Kamala Harris and the History of Primary Frontrunners

Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA)

I used to have a policy on this blog not to talk about the presidential primaries before the midterms, but on occasion I feel it's okay to break that rule, and that's when we're looking at the primaries from an historical context.  I wanted to discuss, specifically the Democratic primaries.  In my opinion, until someone proves otherwise, JD Vance as the sitting Vice President should be assumed to be the de facto Republican nominee.  While recent vice presidents Dick Cheney & Joe Biden have decided to (largely due to age) forego initial runs as sitting VP's, Vance is only 41-I cannot imagine a world where he declines to go for a promotion, no matter how unpopular Trump may be.

But for the Democrats, it's an entirely different story, though not one without a VP frontrunner.  If you look at aggregate national polling, while figures like Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are all doing well, the clear frontrunner at this point is former Vice President (and 2024 losing presidential nominee) Kamala Harris.  Harris in most aggregate gets between 24-27% of the vote, with the next best being Newsom getting between 19-21% of the vote.  This clear frontrunner status had me wondering-in the 21st Century, how often have the two major parties picked the clear national polling frontrunner this far out?  Basically what I'm asking is: based on history...is the race already over?

2000: 2000 is maybe the quintessential polling example where staying in front is the way to win.  Al Gore & George W. Bush, in terms of Gallup polling, never were behind ever.  In Gore's case, this translated into an insane dominance in terms of the primaries (he would win literally every state against Sen. Bill Bradley), while Bush would lose several contests, most famously New Hampshire, in his matchup with John McCain.  But in terms of polling-this race was basically decided well before the midterms, and would lend credence to Harris (and Vance) being the frontrunners.

2004: Bush was the incumbent at this point, so we'll focus exclusively on the Democratic side, and that's where we get a real question mark about Harris's seriousness in running for the nomination.  For much of the 2004 primaries (before the midterms), there were two names that dominated the cycle: Hillary Clinton & Al Gore.  Neither of these two would win the nomination in 2004, but that's mostly because they wouldn't even run for the seat (polling third place was Tom Daschle, who also wouldn't run).  There's still a question mark whether Harris (like Gore) will take one national election loss and admit that this isn't something she'll ever win.  In early 2003, when Gore & Clinton had both declined a run, the frontrunner would become Joe Lieberman...who also didn't win.  In fact, John Kerry wouldn't assume the spot of frontrunner until January 2004, after Howard Dean had spent much of 2003 as the frontrunner.

2008: As a lesson to anyone speaking too confidently about the nominations in 2028, 2008 is the race you should look to to give them a reality check.  The first race in decades to not feature a sitting president or vice president in the race was, by many pundits, already decided headed into the midterms-a subway series contest between NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani & Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.  In both cases, this would eventually fall apart, though each party took a different approach in whom they settled upon.  Clinton losing to Barack Obama would become the stuff of legend, an upstart beating Clinton in arguably the only presidential cycle she would've won, the people demanding a big change, while the Republicans would spend months flirting with figures like Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, & Fred Thompson after Giuliani failed to catch fire before settling for the second place finisher in 2008, John McCain, a storied figure in the party and the last real attempt the GOP would make to try and find common ground in the middle in a presidential primary (that it failed so spectacularly might be why they haven't done it since).

2012: Obama was the incumbent here, so we'll focus solely on the Republicans, and despite my personal memory saying otherwise, in 2010 the frontrunner was very much the guy who got the job: Mitt Romney.  Romney's lead was shaky throughout the year, with people like Chris Christie, Sarah Palin, & Mike Huckabee all threatening it (part of the reason Romney emerged victorious might be that Huckabee was the only one who actually ran), but with a really middling field, Romney took the nomination after most assumed he would throughout 2010.

