The LA Gangster Squad—Organized Crime Intelligence Division or OCID—has been rendered legendary thanks to writers like James Ellroy, Paul Lieberman and Donald H. Wolfe, in all of whose works the special-ops division has figured prominently. The squad was formed in 1946, on secret orders from then-LA Police Chief Clemence Horrall (played in the film by Nick Nolte). It was indeed headed up by Sergeant Jack O’Mara (played by Josh Brolin), with the specific aim of running members of the East Coast mafia out of Los Angeles. Among the most high-profile of these were, indeed, Mickey Cohen (played by Sean Penn), Jack Dragna (John Polito), Jack Whalen (Sullivan Stapleton), and Johnny Stompanato (James Carpinello)—who was, famously, movie star Lana Turner’s boyfriend, and who, just as famously, was shot to death by Turner’s daughter while he was in the process of beating the actress within an inch of her life.

The real squad. Sgt. O'Mara seated on the far left

Again, however, unlike in the movie, Cohen never had Jack Dragna killed. In real life, Dragna, who was born in legendary Corleone, Sicily, died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1956, at the age of sixty-four. Nor was Cohen beaten to death with a lead pipe in prison, as suggested in the film. He was actually released from prison shortly before he died of cancer at age sixty-two. But beyond these historically inaccurate details, Gangster Squad is largely true.

Josh Brolin actually reached out to the family of his real-life character, Sergeant O’Mara, while he was making the movie. It was a great experience, as Brolin describes it. As it turned out, “He was a guy like me,” Brolin told LA Times reporter Paul Lieberman. “He's in love with California, but came back from the war to a ton of corruption in the LAPD. When Mickey Cohen moved in and monopolized and began to poison Los Angeles, he took personal offense to it. He was the Serpico of his time. He refused to be bought and he wanted to get it done.”

Brolin as O'Mara

How he got it done, however, had little to do with due process. In the movie, O’Mara holds up his LA sergeant’s shield and tells his squad that when they go after the mob, “leave these at home.” They basically act like a rival gang, breaking up Cohen’s operations by any and all means necessary, including attacking, extorting, beating and killing anybody and everybody in the mafia food chain and destroying the infrastructure that feeds Cohen’s fortune, while illegally wire-tapping and surveilling his organization.

By all accounts, O’Mara and his crew did very much the same. While the film was being shot, there was a sole surviving member of the OCID who was in contact with the movie’s production. Consulted about the squad’s standard operating procedure, he assured Brolin and others that if their methods were employed today, “we would have been indicted.”

In an interview with the LA Daily News, Brolin recalled: “I met one guy from the actual Gangster Squad, who was in his eighties. To be able to talk with him, I think, was more informative than anything because he was a tough guy and he was very stoic and elusive, which I loved, and I found him very intimidating…True, they were doing the right thing, but they did it in a way that didn’t necessarily follow all the rules,” Brolin says. “The fact that fifty years later, he wouldn’t tell me anything, I thought, was so bizarre. Like, who’s going to care now? But I’d ask him a question and he’d just look away.”

Last Squad member, Sgt. Lindo Giacopuzzi, died
in 2018 at one hundred years old.

It’s no coincidence that this Gangster Squad code of silence remained as entrenched as the same code, known as omerta, that prevails in the cosa nostra. Clearly, there are parallels, and the code of silence isn’t the only one. While Jack O’Mara was, by all accounts, an unbending straight arrow who never broke a rule for his own benefit, but for the higher benefit of society as a whole, the mob-busters that James Ellroy—one of the most meticulous historical crime-novelists in America—writes about tell a different story. It is the topic, and LA is the setting, for many of his works, none more typical than LA Confidential, which became a contemporary cinema classic, starring James Cromwell, Guy Pierce, Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger, when director Curtis Hanson took the story to the screen in 1997.

