Sean Connery on being a Scot and Scotland`s influence on Hollywood

From its earliest days Hollywood has owed a debt to Scotland and Scottish talent, explains Sean Connery in The Times.

Scotland provided the subject for America’s first feature film, The Execution of Mary Stuart, with Mary played by a man, at least up until the final cut. This created a far greater shock on its first screening in 1895 than Lumière’s train achieved that same year when it puffed into a French seaside station in front of a sophisticated Paris audience in a Champs-Elysées café. It was one thing to fear a steam locomotive crashing into your room; quite another to believe that an actor had literally died on stage for your cinematic pleasure.

Dickson’s Fred Ott’s Sneeze, which he followed with his acclaimed sequel Fred Ott Holding a Bird, came to represent a film genre that John Grierson, some 30 years later, would call “documentary”.

Scotland’s most prolific film director was Frank Lloyd. Born in 1886 into a music-hall family in Cambuslang, Glasgow, and a performer on stage by the age of 15, by 1913 he was acting in Hollywood, where he soon began to write and direct silent films. His early successes, featuring the star of the day William Farnum, included A Tale of Two Cities and Les Misérables, which established him as a dependable director.

Lloyd was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. Within two years he had won an Oscar for his Nelson and Emma Hamilton biopic, The Divine, and by 1935 he had won two more for Noël Coward’s Cavalcade and Mutiny on the Bounty. Later he produced such notable titles as Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942). What is so astonishing is that Lloyd, who made a staggering 157 films earning 14 Oscar nominations, is now a largely forgotten figure.

From the earliest days of cinema a fascination with Scottish historical themes fed the appetites of Hollywood. Macabre shockers, or what Robert Louis Stevenson called “regular crawlers”, were especially popular. Not counting numerous shorts, five feature versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde were produced in Hollywood between 1912 and 1941, though none surpassed Fredric March’s Oscar-winning performance and his menacing facial transformation in Rouben Mamoulian’s production of 1931.

The tempestuous life of Mary Queen of Scots became the subject of many sequels. Ever since I first saw John Ford’s romanticised Mary of Scotland, with the glamorous Katharine Hepburn in the lead and Fredric March as Bothwell, I’ve harboured a soft spot for the doomed queen. But just like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which has also spawned numerous features, the realities of history have never hampered the imaginative vision of directors, especially beyond the English-speaking world, from Russia to Japan.

Alexander Mackendrick, the director of such classics as The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success,spent years trying to bring his own gritty vision of Mary Queen of Scots to the screen. Few films had been produced in Scotland up to that time without a heady draught of sickening schmaltz.

Mackendrick always dreamt of correcting this, of making an historical film that would explore the dichotomics of Scottish life in the traumatic wake of the Reformation and the dilemmas faced by the Catholic Queen in John Knox’s Protestant Scotland. Finally, after many false starts, Mackendrick, armed with a well-carpentered screenplay by James Kennaway, got the green light from Universal Studios in 1969.

Mackendrick wanted to recreate the impoverished Scotland of the grim 16th century when, far removed from the scenes depicted in tapestries on castle walls, the poor scuttled searching for food over filthy middens. Kennaway, whose adaptation of Tunes of Glory – on the class conflicts within a Scottish regiment –had already won him an Oscar nomination, shared Mackendrick’s vision of a country tearing itself apart over a religious divide.

But casting the American Mia Farrow as Mary Stuart raised the hackles of the press in Scotland. “How will she manage a Scottish accent?” one reporter asked. “Mary was educated in France and her first language was French,” said Mackendrick. This conference wasn’t going anywhere, even before Kennaway brought it to a dramatic close. When asked what line his script would take, “We shall surround this civilised young woman,” he said, “with lots and lots of nasty f***ing wee Scotsmen”.

Just as Mackendrick and Kennaway were all ready to go, with the cast under contract, the Scottish locations found and sets built at Shepperton, Universal Studios abruptly axed their European operation and the film was pulled. Mackendrick was advised to sue. “I’ll be paid for making films,” he said, before adding with unfashionable probity for Hollywood, “I won’t be paid for not making films.”

After Mackendrick’s dark portrait of a devious showbiz columnist mordantly played by Burt Lancaster in his masterful Sweet Smell of Success, there were few Hollywood hacks big enough to rally to his defence. Neither Mackendrick nor Kennaway, who died shortly afterwards in a motorway crash, would make another film.