2016: For the third time, the early polling leader was Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, and finally she would become the nominee.  Bernie Sanders never felt like a serious threat to Clinton in terms of national polling (for all of the "this primary was fixed" complaints on the left, Sanders never really had a chance nationally against Clinton), and Hillary sailed to the nomination, her biggest competition ending when Joe Biden decided not to run.  The Republicans, on the other hand, obviously had the mother of all upsets when Donald Trump (who wasn't even in hypothetical polling in 2014) came out of nowhere to upset the two frontrunners, Jeb Bush & Mitt Romney (again, Romney wouldn't even run, though he did flirt with it for a while into 2016).

2020: Trump was the president in 2020, so we stick solely to the Democratic side here, and we once again have a frontrunner who stayed that way.  While it feels (in retrospect) like Bernie Sanders got close because he (once again) did well in state results, nationally it was the same as 2016-the frontrunner, Joe Biden, led in virtually every poll unless they included two longshot candidates (Hillary Clinton & Michelle Obama).  Once again, being the frontrunner from the outset helped.

2024: And it would conclude that way in 2024.  Biden was the incumbent, so we stick to just the Republicans, but for many of them Donald Trump was the "incumbent" already and nominating him again was certain this far out.

Conclusion: Looking at this list, there were only four instances (both sides in 2008, and then the Dems in 2004 & the GOP in 2016) where the frontrunner got skipped.  While 2004 is unique (the frontrunners would refuse to run, which may be the case for Harris), the remainder it was because it was a well-known frontrunner whose support was built on sand once someone better came along.  That might be the case for Harris, and I suspect you're going to see her doing some party-building (lots of campaign stops in key states, listening tours, etc) if she wants to run to make sure that she does not fall into the same trap of Giuliani, Clinton, & Jeb Bush-being a frontrunner in name only.

Can Susan Collins Pull a "Never Trump" in Maine?

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)

Ten years into his presidency, the "Never Trump" movement feels like a weird thing to discuss.  Ten years ago, headed into the 2016 general election, it was a much bigger deal that Donald Trump was not the choice of many Republicans, and it's worth noting that the list of Republicans who didn't support him publicly was very long.  From refusals to endorse from figures like the Bush Family (both former presidents, as well as Governor Jeb Bush), to then sitting officeholders like Govs. John Kasich, Larry Hogan, & Bill Sandoval, to members of Congress like Rob Portman, Ben Sasse, & Mark Kirk, the Never Trump movement in many ways was a group of people who assumed that Trump was a flash-in-the-pan, someone that they could survive with one loss in 2016 (putting up with Hillary Clinton for four years), and pretend never happened in 2020 when someone more appropriate was the nominee.

But Trump won the 2016 election, and took much of the Never Trump movement with him.  Of the dozens of members of the US House who refused to endorse Trump in 2016, only two (David Valadao & Mike Simpson) are still in office.  Many of these figures either lost future elections (David Jolly, Eric Paulsen, & Mia Love, for example, all went down in general elections during the 2018 blue wave), or were driven out of the party.  People like Portman & Jeff Flake chose to forego running for reelection all-together rather than deal with the fallout.  Some senators survived, mostly in states like Utah & Alaska where (despite being red states) MAGA isn't nearly as powerful as it is in most of the rest of the country, but by-and-large the movement dissipated.  Liz Cheney & Adam Kinzinger in 2024 were pretty much the last prominent Republicans to help a Democratic nominee.  At this point, all of the Never Trump Republicans are relegated to history, are out of office, or are now Democrats.

All except one: Susan Collins.  Collins has never publicly backed Trump in any of his three presidential elections.  Collins publicly said she wrote in Paul Ryan's name in 2016 and Nikki Haley's name in 2024 (it's worth noting that, as far as I can find, Collins never publicly stated whom she voted for, Trump/Biden/otherwise, in 2020).  Collins is also one of the only federal Republicans (possibly the only Republican) to have survived the entire Trump era in a blue state.  Collins had the good luck to not be on the ballot in 2018 (when I think she would've lost), and had the even better luck in 2020 to be able to vote against Amy Coney Barrett, a crucial bipartisan moment for Collins that may have won her the race against House Speaker Sara Gideon that year.  Part of this is skill (Collins is, in my opinion, the most talented cross-party federal politician still in office in the country of either party at this point), but it's worth noting I think Collins would've lost in 2018, and probably loses in 2020 if Ruth Bader Ginsburg hadn't died.

