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Connery didn’t want to keep hitting like thunder or, for that matter, like lightning. Also, he wasn’t crazy about swimming with live sharks. The Bond movies, he said, “don’t tax anyone as an actor. All you really need is the constitution of a rugby player to spend 18 weeks swimming, slugging and making out. “After the release of” Thunderball, “he complained:” What is needed now is a change of course, more attention to character and better dialogue. “
The dialogue in what he thought was his last Bond film, “You Only Live Twice” (1967), was fine. “I like sake … especially when it’s served at the right temperature, 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit, like this.” But the character fell short. Sumo wrestling filler; trap doors; an autogyro equipped with flamethrowers and missiles; a pool of piranhas; and, of course, a rocket base hidden inside a volcano, “You Only Live Twice” wasn’t exactly an actor’s breakthrough.
At the time, Connery’s boredom and even annoyance were obvious. And so he left the series. Except for “The Molly Maguires” (1970), his subsequent films were not notable. Things were not going exactly as the released agent expected.
So for $ 1.25 million, 10 percent of gross proceeds and financing for two films chosen by Connery, Eon lured him back for “Diamonds Are Forever.” Grayer, wiser, and somewhat heavier, Connery, however, seems to relish this little 1971 nonsense, reconciled to his increasingly cartoonish legacy. Tucking a deadly cassette tape into a shocked Jill St. John’s bikini bottom, he jokes, “All your troubles are behind you.” One of the scriptwriters, Tom Mankiewicz, said: “He had the grace of an old professional.”
A dozen years later he returned once more, to the non-Eon production “Never Say Never Again.” It was a pale remake of “Thunderball”. But, Steven Jay Rubin wrote in “The James Bond Movie Encyclopedia,” “When it’s on screen, the movie works. Fortunately, it appears a lot on screen. “
Connery once described the part that has now made him immortal as “a cross, a privilege, a joke, a challenge. And as damn intrusive as a nightmare. “But for those who can’t get enough beluga caviar or Walther PPK, it’s still a dream. Sean Connery as James Bond is forever.
