"I quite enjoy it, actually. Chicago has been a surprise. I had never been here and had no idea it was such a beautiful place. I went up to Lake Forest and played golf and came back down along Lake Shore Drive just at sunset on a Sunday, and it really was quite stunning, the coast along the sea. Not the sea, the lake. Well, it looks like a sea. And the skyscrapers here aren't all arranged in walls, like in Manhattan. You can stand back and see them. I like the little corners, too, where the old city remains. We went to that restaurant, Gene and Georgetti's, underneath the elevated trains. They had great steaks, and more waiters than I've ever before seen in one place at one time. Such a crowd, it was more like American football."

There are all the ethnic restaurants as well, I said, feeling like a representative of the tourism office.

"Yes. Well. Mexican food, and all that sort of thing? I've never really fancied Mexican food, you know. A taco rather minds me of a puncture outfit."

A what?

"A puncture kit. For patching holes in bicycle tires. It contains all these bits and pieces, hard to identify."

I had never thought of it that way before, I said. The movie Connery was going to see the next morning, by the way, was "The Name of the Rose," scheduled to open Oct. 24 in Chicago. The film, set in the year 1327, stars Connery as William of Baskerville, a legendary Franciscan who visits a monastery being plagued by a mysterious series of murders. It is up to him to solve them -- and head off the evil Inquisitor (F. Murray Abraham), who assigns all blame to heretics and those possessed of the devil. The movie seems to take place mostly at night inside gloomy monastery walls, where secretive and vindictive men scurry about thinking the worst of one another. It was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, who made "Quest for Fire," and whose characters often seem in the early stages of man's ascent from the mud.

"I haven't seen it yet," Connery said, "and I'm quite curious. God, it was one of the toughest films I've ever made. We filmed in Germany in a monastery, and then we built sets on a hillside outside Rome, and of course, there was noise from planes and trains and buses and blimps. We couldn't record a single line of dialogue that was usable, and so we had to spend 10 days looping every line of the movie. The monastery was so cold, you could see your breath when you spoke, and of course, they wanted that effect. But I wanted to make the film because I loved the book, which sold 4 million copies, although I imagine 2 million of those copies were never finished, because the first 100 pages are rather slow going -- although nothing compared to the 10 days we spent dubbing the dialogue."