But recent polling in Maine seems to be spelling out something that might help Collins in a way I never would've imagined.  A recent Emerson poll showed that in the Maine Democratic Primary, Graham Platner enjoyed an incredible lead over Janet Mills (55-28%), and had a 7-point lead over Collins in the general.  This is one of many such polls for Platner, who has essentially taken on the distinctive frontrunner status in Maine, a Senate race we've talked about a lot here.  What was interesting to me in this Emerson poll was the favorability ratings across the Democratic Party between Mills & Platner.  Platner's voters generally liked Mills (56-36% favorability rating, a solid position to be in in a tough race).  But Mills voters seem to hate Platner, with only 18% of them having a favorable viewpoint of him and 56% disliking him.

Normally, these numbers are things that people shouldn't worry about, and that I wouldn't normally care about-the Never Trump movement is maybe the best indication of that.  Given a general election matchup that's competitive, the party gets in-line even if they don't love the nominee, and while there were a lot of very prominent Never Trump endorsees in 2016, the GOP largely just voted for their nominee en masse (it's how he won).  In this case, I would normally think that the Mills voters would see Platner winning, complain for a minute, and get in-line.

But there's a problem here-Collins is famous for peeling off disaffected Democratic voters, and Platner is a uniquely tough candidate to swallow if you aren't already backing him (I have said, for the first time in my life, that he's a federal Democrat in a major federal race that I simply could not vote for & would ultimately leave the ballot blank if I lived in Maine).  He has been deeply critical of the kinds of Democrats that don't like him (hence why they don't like him), and most of these Democrats, particularly those over 40, have likely voted for Collins in at least one of her elections.  They are very comfortable with splitting the vote for her (Collins won with both Barack Obama and Joe Biden at the top of the ticket), so it begs the question-can Collins do something Hillary Clinton couldn't?  Can she get the NeverPlatner voters to come to her side?

These Emerson numbers make me think that she can.  Collins is in a position where, if the Republicans are so bad off in November (and with the rise of both oil prices & unemployment, they might get there) she can't win at all; she needs Trump in better shape than he is to have a shot (in some ways, she might mirror Norm Coleman in 2008 where a large swath of Democratic voters didn't back their Senate nominee because they actively disliked him, but it was too blue of a year for that to ultimately make the difference).  But if she does win (and she has never lost a Senate race in nearly 30 years), it will almost certainly be because of this contingent: Democrats who have voted for her before (and also voted for Janet Mills before), but who have shown an outward dislike of the man the Democrats are about to nominate.  If I'm the Collins team, I have to like what I'm seeing in this polling...and am surely prepared to try to do the reverse of what the NeverTrump movement never could.

Democrats Risk Disaster in California

Sheriff Chad Bianco (R-CA)

We have not written a lot of political articles in the past couple of weeks (I have been on vacation, and been enjoying the rest & relaxation that I've been needing after months of pushing myself too hard at my real-life job), and so we're going to have a trio of them in the coming days as I catch up on some of the topics of the past few weeks.  We're going to start with a discussion of the California Governor's race, something that I've been ignoring given that I thought it would sort itself out...but like many Democrats, I feel like we've waited a bit too late, and are now entering catastrophe, even in a blue wave year.

California, due to term limits, will be electing a new governor in 2026 as incumbent Gov. Gavin Newsom will retire (and almost certainly in the process immediately start running for president in early 2027).  Given the state is one of the bluest in the nation, and Donald Trump's approval ratings are in the toilet, it would be a safe assumption to presume that Newsom will be succeeded by a fellow Democrat.  But California has a unique jungle primary system, one that allows an open-party primary where all candidates run, and the top two (without ranked-choice voting taking place) advance to the general election.

