I would have no idea Sean Connery had a brother were it not for this film. Apparently Neil spent most of his life working as a plasterer and was only in three or four movies, most of them attempting to capitalize on his relationship with Sean. This one’s a stellar example, as its other two titles are OK Connery and Operation Kid Brother. Yep, they’ve got Sean Connery’s brother, and that’s all they’ve got.
Dr. Neil Connery (yeah, they didn’t even bother) is a renowned plastic surgeon and hypnotist, who also happens to be the brother of an important secret agent. When one of his patients is kidnapped and her fiancé murdered, the government turns to him to find out what’s going on. A trail of clues leads to the evil organization Thanatos (like Thanos, but with weak chins instead of weird ones), who have a fiendishly convoluted plan to control the world’s gold reserves. Is Neil up to the levels of drinking, smoking, and seducing that this mission will require? Or will they be forced to call in a real secret agent instead?
I’d never seen this episode for some reason, so the first time I ever watched the movie was just now, and I gotta say, they missed an opportunity, big-time. It seemed perfectly obvious to me that the way to defeat a device that shuts down anything made of metal is using a plastic explosive. The archery thing is kind of cool I guess but if they were trying to make a comedy they really dropped the ball there.
Were they trying to make a comedy, though? I honestly can’t tell. If you were to tell somebody they’re going to watch a movie about a super-spy’s non-spy little brother having to save the world while the spy brother is out of town, they would probably assume that’s a comedy, but Operation Double 007 never bothers to make any jokes. It presents us with a series of tropes that seem designed to be made fun of, but never does so, and therefore comes across not just as one missed opportunity, but a series of them.
For example, consider the villain, Mr. Thayer. All his employees, from secretaries to sailors to the girl whose back he projects movies on (?!), are beautiful women. In The Million Eyes of Su-Muru, they had a running joke about how all these women had become so sexually frustrated that they threw themselves at whatever men they saw. It was a stupid, sexist, heteronormative, unfunny joke, but the attempt was made. Operation Double 007 never even tries that. The women are just there – Thayer keeps them more or less as decorations, and their only function on screen is to decorate the movie.
Similarly with Connery’s character. You would expect that the non-spy drawn into the spying world would be out of his depth, and that this could be mined for comedy. In particular, you’d probably think of him having some kind of job you wouldn’t expect to be useful in spying, only to have a situation arise where the world can be saved by driving a forklift or cooking a meal or some other utterly ordinary skill. Instead, Connery is a surgeon, hypnotist, lip-reader, and championship archer, a set of quite extraordinary skills that sometimes put him a step ahead of the actual spies.
Another way you could go would be to make the brother’s personality defy the spy movie stereotypes, perhaps having him be a nerdy teetotaler who is awkward with women. The title Operation Kid Brother suggests we may be watching somebody much younger than the spy, who doesn’t have the kind of worldly experience needed for the role. Operation Double 007 doesn’t do that either. Connery can smoke and smooch with the best of them. The only difference between his character here and the standard James Bond type seems to be his beard, which is pointed out and then forgotten about. Another potential source of comedy lost.
Finally, you can do like Austin Powers and just dial all the stereotypes up to eleven, to the point where it all becomes a farce. Some of the references in Operation Double 007 make it sound like they were heading this way, as when the blonde tells Connery “you read too many novels by Fleming”, but it never really gets there. This is at least partly because the Bond movies sometimes get so ridiculous they become this kind of parody all by themselves (see Brosnan’s entire run). Thanatos’ plan to blackmail the world by shutting down all machines with a nuclear-powered super-magnet isn’t any sillier than Goldfinger wanting to irradiate Fort Knox.
The only moment when I actually laughed at the movie rather than at Joel, Crow, and Servo was when they announced that Thanatos was planning to steal an atomic nucleus and everybody acts like this is shocking and terrible. What’s so bad about stealing an atomic nucleus? I’ve stolen atomic nuclei. Every time I take home a paperclip from work I am stealing billions of atomic nuclei. If you’re going to technobabble, you have to make sure you’re not using words that actually mean something.
With all possible fonts of humour thus firmly stopped up, all we’re left with is a slightly sci-fi-ish spy movie that makes a big deal out of the fact that it stars Sean Connery’s brother. Since it never makes a joke, we have to try to take it seriously, and when you try to take it seriously, it’s still not very good.
For one thing, for all the fuss it makes about its star, Operation Double 007 makes it really difficult to tell if Neil Connery has any talent as an actor. It doesn’t ask him to show much emotion or portray a character grappling with difficult decisions, just to run around and punch things and sometimes glare at people he’s supposedly ‘hypnotizing’. We don’t even get to hear his voice, as it’s dubbed over by some American. Apparently this was because Connery himself was ill when the time came for ADR. I kind of wonder if maybe his line reads were just that bad, but as I’ve never seen any of his other movies I can’t make that judgment. The other actors all look bored. They’re being paid to be here so they showed up, but they’re not putting in any more effort than they absolutely have to.
