A moving target is harder to hit. That must be why OK Connery goes by so many different titles. The perfectly reasonable Operation Kid Brother is one alternative, the frankly bizarre Divided Evil another. Probably the most informative of all the variants, apart from the original, is Operation Double 007.
If I tell you that it stars Sean Connery’s younger brother, Neil, you’ll twig what’s going on here. A mockbuster Bond movie, complete with actors from the franchise. Like Bernard Lee, who played M; Lois Maxwell, of Miss Moneypenny fame; a Bond Girl in the shape of Daniela Bianchi (she was in From Russia with Love); Adolfo Celi (a villain in Thunderball); and Anthony Dawson (who was Blofeld twice, though uncredited).
Like a martini that’s shaken not stirred, these ingredients are thrown together and are heftily agitated in the Bond style, care being taken never to say “Bond”, “007”, “Ian Fleming” or anything else that could cause copyright infringement. Lois Maxwell, for instance, is called Miss Maxwell. Connery junior is referred to as “the brother of our top agent.” And so on. A mocktail.
Neil Connery plays Dr Neil Connery – an ace plastic surgeon, archery expert, guru in Tibetan hypnotism and polyglot lip reader handy also with his fists – forcibly recruited by the British secret service to thwart the Thanatos organisation, who plan to corner the planet’s gold reserves by stealing a nuclear core and unleash a magnetic wave generator that neutralises all machinery – like I say, stuff just thrown together.
From the opening lusty title song about how heroic and sexy our hero is – “He is the man for me” we’re told repeatedly, because “He loves only gold,” has already been done – this is an exercise in Bond tropes done on a budget. A yacht, pretty young women, a game of chemin de fer, an art auction, disguises, submarines, gadgets, a villain with excruciating taste and so on, with Dr Connery’s way with hypnosis repeatedly swung into play when the screenwriters run out of other ideas, which is quite often.
Watched in the spirit of a Mike Myers Goldmember, it’s actually all quite a lot of fun. Lois Maxwell gets a lot more to do than she ever did in a real Bond movie, and the likes of Bernard Lee and Adolfo Celi deliver a patina of sophistication that helps push the film into the acceptable bracket, as does the soundtrack of slinky Bond-shadowing minor chords, courtesy of Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai.
Neil Connery was a plasterer before taking the role and didn’t disturb the acting pantheon much after this but he’s actually pretty good as the stand-in agent – The Spy Who Subbed Me? – though he’s hung out to dry a couple of times by slack editing.
The director is the efficient Alberto De Martino, an old hand at mockbusters who’d later direct The Antichrist, a successful knock-off of The Exorcist. Because it’s a cheap Italian production he’s shooting everything silent. The voices were all dubbed on later. At which point Neil Connery was in hospital with appendicitis and so had to be dubbed by someone else. Why they used an American actor is a mystery. Part of Neil Connery’s appeal was how much he sounded like brother Sean. A missed opportunity.
Later in his stop-start acting career, Neil Connery played a character called Mr Bond in a Tsui Hark movie called Mad Mission 3, an action comedy that also featured the Queen of England and Ronald Reagan. Another one to stick on the list.
But back to OK Connery. Bond nuts really should watch it. If nothing else they can enjoy boring everyone to death with trivial did-you-knows as the movie progresses. Why is the Rosa Klebb-style character called Lotte Krayendorf, for instance? Because, in From Russia with Love, Klebb was played by Lotte Lenya.
As for everyone else, it’s the sort of movie which, if you must indulge, can be half-watched while doing household chores or checking emails. Life’s probably too short for it to warrant the full beam of attention. You only live once, after all.
OK Connery – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