This has caused some consternation in the past, in particular in 2012.  That year, in a seat that was drawn to favor the Democrats (it was a mild blue district), the Democrats received collectively 48.5% of the vote, but given there were four Democrats running to the Republicans' two, Pete Aguilar, the Democratic frontrunner, came in third, and both the Republicans advanced in a district that Barack Obama would carry.  Two years later, Aguilar would stage a comeback, being one of only three Democrats to flip a seat in the otherwise red wave slaughter of 2014, and has held the seat ever since.  But it was a cautionary tale for the Democrats-the jungle primary process could easily backfire if too many Democrats ran, even in a blue constituency.

That is what appears to be happening in the governor's race this year.  The Republicans have two major candidates: Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and political commentator Steve Hilton.  Meanwhile the Democrats have over 20 candidates, eight of which (Xavier Becerra, Matt Mahan, Katie Porter, Tom Steyer, Eric Swalwell, Tony Thurmond, Antonio Villaraigosa, & Betty Yee) have all held major office in the past 15 years.  Polling has shown a pretty consistent story-with eight major Democrats in the race, the Top 2 spots have gone very consistently to Bianco & Hilton.  Bianco & Hilton in most cases barely get more than 14-16% of the vote a piece, but with Democrats struggling to hit the 15% marker, if you go solely by polling, the two Republicans are the frontrunners to be the next nominee.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA)

It's worth noting that "major" Democrats is a descriptor of their current or recent political positions, and not an indicator of their polling position, because if we're being honest, only three Democrats are "major" candidates in this race.  In recent polling, only Steyer, Swalwell, & Porter have gotten into the double digits, and in 2026, they are the only three candidates that have managed to beat Bianco or Hilton in at least one poll.  Most polling aggregates show Swalwell in the best position, followed by Porter, and then Steyer.  If a Democrat emerges from this race, it will be one of the three of them, and it's worth noting-if any of them is in a normal general election against either Bianco or Hilton, they'd crush and easily become the next governor.

Which is why a recent move to have a debate seemed like a great idea.  All three (plus the Republicans) had qualified, and voters (a consequential quarter of which are undecided) could hear from the candidates, and help a frontrunner emerge depending on who did the best.  But that was cancelled, and for really eye-rolling reasons.  Porter, Steyer & Swalwell (along with Bianco & Hilton) are all white, which is not the case for all five of the remaining major party Democrats.  If this was based off of just picking candidates, it would be a bad look, but these candidates are hardly without resources (Yee, Thurmond, & Becerra have all held statewide office, Villaraigosa & Mahan have been major city mayors).  If they can't connect enough to get at least 10% of the vote in an electorate as diverse as California's the debate committee (who was very forthright in who should be included based on polling) shouldn't be blamed.  That the losing candidates made this about race (when it wasn't-it was very much about who was the most likely to become governor based on polling) feels really stupid & disingenuous.  In the same way that Jasmine Crockett called out people who criticized her campaign as discriminating against a Black woman, this isn't about discrimination-it's about who pollsters have shown can win.  And none of these candidates can win.

And it's not like the powers-that-be didn't want a diverse candidate.  Democrats begged former Vice President Kamala Harris or Senator Alex Padilla to come in and clean up this race, but they refused.  But at this point, without a debate, it's time they come in to clean up regardless (along with Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, & Gavin Newsom).  We are getting darn close to the end of this primary, given how much of California's electorate votes by mail (the primary is June 2nd).  At this point, it's not obvious that any of the also-ran Democrats have enough sense to get out of a race where they are going to get less than 5% of the vote and look like fools.  Republicans seem to be loving this, and so far Donald Trump's team has had the good sense to ensure he won't endorse or point out the scam so that Hilton & Bianco continue to do roughly evenly with voters (though one wonders if the move by the Department of Justice to go after Swalwell might backfire in the way Trump's threats helped Adam Schiff in 2024).  The Democratic powers-that-be need to step in and help the Democrats in this race know who the frontrunner is (even if they have to pick between Porter, Swalwell, or Steyer themselves and make up a frontrunner), because there's an increasingly strong possibility that California is about to have a Republican governor if they don't.