Mackendrick became the dean of film and video at the California Institute of the Arts. Under his long tenure, CalArts grew into arguably the most creative film school in the world, with Mackendrick as its most inspiring hands-on teacher. “Yet Sandy was an even better film-maker, and should have done more,” Charles Crichton said, before directing John Cleese’s A Fish Called Wanda. “He was head and shoulders over all of us at Ealing.”

Anyone contemplating a film career could do no better than read Mackendrick’s book On Film-making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director.It offers the lifetime experience and thoughts of one of cinema’s greatest masters. “Speech involves rationalising our feelings and impulses, something film directors of the silent period discovered they could catch at first hand,” he writes. “They found that the camera can, uniquely, photograph thought . . . Actions and images speak faster and more to the senses than speech does.”

I wholeheartedly agree with that. A silent gesture can convey more in a flash than a minute of spoken dialogue. Unlike most actors, who resist directors cutting their lines, I have spent my whole career filleting mine. There are few directors who have not seen my cuts as improvements. Steven Spielberg paid me the ultimate compliment on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by adopting nine out of ten of my ideas that traded dialogue for added visual interaction.

This is the very essence of Mackendrick’s teaching Towards the end of his life Mackendrick was lionised by young film-makers during his retrospective at the 1990 Quimper Film Festival in Brittany. “Are you an American?” a film student asked of the Boston-born director. “I’m a Scot,” he said. “The Mackendricks are a ‘sept’, or branch, of the clan Henderson,” as he tugged proudly on his Henderson tartan scarf. His parents had eloped from Scotland and through the weirdest of coincidences he was conceived in Hollywood, which must have instilled in him an early warning of the perils of the place.

The young Mackendrick was soon dispatched to Kelvinside in the West End of Glasgow to be brought up by his Presbyterian grandmother. His family roots there included Thomas Annan, the pioneering Victorian photographer of the closes and houses of Glasgow’s doomed medieval quarter, before it was demolished in the wake of a devastating cholera outbreak in the mid-19th century.

In Scotland Mackendrick is still best known for his first film, Whisky Galore, which he always put down as a mock documentary on an amateur outing. Yet that was surely its strength. Filming entirely on the Isle of Barra during the wet summer of 1948, the fledgeling director was forced to augment his London cast with islanders. “This taught me something that I have used ever since, which is how to take professional actors, trained actors, and put them up against the amateur,” Mackendrick explained.

“The result is that they feed off each other. The professional actor gives the scene its pace and the amateur keeps the professional actor honest.” “We corrupted them all,” said Gordon Jackson, one of the leads. “They were high-powered actors and actresses by the time we left.”

Mackendrick’s final analysis of his first film was that it was a parody of a documentary. The opening narration, delivered in mock heroics by the great Scot character actor Finlay Currie, certainly lampoons John Grierson’s delivery at the end of Night Mail. “To the west there is nothing,” Finlay’s voice unfolds over the island’s empty strand, framing the far horizons of the Atlantic, “nothing except America”.

Night Mail (1936) was Grierson’s first major success as a producer running the General Post Office Film Unit. The popular success of its national cinema release came as a spectacular vindication of Grierson’s ability to assemble creative horses for courses. With Harry Watt and Basil Wright as directors, he invited the young composer Benjamin Britten to score the film and W. H. Auden, who was teaching at the time, to write poetry to the rhythm of the train hurtling north: “This is the Night Mail crossing the border/ Bringing the cheque and the postal order.”

The poetry began only when the night mail crossed the Border; Grierson saw to that. As a romantic expat he always talked of the bump he experienced as the train bounced over the tracks entering Scotland. A stanza after: “Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb/ The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.”

Grierson now recites in his own gruff Chicago Scots: “Dawn freshens, the climb is done. Down towards Glasgow she descends towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. All Scotland waits for her in the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs men long for news.”

And as the film ends over shots of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, Grierson concludes in his rolling prose: “Thousands are still asleep dreaming of terrifying monsters; or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s. Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, asleep in granite Aberdeen, they continue their dreams, and shall wake soon and long for letters, and none will hear the postman’s knock without a quickening of the heart, for who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”

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