Cromwell - a chilling Capt. Smith

In it, Cromwell plays a truly chilling Captain Dudley Smith, whom Ellroy fans have known ever since he was a tough and less than honest LAPD detective-sergeant. In LA Confidential, the now-Captain Smith has formed a mob-squad, the main purpose of which—as in Gangster Squad—is to run the likes of Mickey Cohen and company out of LA and back to Chicago or the East Coast where they belong. But there’s nothing altruistic in Smith’s ambitions, which tend toward running out the mobsters so that he can take over their illicit operations and use the LAPD to guard his interests. For his squad, the corrupt police captain has carefully chosen men who represent both brains (like Spacey) and brawn (like Crowe) with their common factor being their moral flexibility. Enter a rookie prodigy (Pierce), who looks like a by-the-book sort of fellow, but who is, barely beneath the surface, every bit as ambitious as Smith.

The story Ellroy tells isn’t (in this case or in that of any of his extraordinary noire-genre police novels) one of a clear-cut struggle between good and evil. His stories are about two evils that violently clash in a death-battle until only one is standing. In neither case is society or the rule of law the undisputed winner. Not by a long-shot.

Cromwell, Crowe, Pierce and Spacey - LA Confidential

Is street justice sometimes a brand of true moral justice that feels utterly satisfying to our moral outrage? Absolutely. It’s also true that all of the score-settling and contempt for procedure can, in the end, lead, as in The Untouchables and Gangster Squad, to a legally reached outcome—in short, the removal from society of dangerous criminals, circumventing their often-incredible power and influence, and convicting them of whatever is possible (in fiction as in real-life, tax evasion in the cases of both Capone and Cohen). This, as an alternative to insisting on the moral obligation to seek punishment for their higher crimes—extortion, corruption, murder—when evidence is too scant to bring them to trial.

In these cases, our moral satisfaction is surely better placed than when “justice” is merely dispensed from the barrel of a gun, as is the case of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise, the series of righteous avenger films created by and for Charles Bronson, and all of the copy-cat motion pictures to follow since then. Because, as Ness—through the words of David Mamet and in the voice of Kevin Costner—points out in The Untouchables, when we take the law into our own hands, no matter how noble our purpose, we “become what we have forsworn.” One who kills in the name of “justice”, in other words, is no less a killer than the one who kills with malice. And vengeance isn’t the same as justice, because it isn’t based on what we can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt but on what we “believe”, and what we think we know.   

Ignorance can indeed be bliss. Because, if you can’t help being aware, as I am, of your contradictions and your moral conundrums, then it almost takes all the fun out of watching street-justice movies. Almost…but not quite.

 

CONNERY...SEAN CONNERY

 I was thirteen when I asked a girl out on a date for the first time. She was my same age. We were in junior high band together. I had started watching for her after school and asking her if I could carry her books for her and walk her home. She let me. I never knew what to say. On my best days, I was able to kid her or talk about things that had happened at school. But a lot of times, I just walked her home, said, “Well, see you tomorrow,” handed her back her books and walked on to my house.

Connery...Sean Connery

I had started doing all of this with a purpose—trying to work up the courage to ask her to go out with me. But, hey, why would she? And how would my already fragile ego survive if she told me no and asked me not to walk her home anymore? I wasn’t the most appealing guy around, a skinny, gawky, bespectacled nerd with an aversion to sports and to just about any other popular activity in which “normal kids” took part. About the only thing I had going for me was that I was an incipient drummer and had recently started playing in a rock and roll band that sometimes played at the local teen center, called The Wigwam (but better known as The Rec), where we got a percentage of the gate—which worked out to about two or three bucks apiece.

But that wasn’t my only source of income. I had money. I don’t mean I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. But I delivered papers and did odd jobs—mowed lawns, raked leaves, shoveled snow, painted fences—and some weeks made as much as fifteen dollars or so, which meant I was pretty successful and pretty flush for a thirteen-year-old of those times. So it wasn’t like I didn’t have the money to ask her out. I just didn’t have the guts.

I don’t know how long it took me to finally ask her, but it was a while. Finally, one glorious blue and gold autumn afternoon after school when I walked her home, feeling tongue-tied the whole way, I screwed up my courage and blurted out, “Wanna go to the movies with me Friday night?”

Luckily, as soon as the words were out of my mouth she said, “Yes!” as if she’d been wondering how the hell long it was going to take me to make a move.

I really couldn’t have cared less what was on at the Wapa Theater in my hometown of Wapakoneta that Friday night. What was important was the girl I was taking—actually that it was a girl I was taking.