Rider on the Rain (1970)

Film: Rider on the Rain (1970)

Stars: Charles Bronson, Marlene Jobert, Gabriele Tini, Annie Cordy, Corinne Marchand, Jill Ireland

Director: Rene Clament

Oscar History: No nominations, though it did get a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  France, however, in 1970 chose to submit Hoa-Binh, and wasn't nominated at all.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Charles Bronson: click here to learn more about Mr. Bronson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Charles Bronson's career as a movie star was bizarrely-timed.  Similar to actors like, say, Morgan Freeman & Samuel L. Jackson, Bronson spent decades after coming to Hollywood working in a host of small & supporting roles before getting top-billed parts in his 50's.  Like most of these men (and honestly even more so), Bronson did this in notably good movies.  While early roles had him playing occasionally in B-Pictures (like the Vincent Price horror classic House of Wax or the celebrated Roger Corman biopic Machine Gun-Kelly), he appeared in a number of really popular & classic movies in the 1960's, including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Sandpiper, & The Dirty Dozen, all of which had him in key supporting roles...but not getting the lead parts that were going to men like Richard Burton & Steve McQueen.  Bronson did, during this time frame, get a part you could arguably say he's the male lead in, Once Upon a Time in the West (he gets fourth-billing in the film, but of the three main men in the movie, he has the most screen-time), a film that was not a success when it was released to American audiences (it was filmed in Italy), but has since been considered by many to be a masterpiece.  I will go on record as saying it is my favorite movie of all-time (full stop), and Bronson is wonderful in it.

(Spoilers Ahead) But that changed in the early 1970's, as Bronson started to regularly to get lead roles, one of the first of which was Rider on the Rain.  Rider on the Rain is about a man named Henry Dobbs (Bronson), whom we don't realize until much later in the picture is not a true blackmailer or a cop, but instead a member of the military.  It's also true that much of Rider on the Rain is not really Bronson's movie-the main character in this (despite billing to the contrary) is Mellie (short for Melancolie, one of several cheeky monikers in this picture), played by French actress Marlene Jobert, who despite not being super well-known to American audiences now, was a regular lead presence in French films of the 1970's (and would go on to win an Honorary Cesar for her troubles in 2007).  Jobert & Bronson have a weird chemistry, one that feels at odds with his famed brevity as an actor (Bronson in virtually all of his roles speaks in short, clipped sentences...if you've never seen him, think something like Clint Eastwood but with slightly more inflection).

Rider on the Rain, though, would not be the prototype for a Charles Bronson picture, and that's a kind of a pity because while the film isn't very good, it is quite odd (and if you know me, you'll know I'll take "weird & not very good" over "boring but fine" any day of the week).  Jobert's Mellie kills a man who rapes her in the opening scene, and for much of the movie is trying to convince everyone around her (including herself) that she didn't do it.  It's a weird juxtaposition because in 1970 (and especially in 2026), the audience is rooting for her, and is fine giving her a pass for dealing out very direct vigilante justice.  She's also played strangely, with Jobert feeling at once a mature woman, one who is lusting after a shockingly jacked (the man's abs are incredible for being nearly 50 and not having modern workout techniques) Bronson, while also playing a "little girl" role in parts.  The film in many ways feels like a sort of New Wave take on Hitchcock, and some of the camerawork mirrors that (as does a twist at the end that I won't spoil even with the spoiler alert-you'll have to see the movie to find out).

