Enter Sean Connery, dark hair slicked with pomade, eyes locking hungrily upon a beautiful green-eyed girl. Her return glance leaves no doubt—the feeling is mutual. His slouch and casual banter exude languor and nonchalance, but there’s an undercurrent of coiled menace to this man, as though he might, at any moment, spring into table-overturning, crockery-shattering action.

Except nothing of the sort happens. Instead, the other fellow in the scene cuts the tension by taking out his fiddle and favoring the room with a jaunty tune learned, he says in a stagy brogue, “in the old ruins on the top of Knocknasheega!”

This isn’t a James Bond picture. It is 1959, and Connery is putting in time in a cornball live-action Disney feature called Darby O’Gill and the Little People. He’s the second male lead, billed beneath not only Albert Sharpe, the elderly Irish character actor in the title role—a kindly farmhand who sees leprechauns—but also the green-eyed girl, the ingénue Janet Munro. Though verily pump-misting pheromonal musk into the air, to a degree unmatched before or since by any actor in a Disney family movie, Connery is still a jobbing scuffler, not a star. He has no idea of what lies in store for him.

The seventh of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, Goldfinger, has recently reached the shops. But there are no Bond pictures yet. In London, a Long Island–born film producer named Albert R. Broccoli, known as Cubby, is still lamenting that he blew his chance with Fleming. The previous year, Broccoli had set up a meeting with the En­glish author and his representatives to talk about securing movie rights to the Bond series, only to miss the meeting to tend to his wife, who had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In Broccoli’s absence, his business partner, Irving Allen, let Fleming know that he didn’t share his colleague’s ardor. “In my opinion,” Allen told Bond’s creator, “these books are not even good enough for television.”

This is an older, stiffer world, with Britain just five years removed from food rationing and America still in an era of Kramdens, Eisenhowers, and finned Caddies. It is a world unfamiliar with the catchphrases “Shaken, not stirred” and “Bond, James Bond,” where no ears have ever heard Monty Norman’s four-note Bond motif and no eyes have ever taken in Maurice Binder’s amniotic credit sequences of lissome women undulating in silhouette to lavishly charted John Barry arrangements.

But it is also a world in transition. Transatlantic jet service is newly available to commercial passengers, thanks to the carriers B.O.A.C. and Pan American. G. D. Searle & Company, a pharmaceutical concern, is awaiting approval from the Food and Drug Administration to market one of its products, Enovid, as a birth-control pill for women. A scrubbed, fit group of U.S. military test pilots has just been introduced to the public as the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronauts. And the undeclared Democratic front-runner in the next presidential election is only 42 years old.

In March 1961, when he actually is the president, John F. Kennedy lists Fleming’s fifth Bond novel, From Russia with Love, as one of his 10 current favorite reads in a Life-magazine article. That same year, Broccoli, having parted ways with Allen and joined forces with another producer, a Canadian by the name of Harry Saltzman, finally gets the rights to turn Fleming’s books into movies. After an arduous and seemingly fruitless search to find a lead actor mutually agreeable to the two producers and their studio benefactor, United Artists, Broccoli circles back to one of the lesser-knowns among the candidates: Sean Connery. To confirm his hunch that this tall, handsome Scotsman could be the guy, Broccoli, while in Hollywood, ar­ranges for his new wife, Dana, to join him in a screening room at the Samuel Goldwyn Studio. There they watch the only Connery footage that Cubby has been able to rustle up: *Darby O’Gill and the Little People.*Dana Broccoli’s response is instantaneous: “That’s our Bond!”