Bond...James Bond

When we got there, I found out what we were seeing was a new picture called Dr. No, about a British Secret Service agent called Bond...James Bond, code-named 007, the double aught meaning he had “a license to kill”. I had no idea at the time that what I was witnessing was the birth of a whole new cinema genre. There had been spy versus spy movies before but never anything like this—action-packed, sexy, spectacular, full of high-tech gadgets and early special effects—and it would open the gates to a whole culture of high-action, high-budget espionage movies that would flourish throughout the rest of the Cold War era and beyond.

But on this particular Friday night, the whole first part of the film was simply background for my rising anxiety. The entire time I was watching, all I could think about was when it would be appropriate to reach over and take my date’s hand. I wanted to take her hand. I thought there was a good chance that she expected me to take her hand. But at the same time, I didn’t want her to think I was like “all the other guys” who thought they had some right to take what they wanted whenever they wanted. I liked her and respected her and I wanted her to know that.

So I sat there tense as a fiddle string thinking and rethinking how I might be so bold as to just reach over and grab her hand. While I was thinking about this, I kept discreetly glancing her way whenever I thought she wouldn’t notice. She was gazing at the screen, lips slightly parted, in apparent concentration on the plot and images.

About the time I was on the point of making my move, Ursula Andress walked out of the ocean half naked under the gaze of this tall dark and handsome Scot called Sean Connery, whom few of us knew, and I thought, “Nah, not now.” It was way too on the nose, so I desisted. 

But when I glanced down, by the flickering light of the picture, I witnessed how she unfolded her hands, which had been lying clasped together inertly in her lap, and moved the left one over so that it was lying flat on her pleated wool skirt just over her knee, as close as she could get it to my right hand that was lying on my corduroy trouser leg, just above my own knee. Our pinky fingers were within an inch of each other.

Was it a sign, I asked myself? Or was she just trying to get more comfortable? Then our little fingers brushed and she took my hand in both of hers and laid the trio gently on her knee. And it was as if a Roman candle had gone off in my head.

For the entire rest of the film, our hands remained entwined, sometimes mine holding hers, at others hers holding mine, until they grew sweaty and until my entire right arm had gone to sleep. But still, we clung, and how her hand felt in mine was about all I could think about until the house lights came up and it was time to leave the cinema.

Dr. No, then, was a kind of symbol of my coming of age and I couldn’t think of Bond...James Bond without linking the Sean Connery character to the feeling of euphoria that discovering romance brought me. I went back and saw it again with a buddy who hadn’t seen it yet, and this time was able to focus on the action and I was hooked. I came out of the Wapa wanting nothing as much as to be Bond...James Bond—or more specifically, Connery...Sean Connery. And the more of Connery’s films I saw, the more that feeling grew. So much so that even today, at any moment, I can expect Virginia, my wife, to look at me reprovingly and say, “Oh please, you’re not quoting from ‘The Untouchables’ again, are you?”  

Connery five years ago at 85.

So news of the death of Sir Thomas Sean Connery in the Bahamas at age ninety this past week was yet another mile-marker for the end of an era that was mine. Particularly because that first experience with a Bond picture turned me into such an immediate fan that I also became an avid reader of the Bond books as well as being a fan of the movies. And that prompted me to also look into the life of their flamboyant author, Ian Lancaster Fleming.

Connery must have had to work hard on toning down his normally dense Scottish brogue in order to play Bond, since it’s pretty clear that Bond was Fleming’s alter-ego (sort of Fleming on steroids) and the writer was a very “upper” sort of English chappy. From thirteen to eighteen, he attended Eton College, one of the oldest and most exclusive boys’ schools in Britain. He later was enrolled at the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, also furthering his education at the Universities of Munich and Geneva. During World War II, Fleming was a Naval Intelligence officer involved in the planning of Operation Goldeneye (which, in itself, sounds like the title of a Bond book) and in the planning and oversight for two British Intelligence units—the 30^th Assault Unit and T-Force.

After the war, and before becoming a novelist, Fleming worked as a journalist. And his time in Naval Intelligence as well as his brief career as a newsman combined to provide him with some stunning ideas for his spy novels. His first Bond novel was Casino Royale, published in 1952. It was an instant success and his career as a writer took off from there. Before his death in 1964, Fleming’s eleven 007 novels had become some of the world’s best-selling serial fiction and, as of today, his books have sold more than a hundred million copies.