By this point in my blogging career you guys are probably expecting me to get mad about the way women are treated in this movie, but for the most part it doesn’t bug me. They're largely portrayed as competent and skilled on both sides – the nun is an expert infiltrator, Miss Maxwell a good shot, the blonde has skills ranging from sailing to hand-to-hand fighting to horseback riding, and so forth. The only place where it really makes me mad is the way the story uses Yasuko. She’s introduced to us as a burn victim who was going to marry the last spy who was looking into Thanatos and their magnet thing. We meet her as Connery announces that he has successfully healed her face, so she still has value and her boyfriend won’t have to marry an ugly girl.
That’s just backstory, though. Yasuko’s actual function within the story is basically as a file folder. Her boyfriend hypnotized her and implanted some secrets in her brain, then made her forget she knows them – only Connery, by hypnotizing her again, can extract the vital information. In other movies this role could be filled by a suitcase, a tape, a flash drive, whatever you like. Operation Double 007 uses a human being, who goes on to be kidnapped, tortured, and eventually killed over something she consciously knows nothing about. We have no idea if she consented to this, and none of the other characters seem to give two shits about her life or death on any other level. She never even gets to find out her boyfriend is dead.
You know, a much more interesting movie could have been made with Yasuko as the hero. Learning her fiancé is dead and knowing he told her a secret but not what the secret is, she could set out to take revenge on his killers and find out what was worth dying for. Sadly, that movie wouldn’t have been a feeble attempt at a starmaking vehicle for some famous guy’s brother, so nobody wanted to make it.
The way hypnosis is used in Operation Double 007 is both ridiculous and troubling. Ridiculous because Connery seems able to hypnotize people just by staring at them really hard. Troubling because he is able to strip them of any resistance to his will and command them at a distance, as he does the one mook who suddenly turns around and punches his comrades. It’s particularly creepy the way he uses it on the man he was supposed to operate on, who is subsequently killed when he charges Thayer to facilitate Connery’s escape. Connery is supposed to be a doctor, somebody who is devoted to improving and saving lives. Shouldn’t sending a guy to his death give him some of those moral qualms the movie never asks him to portray? I guess not.
Why didn’t they make this a comedy? When your entire premise is we’ve got Sean Connery’s little brother in our spy movie that would seem to be the way to go. Sadly, they studiously avoided every possible opportunity to be funny and left us with a film that’s just kind of bland and lifeless, with no clear goal. Some movies needed a re-write, but this one needed a re-imagining from the ground up.
1967 OK Connery Also Known As (AKA) Operation Double 007 Secret Agent 00 Brazil Operação Irmão Caçula Colombia Operación hermano menor Denmark Operation Lillebror Spain Todos los hermanos eran agentes Finland Operaatio 'Pikkuveli' France Opération frère Cadet Greece (transliterated) Sta ihni tou adelfou tou Ireland (English title) Operation Kid Brother Italy (alternative spelling) O.K. Connery Japan Dokutâ Konerî/Kiddo Burazâ sakusen Mexico Operación hermano menor USA (informal short title) Kid Brother USA Operation Kid Brother West Germany Operation 'Kleiner Bruder' Directed by Alberto De Martino Music by Ennio Morricone & Bruno Nicolai Writing Credits Paolo Levi ... (story) Paolo Levi ... (screenplay) Frank Walker ... (screenplay) Stanley Wright ... (screenplay) Stefano Canzio ... (screenplay) Release Dates Italy 20 April 1967 USA 22 November 1967 (New York City, New York) Japan 2 March 1968 Finland 26 April 1968 West Germany 26 April 1968 UK May 1968 Denmark 29 May 1968 France 28 June 1968 Ireland 12 July 1968 Mexico 17 July 1969 Finland 1 April 2007 (Night Visions Film Festival) Cast Neil Connery Neil Connery ... Dr. Neil Connery Daniela Bianchi Daniela Bianchi ... Maya Rafis Adolfo Celi Adolfo Celi... Mr. Thai - 'Beta' Agata Flori Agata Flori ... Mildred Bernard Lee Bernard Lee ... Commander Cunningham Anthony Dawson Anthony Dawson ... Alpha Lois Maxwell Lois Maxwell ... Max Yachuco Yama Yachuco Yama ... Yachuko Franco Giacobini Franco Giacobini ... Juan Ana María Noé Ana María Noé ... Lotte Krayendorf Guido Lollobrigida Guido Lollobrigida ... Kurt Francesco Tensi Francesco Tensi ... Auctioneer Margherita Horowitz Margherita Horowitz ... (credit only) Enzo Consoli Enzo Consoli ... Sitting Man at Lecture (as Vincenzo Consoli) Mirella Pamphili Mirella Pamphili ... (as Mirella Pompili) Nando Angelini Nando Angelini ... Ward Jones Lanfranco Ceccarelli Lanfranco Ceccarelli ... Assassin (as Franco Ceccarelli) Aldo Cecconi Aldo Cecconi ... Wilson Antonio Gradoli Antonio Gradoli ... Monte Carlo inspector Fajda Nicol Fajda Nicol ... Henchwoman (as Faida Nicol) Caterina Trentini Caterina Trentini ... (as Kathleen Trentini) Leonardo Scavino Leonardo Scavino ... Ben AHmed (as Leo Scavino) Rest of cast : Mario Soria Mario Soria ... Gamma (uncredited) Kitty Swan Kitty Swan ... Co-agent on ship (uncredited) Pietro Torrisi Pietro Torrisi ... (uncredited)
