OVP: Thunderball (1965)

Film: Thunderball (1965)

Stars: Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Luciana Paluzzi, Rik van Nutter

Director: Terence Young

Oscar History: 1 nod/1 win (Best Visual Effects*)

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.

Our shift from Errol Flynn to Sean Connery in part also shifts us into the modern definition of an action star, and in some ways we should've gone with our next two month's stars (who are far more focused on the 1970's, but wouldn't have much legacy as action stars in the blockbuster sense beyond that), except that if we're going chronologically Connery became famous first.  He also just managed to live long enough as an action star to become a leading man alongside the heyday of the genre in the 1980's & 90's.

But we are shifting into Connery because he defined action in the 1960's, and he did so as the quintessential movie hero: James Bond.  While Bond was originally a book character, in a highly-popular spy series by Ian Fleming (which would eventually have every single novel be brought to the big-screen), Connery's inhabitation of it would make it an essentially cinema-derived product to the minds of billions.  Connery got the role of Bond pretty early in his career.  He was a leading man at that point, having appeared in Darby O'Gill and the Little People (a live-action Disney movie), but he had not had a traditional breakthrough, which would change with the colossal success of Dr. No.  The film would make Connery a household name, but as we'll find in the coming weeks, it was more Bond that would be the household name than Connery himself.

(Spoilers Ahead) Connery would make seven Bond films in his career, and I had before this just seen two (Dr. No and Goldfinger).  We're only going to do one Bond film this month (there's a lot to Connery's career that I want to cover so we won't have time for more), and I didn't want it to be one of his post-1960's pictures, so I kind of just drew a name out of a hat and went with Thunderball (both because of its Oscar win and because I love that Tom Jones theme song).  This film won Bond his first (and to date only) Visual Effects Oscar, and is a story about Bond once again taking on SPECTRE, this time with their #2 leader Emilio Largo (Celi), who is planning on destroying a major US or UK city unless their governments pay him 100 million pounds.  Connery eventually starts to infiltrate the spy's den, all the while bedding a half dozen women, including those closest to Largo, before eventually defeating him with the help of the curvaceous & stylish (seriously, that black-and-white bikini could make a comeback so fast on Instagram if someone wanted to bring it back) Domino, played by Auger.

The movie is not one of Bond's most-celebrated outings, and many clock this as the first weak link in the Connery era of films, generally considered the best until Daniel Craig, and they're right.  Connery is still there, charming and brutishly sexy as ever (the film's now heavily-criticized sexual politics have a cringe moment early on when Connery toes the line with Molly Peters' physiotherapist, eventually having sex with her despite protestations earlier in a steam room), but there's not enough to do.  The biggest problem is that there are too many women in this (I know that's opening up for ridicule as a gay man saying it, but it's true)-they feel frequently interchangeable and none of them stand out.  This film would be remade in 1983 in Connery's final Bond film (Never Say Never Again), and Domino would be played by future Oscar winner Kim Basinger, so I'm curious when I eventually get to that (not for this series, but in terms of Bond completionism) if it'll be better.

I do want to talk about the visual effects before we go, since this is a big Oscar blog, and I'd be remiss if I ignored them.  I think the effects are impressive-the opening sequence with Connery using a jet pack is crazy (it actually worked), and the underwater fights and the explosions later in the picture are top-notch.  I have to assume it was the underwater photography that got it the win though, given how revolutionary it looks.  I've seen a film like Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, which was a CinemaScope spectacle 12 years earlier starring Robert Wagner & Terry Moore, and it was considered revolutionary at the time (it even got nominated for Best Cinematography at the Oscars) in the way that it shot underwater so well in color, but 12 years later, Thunderball is on another level.  This looks like it was shot with green screens it's that impressive, and is a real step up compared to anything you'd see of this nature, likely inspiring everything in the future from Jaws to Titanic.