"Big Tam" of Fountainbridge

Connery, for his part, grew up in the rough and tumble Edinburgh industrial suburb of Fountainbridge. His father was a factory worker and truck-driver and his mother worked as a cleaning woman. As a youth, Connery worked delivering milk door to door. In his teens, his friends called him “Big Tam” because of his size—six-foot-two by age eighteen. Connery once said he’d lost his virginity at age fourteen, during the Second World War, to an adult woman wearing an Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform. Like Fleming, Connery was in the Royal Navy (1946-1949), but as a common seaman in a gunnery unit on the HMS Formidable. During that time he got himself two discreet and thoughtful tattoos—one that read “Mum and Dad” and the other, of course, “Scotland Forever”.

Speaking of which, for all of his playing the part of Mother England’s favorite killer-agent, Connery was a Scot through and through and was passed over for knighthood twice by the queen’s counsellors before finally being knighted in 2000. Objections to his inclusion in the Queen’s Birthday short list were always due to his rabidly Scottish politics and his siding with Scotland’s independence movement. The honor of being a knight of the British Empire probably paled in the actor’s mind compared with a 2004 survey that described him as "The Greatest Living Scot", or another one that garnered him the title of "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". He was a member of the center-leftist Scottish National Party, whose Scottish independence campaign he at one time helped support financially through personal appearance events.

Sir Thomas Sean Connery

The ads for the Bond movies often said, Sean Connery is James Bond. And as he starred in one after the other in the series, that became way too true for the Scottish actor. In an interview, he once complained that people saw him on the street and said, “There goes James Bond.” But the Fleming character was making his career as an actor, and making him wealthy. He reportedly only made twelve thousand pounds (less than twenty thousand dollars) for Dr. No. But by the time he did Diamonds Are Forever in 1971, he was pulling down a million pounds. And for his final role as Bond, he reportedly received 2.3 million pounds. It was hard to turn each new role down.

In total, Connery played Bond six times pretty much in a row: Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967) and Diamonds are Forever (1971). After a twelve-year hiatus and other roles in between, he delighted his fans by coming back in 1983, at age fifty-three, to play Bond one more time. The movie took its title from his earlier refusal to play any more Bond roles and was called Never Say Never Again.

Author Ian Fleming was still alive for the casting of the first movie and was asked to weigh in on the candidates. He wasn’t at all sure about Connery for the part. The brawny Scot was nothing like the elegant “Commander Bond” that he had imagined. He was thinking more along the lines of the ever suave and phlegmatic David Niven, or the refined and iconic Carey Grant, but the writer was ultimately convinced by his girlfriend that Connery had a singular tall-dark-and-handsome sex appeal and animal magnetism that couldn’t be overlooked. So Connery it was. And the thousands of fan letters that came in from women after Dr. No proved Fleming’s girlfriend clairvoyant.

Although numerous other actors would play Bond in nearly a score of other Bond movies, none ever managed to overshadow the original. Sandwiched between Connery’s last two pictures in the first string, George Lazenby (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) seemed like a lame attempt to find a Connery ringer. The movie was a one-off. Tall, blonde and awkwardly comic Roger Moore played Bond seven times, but changed the franchise into more of a theater of the absurd than a series of clever spy versus spy action films. Timothy Dalton tried to bring back the Bond action hero in his two attempts but only served to provide a lackluster, unconvincing parody of the Connery character. In the nineties and at the turn of the century, Pierce Brosnan made, perhaps, the most successful bid to compete. His four Bond films created an entirely new Bond, perhaps more the David Niven type character that Fleming had had in mind. Watching him, one thought, “This is fun. Not James Bond, but fun.” And the latest James Bond (Daniel Craig) has created an entirely new James Bond that has little or nothing to do with anything Ian Fleming ever imagined, but who makes for a great, all-new highly adult action series of five films to date.

Connery’s first six Bond movies, however, have garnered the title of iconic classics. And in the minds of most people over the age of fifty, he still is James Bond. The American Film Institute has dubbed his James Bond—and his James Bond only—“The Third-Greatest Hero in Cinema History”.