The film also starred Jill Ireland in a supporting part.  Ireland is going to show up in one more movie we profile this month, but I'm going to take this moment to talk about her a little bit given that she was so crucial to Bronson's public persona.  Ireland & Bronson met in a rather nefarious way (she was married to David McCallum, Bronson's costar in The Great Escape, and according to legend Bronson told him that he was going to "marry his wife," which of course he would in 1968, and the two would star in 15 films together throughout the course of their career.  Ireland is important to understanding Bronson's public profile in part because she was in so many of his movies (and would even produce some), but also because he was famously shy.  Bronson rarely sat for interviews, so he didn't get the traditional cultivated celebrity-treatment that other stars would get as part of media coverage, but one thing the public knew about was his devotion to his wife.  You watch one of the rare interviews he did in the 1970's (with Dick Cavett) where he was joined by Ireland and you see the devotion, and by all accounts they had a very happy marriage.  We'll talk a little bit about this as we go along, but wanted to give Ireland her due alongside our month of Charles Bronson given she was such an important component in his filmography.

Saturdays with the Stars: Charles Bronson

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we talked about Sean Connery, the man who in many ways forged the mold for what we think of as a modern action hero.  This month we're going to talk about a man who, like Connery, had a history of fine acting but was largely overshadowed by the action films that the public adored & would ultimately become his legacy.  Unlike Connery, though, he seemed to be more comfortable with this, and would largely eschew any attempts to reclaim some of the impressive, dramatic work of his early career after one movie, the one he would be most-associated with, would forever cement his public image as a violent vigilante on the big-screen.  This month's star is Charles Bronson.

Born Charles Dennis Buchinsky in 1921, the future Charles Bronson grew up in a small coal-mining town in rural Pennsylvania, the 11th of 15 children born of immigrant parents from Lithuania.  Bronson grew up in abject poverty, his father dying when he was just 12, which forced him to go to work in the mines to help support his mother and siblings.  He still was able to finish high school, though, and in some ways World War II offered him a different life, as he joined the Army Air Force and was a pilot in the Pacific, eventually winning a Purple Heart.  After the war, he would take on stagehand work and eventually small parts in the Philadelphia theatrical community (even living with future Odd Couple star Jack Klugman) before moving to Hollywood and working as an extra in movies starring opposite Katharine Hepburn, Mitzi Gaynor, Spencer Tracy, & Gary Cooper.  His big break came with a scene-stealing turn as Igor in House of Wax (a surprise hit starring Vincent Price), which led in the 1960's to key supporting turns in some of the biggest action/war pictures of the era, such as The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, and The Dirty Dozen.

Bronson's career is fascinating in part because he could've stayed a supporting player forever, making a good living as a stoic figure stealing scenes in war pictures that would continue to be popular throughout the 1970's & 1980's, but instead two odd things happened.  First, he would gain international recognition in two films (Once Upon a Time in the West and Rider on the Rain), the former considered by many (including me) to be the greatest film ever made, and the latter a commercial & critical triumph that would win the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1970; both films were lensed outside of Hollywood, giving him an international flavor despite very American roots.  But instead he would largely sell out when he came back to Hollywood as a leading man, making a series of action films that were wildly popular, but didn't have the gravitas that he was clearly capable of, all culminating in Death Wish, his most famous movie, and the role with which he would be (for better or for worse) associated with for the rest of his life.  This month, we're going to talk about Bronson's career, why he ended up being an action film hero that (unlike Connery) never really also made promise on his clear acting talent in serious dramas, and how this would in some ways set up a paradox that future stars in this series would have to jump past.

