Credit: Far Out / Mieremet, Rob / Anefo
Sun 10 May 2026 17:45, UK
There are several roles that Sean Connery is rightly famous for, but together with his director of choice, Sidney Lumet, he made some fantastic, lesser-known films that are well worth searching out.
Lumet first cast the handsome Scot in a 1965 black-and-white gem called The Hill – Connery, who at this point was globally famous after the first three Bond movies, is magnificent in the tense WWII thriller set in a prison camp where inmates are punished by having to continually walk up and down a steep hill in blazing sun.
Lumet and Connery then teamed up again six years later for The Anderson Tapes, an underrated heist film that saw Connery as a recently released burglar trying to rob every tenant of a New York apartment block in one go.
And then two years after that, the pair united for another very overlooked movie with a brilliant central performance from Connery, 1973’s The Offence. That one was a gritty British crime drama with the big Scotsman as a troubled detective who kills a suspect during interrogation due to the horrific nature of his crimes. It was Connery’s attempt to shake off the James Bond typecasting, and it was superbly effective; the movie was shot on a budget of less than $400k and highlighted just how grim parts of the UK were in the early ‘70s.
A year later, the duo were at it again, this time for a completely different kind of movie with 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express, one of the more acclaimed Hercule Poirot adaptations and a film that saw Connery as the boisterous British military type Colonel Arbuthnot. Then, 15 years on, they took their partnership into a third decade thanks to the 1989 comedy drama Family Business with Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick, although that mob caper was critically panned and represents the low point of their output.
And a movie in the 1990s, representing the partnership’s fourth decade, was tantalisingly close, according to Connery in his book Being a Scot. Connery’s wife at the time, Micheline Roquebrune, had been to see a play in Paris in 1994 simply called Art by a playwright called Yasmina Reza, a comedy about a man who buys a completely white painting and tries to convince his friends of its worth. Roquebrune later called Reza and said, “Listen, I fell in love with your play and simply adore it. Sean and I would love to buy the English-language rights.”
Connery and his wife then had the play translated, which resulted in Art being put on in London’s West End two years later, starring Albert Finney, and then on Broadway in a show that would run for some eight years, winning a Tony award for ‘Best Original Play’ and bringing in tens of millions in revenue.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
The actor was naturally very keen to make the most of the play’s popularity, and a movie version was mooted, with Connery saying: “I discussed the film opportunities with my old friend Sidney Lumet. Yet despite our efforts, Yasmina Reza insisted that Art should first be produced in French. Sadly, we are still waiting.”
Of course, the chance would never come around. Lumet made his final film in 2007, the searing Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, and died in 2011. Connery passed away aged 90 in 2020, one of Britain’s greatest movie stars.
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