Perhaps the single most important attribute with which Connery has imbued not only Bond but all of his action characters from The Man Who Would Be King to The Untouchables is that there is little need for viewer suspension of disbelief. Connery convinced you that he could do what his characters had to do. Why? Because he could!

The Man Who Would Be King

As a young man in the mean streets of Edinburgh, Connery got on the wrong side of a local gang. When the gang boss sent a couple of goons to mess him up, “Big Tam” surprised them by grabbing one by the throat and the other by the arm and cracking their skulls together, knocking them unconscious. Nobody messed with Connery after that.

In the early 1950s, Connery was hard into bodybuilding and even competed in a Mr. Universe contest, in which he won a minor trophy. But he said that after seeing the American bodybuilders who eschewed all other sports in order to ensure that they didn’t lower their enormous muscle mass, he realized it wasn’t for him, since he loved soccer and was good at it. In fact, avid footballer that he was, he worked his way up through the leagues and had a shot at one of England’s world-famous teams but, in the end, turned it down. He was already doing some minor acting and liked it. A footballer’s days were numbered. Thirty, and you were over the hill, but acting was forever.

Bodybuilder

Still, the sleek yet muscular body that he had built and maintained helped him land acting parts. In the meantime, he became a male model for artists and photographers to make ends meet. Friends in the theater business—including a young Michael Caine, who became Connery’s life-long friend—helped him make his way in stage productions, TV and movie bit parts. They also helped him improve his locution and taught him how to walk and dress and carry himself with elegance and taking advantage of his natural physical grace.    

But still, his muscles were never just for show and his streetwise toughness never left him. Before the days of the Bond films, Connery was in Another Time, Another Place (1957) with Lana Turner. Based on a World War II romantic drama by Lenore J. Coffee, and set in London, the film tells the story of Turner’s character, Sara Scott, who is stuck in a love triangle with Connery’s character, a British reporter called Mark Trevor, and her rich American boss (played by Joseph Cotton), who has asked her to marry him.  Very likely as a result of a publicity ploy to build box-office pull, a rumor was leaked of an actual affair between Connery and Turner during the filming.

Johnny Stompanato

At the time, Lana Turner was carrying on a high-profile, real-life affair with Los Angeles gangster Johnny Stompanato, who worked as a bodyguard/hit man for mad dog mafia kingpin and former boxer Mickey Cohen. As news of the alleged affair between Turner and Connery spread, Stompanato grew insanely jealous and one day showed up on the set of Another Time, Another Place in London. When he saw Connery, Stompanato pulled a gun. There was no time to find out if he meant to shoot Connery or simply threaten him at gunpoint, because before the mafia goon knew what hit him, the actor had disarmed him and decked him with one blow. Stompanato got a police escort off the set and to the airport, where he was put on a plane to LA and told not to come back.

Mafia kingpin Mickey Cohen

It was a real embarrassment for an alleged tough guy like Stompanato, and even more so for his boss who’d had one of his chief muscles for hire get his ass handed to him by a movie actor. Connery indicated that he received threats after that from the Cohen organized crime group. But the following year, Stompanato was again, and for the last time, famously in the news when, in the midst of beating Lana Turner within an inch of her life, he was stabbed to death by Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane. Tough guy? Not so much. It was ruled justifiable homicide.

Before Bond there would be Spike the small-time hood in No Road Back, Mountain McLintock in the BBC production of Requiem for a Heavyweight, rogue truck-driver Johnny Yates in Hell Drivers and a minor role in a major thriller called Time Lock. Unrecognizable as the future 007, he also co-starred in a Walt Disney movie about leprechauns called Darby O’Gill and the Little People. I saw it a few years earlier, long before my teens, in the same movie theater where I had my first date, and never would have been able to guess that the guy in Darby O’Gill and the super-agent James Bond were one and the same person.

Despite how iconic Connery’s 007 was, however, it was only the start of an extraordinary film career in which he would bring to life some of the most memorable characters in motion picture history. To wit, and in no particular order:

 - William of Baskerville, a medieval detective-monk, sent to a remote abbey to solve some mysterious deaths under the shadow of the Inquisition, in the movie adaptation of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose.

 - A tough space cop out to investigate corruption and murder aboard a planet-mining space station in the 1981 thriller, Outland.