OVP: The Rock (1996)

Film: The Rock (1996)

Stars: Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, David Morse, John Spencer

Director: Michael Bay

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned in our last entry on Saturdays with the Stars, Sean Connery's career got a new life in the late 1980's when he won an Oscar for The Untouchables and followed that up with a mammoth hit in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  These two films set up the course for the remainder of his career-Connery would still star in major action films, but would take on an advisory role, frequently the vaunted elder who would mentor younger, more "age-appropriate" leads like Richard Gere, Wesley Snipes, and in today's film, Nicolas Cage.  These movies were hits.  Much was made (we'll get there in a second) about how Connery really ended his career with a sluggish slump into retirement, but this ignores that during the late 1980's, 1990's & into the 21st Century, when Connery was being knighted and being named the oldest man ever to achieve the title of "Sexiest Man Alive" from People Magazine, Connery starred in a number of smash hit movies like The Hunt for Red October, First Knight, The Rock, and Entrapment.  While other actors of his generation like Paul Newman and Marlon Brando had, by-and-large, been relegated to old man dramas (and in more cases than not, cemetery plots), Connery was a box office draw in the way that men decades younger than him were and was talked about as a still-relevant movie star.

(Spoilers Ahead) Perhaps this is best boiled down by talking about The Rock, the biggest hit he had during this era (the film would make $335M, adjusted for inflation that'd be $709M, which is basically impossible to do today without it being established IP).  The movie itself is made by Michael Bay, who at the time would've been short-hand for crap (or at least was headed in that direction), and in the past decade, has been saved by Millennial film fans (nostalgic for an era when IP wasn't the only way to make a movie) as being more worthy-of-praise than he was at the time.  The movie makes little sense, and not just because its politics so closely resemble Bay's rather sketchy takes on Libertarianism.  We have Brigadier General Frank Hummel (Harris) holding Alcatraz hostage in hopes of securing $100M for the families of those who died in top secret missions.  He is holding dozens of hostages on the island (tourists who have visited it), and the government sends in a team of agents, though they're quickly boiled down to just two: Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Cage), a chemical weapons expert with little field experience, and retired Captain John Patrick Mason (Connery), the only man to ever successfully escape from Alcatraz.  The two team up to not only stop Hummel from detonating a chemical weapon that could destroy tens of thousands, but also to see if Mason can get his freedom, which is dangled as incentive but all involved know is just a ruse to get his help.

The real enemy in this movie, it's worth noting, isn't Harris's general, but instead FBI Director James Womack (played by John Spencer), and that's because you don't get a government that wants to help the people in a Michael Bay picture.  Even more so than Clint Eastwood, Bay's films are quintessentially glorious, tech-savvy propaganda for government incompetence.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing (lord knows there's a case to be made that government incompetence dominates our collective consciousness in the Trump Era, and has to a degree in every administration), but it also means that The Rock is a movie you don't really want to think about too much, as it becomes too ridiculous & frequently too absurd to consider it technically.  A lot of your mileage with the movie will depend on your take on Connery & Cage's unlikely friendship, and your tolerance for gratuitous violence.  The violence here is less artful and more just disgusting, and I will own that I don't think Cage & Connery work at all.  Connery's performances with Costner & especially Ford in the late 1980's worked better because there was a subtlety, a clear driving friction with which they can find common ground.  But Cage is not a subtle actor, and Connery can't seem to find any sort of chemistry with him...it just feels like they're making two different movies.

Connery would continue making films regularly until 2003.  He ended his career with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a bad superhero movie that made a lot of money, which hadn't been the case for some of Connery's most recent endeavors like Playing by Heart and The Avengers (for the record, not a superhero movie).  He retired, and with the weird exception of an animated adventure film, never made another movie despite entreaties to join later installments in the Indiana Jones & 007 franchises, dying in 2020 at the age of 90 from a combination of pneumonia & dementia.  Despite decades of trying to escape it, the first line of his New York Times obituary of course included the words "James Bond."

Next month we're going to talk about one of Connery's peers, someone who would dominate action films in the 1960's and especially the 1970's.  Like Connery he wouldn't really get the credit for being the fine actor that he was, but unlike Connery, he didn't seem to care, finding "selling out" a bit more palatable when one gigantic smash hit that changed his career's trajectory captured the public consciousness (and divided critics, both cinematic & political).

