In May 1965, Sean Connery was at Cannes to promote Sidney Lumet’s film The Hill, in which he played a gruff and unbreakable rebel in an army prison in north Africa. He had chosen the role because he felt he was becoming a “Bond slave” and the film was about as far away as possible from the cartoon smoothness of 007. Cannes wasn’t much interested in that distinction, however. Goldfinger had come out the previous year; Thunderball was on its way. When Connery cruised the Croisette in an open-topped sports car it was Bond, “Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” as the New York Times called him, the crowds wanted to see.
Connery, for all his reluctance to identify with his character, clearly didn’t disappoint. Has he ever looked more Bondlike than in this picture? Eyebrow raised, catching the eye of a beautiful face in the crowd, keeping his head and his tailoring on point, while all around him are losing theirs. This was his first time at Cannes, but he knew exactly what Cannes demanded: it was the place actors had always come to act most like film stars.
This year’s festival, which opens next week, will conjure similar images: the same spring Riviera light, the same rococo facades, the same paparazzi scrum around an icon. Just as the photograph of Connery harked back to the welcome and confected spectacle that the film festival represented after the war, so this year’s images will reference the less inhibited atmosphere of the 60s. Glamour never goes out of style – or at least so Cannes insists.