 - Straight-arrow Dustin Hoffman’s ex-con father Jessie McMullen, who is proud of his criminal past and, fresh out of prison, starts vying to involve his grandson (Matthew Broderick) in the Family Business.

 - A hardened criminal out to pull off the crime of the century in Sidney Lumet’s production of the Lawrence Sanders novel, The Anderson Tapes.

 - Barley Scott-Blair, the head of a publishing house who, while giving a talk in Moscow on closer ties between East and West, becomes involved in a story of espionage and intrigue, and falls in love with Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, Katya, in the film adaptation of the John Le Carré novel, The Russia House.

 - The closet-dissident captain of a Russian submarine in the film version of the Tom Clancy novel, The Hunt for Red October.

- A dangerous hardened criminal and lifer con who is the only one who can bust into Alcatraz and save the world from a covey of seditious Marine officers holed up there with weapons of mass destruction, in The Rock.

 - Major General Roy Urquhart, commander of the British First Airborne in the epic World War II picture, A Bridge Too Far.

 - Mulai Ahmed el Raisuli, the flamboyant leader of a band of Berber insurrectionists who kidnap an American citizen and incur the wrath of Teddy Roosevelt, in The Wind and the Lion.

 - A rogue British Army NCO who, with his buddy (Michael Caine) sets off from late nineteenth-century British India in search of adventure and ends up in faraway Kafiristan, where he is briefly taken for a god and made king, until local politics intervenes and he loses his head, in a 1975 film version of the Rudyard Kipling novella, The Man Who Would Be King.

 - Henry Jones, renowned archeologist father of adventurer archeologist Indiana Jones in an installment of the stunningly successful Steven Spielberg franchise called The Last Crusade. 

And this barely scratches the surface of an incredible legacy that includes at least sixty-seven film credits.

In every one, Connery embodies his character and makes him unique, but without ever losing the tough charm and charisma of the actor himself. Still, in such a long career, it’s hard not to do things you wish you hadn’t. Like, say, the 1975 Zardoz, or the picture that pretty much did it for Sir Sean and decided him on retiring, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But hey, even icons can have a bad day.

I’ve been saving the two best for last—Finding Forrester and The Untouchables. The former is actually the latter, if you see what I mean, but let’s start there.

It’s a movie after a writer’s heart so naturally I fell hard for it. In it, sixteen-year-old Jamal hides his light as a writer under a bushel and fritters away his time with his buddies on a basketball court in the Bronx. The court is overlooked by the apartment in what was once a better neighborhood, of reclusive writer William Forrester, whose one published work has become a classic all-time bestseller, while the writer himself has become something of an urban legend. Jamal’s friends dare him to sneak into the apartment, but Forrester surprises him in the act and chases him with a knife. Jamal is so terrified that he abandons his backpack inside Forrester’s apartment when he flees. Days later, Forrester drops the backpack onto the street, and when Jamal retrieves it, he finds that Forester has edited the writing in his journal. In short, Jamal asks Forrester to tutor him, and ends up being the protégé of one of America’s best loved authors.

Connery plays Forrester with range and pathos, painting the strengths and demons of a poetic soul and demonstrating the growing nexus between a master and his disciple.

Tough cop Malone

But my all-time favorite is Connery’s best, and best-known post-Bond role as an aging, jaded Irish cop called Jimmy Malone on the streets of Chicago in the times when the power that mobster Al Capone wielded there made many wonder why they didn’t just make him mayor. Connery reluctantly decides to tie his destiny and streetwise experience to the mission of Treasury Agent Elliot Ness, mainly because he is fed up with the mob and how—as he so eloquently puts it—the town “stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.” He thinks Ness might just be the one to clean it up, and ends up mentoring the straight-arrow Fed in how to do things “the Chicago way” if he really wants to get Capone. His constant question to Ness is, “What are you prepared to do?” And he nudges the Treasury agent (Kevin Costner) to do whatever is necessary to take Capone down.

Connery brings Malone alive. He’s not a super-hero. He’s a flawed Irish cop whose heart is in the right place, and Connery has both the strength and the range to make you believe his every move and word throughout the entire film.

In that small-town cinema nearly six decades ago, he was the man I wanted to be when I grew up. Now, having gotten word of his death and pondering his life, I realize he’s still the man I want to be when I grow up. Connery...Sean Connery.