OVP: The Untouchables (1987)

Film: The Untouchables (1987)

Stars: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Charles Martin Smith, Andy Garcia, Robert de Niro

Director: Brian de Palma

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Sean Connery*, Art Direction, Costume Design, Original Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to cover two Connery films today as I missed last week, but didn't want to short-change him, so we'll talk through both his time in the 1980's and, this evening, the 1990's.  Connery was, by the early 1980's, a movie star but not a consistent box office presence.  While he had made hits (Time Bandits dwarfed its production costs in 1981), nothing he had done had, quite frankly, approached what he had achieved with James Bond, and as a result Connery was talked into making his final installment in the franchise in 1983 with Never Say Never Again.  This was something he did without Eon Productions (traditionally the production house for Bond films), and he did so in a head-to-head competition with Roger Moore, who had Octopussy out that year.  Both films were huge successes at the box office, though Moore's film ended up on top.  Connery hated the experience, and stuck to his commitment to "never again" after this one (he would never appear in a Bond film again), and indeed wouldn't even make a movie for two years after this.

(Spoilers Ahead) Connery probably could've played his types of middling, increasingly aging rogues & fictional knights forever for the rest of his career, the memory of Bond so appealing to nostalgic movie producers who grew up idolizing him, but it was today's film that truly changed the course of his career & legacy.  The Untouchables is a film where Connery gets second billing to Kevin Costner, not remotely as famous as him at the time, but it was a smart move to choose a supporting part.  The Untouchables is a highly-fictionalized look at Eliot Ness (Costner), the federal agent who led the efforts to take down Al Capone (de Niro), and features Connery in a role as a rogue cop, one who is brought in as part of Ness's operation, which is ultimately successful in beating Capone (or at least sending him to jail), but (because this is a Brian de Palma film) not without a lot of very bloody corpses along the way.  Like most of de Palma's films, I struggled with this.  Costner's one of the blandest leading men of his era, gorgeous but blank-faced and rarely a compelling figure in the lead (and if we're judging solely on looks, Andy Garcia is even prettier than him at this point), and Robert de Niro is actively terrible in this movie, a hint of the many cash-grabs the acting icon would have in the decades to come.  The best part of the movie, for me, was Ennio Morricone's score (and that flawless Giorgio Armani tailoring).

Connery is solid, though, not nearly as good as he is in, say, The Man Who Would Be King, but he's winning and very good at embracing the role of "aging sexy guy who mentors a younger star," something that he'd started with Christopher Lambert in 1986's Highlander, and which would become the bulk of the remainder of his career.  For much of the catty press he took back in 1983 for Never Say Never Again, about how he and Moore were far too old to be believable as aging action stars bedding women young enough to be their daughters, it did feel like Connery's place as an action star would soon fade.  But here, he showed how well he could fit in-he was a tough guy, someone who was grizzled but had "one last go in him" and this would be something he'd ride for the next 15 years or so, but also would carve out for others like him.  Action stars, because of Connery's work in this and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a few years later, had a path for a second act, one with a lot of box office (The Untouchables was a massive hit, the sixth highest-grossing film at the domestic box office in 1987, and made 3x as much as de Palma's now much-obsessed Scarface), so the paydays (and movie stardom) could continue even as the stunt work became less intense.

It also would define Connery's career because it made him one of the only action stars to date to win an Academy Award.  In the 1980's, with a lot of Golden Age actors aging to the point where they were near death, we saw a lot of the leading actors of that era winning "sentimental" Oscars.  Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Geraldine Page, Don Ameche, Paul Newman, & Jessica Tandy would all take home Oscars at the time, and with this movie, Connery would as well.  Connery's win is one that it's hard to fault the Oscars (it's cool that he won a sstatue, even if I don't know that I'm going to agree with them in the 1987 OVP), and certainly they did worse in the era, but it gave him a nobility that would become a trademark the remainder of his life, and gave him a further distinction over future James Bond actors none of whom (to date) have ever gotten so much as a nomination.