In Sidney Lumet's The Hill (1965) - entirely about how the military crushes individualism - Connery plays joe Roberts, imprisoned by his own army in North Africa for disobeying orders. The hill of the title is a vicious punishment climb that offending soldiers are marched up and down, to break their will. The Hill could not be a clearer attack on the absurdity of military rule. The climbing is nothing but the means by which superiors maintain their superiority, an instru-ment of otherwise pointless power. As Roberts, Connery rages against this power, fighting back, mocking a sergeant major's command. He's "no tin-pot soldier", he yells: the orders are "stupid and out of date" and "there are too many people in this army giving orders". He's enraged, out of control, falling around, slavering. "It's what I would have written," he told me.

The style of The Hill is as rebellious as its content: no girls, locations, colour, music, post-synching (some US prints were subtitled) or stand-ins - Lumet and Connery rejecting the fantasy world of the Bonds in favour of aesthetic rigour. Long takes followed the actors themselves up and down the hill in brutal midday heat. Much was shot against the light.

The Rock (1996), though flawed - it sets up a fascinatingly complex mythic-moral world, then dumps it half way through - is The Hill for the video age. Both portray places of correction, looming man-made symbols of the law. In the later film, Ed Harris is the leader of a bunch of rebel marines, rightly outraged at the way the US government misleads or ignores the relatives of those killed in service. To force a change in government attitude, they take hostage a group of tourists visiting the now-decommissioned Alcatraz - the 'Rock', as it's known. Connery is John Mason, a British national jailed for "longer than Mandela", and the only man who ever escaped from the Rock. His knowledge is needed to defeat Harris' scheme. As in The Hill, the law (this time the US government) is wrong, the world mad, the Holy Grail in the hands of fools. Mason, a Roberts 30 years on, has as little respect as his younger counterpart for the abstract rulings of the pow-erful - but he has also given up hope of the possibility of change, directing his energies towards internal transformation.

Connery's second Lumet picture (of five altogether) was The Offence (1973), made only because Connery insisted in his Diamods Are Forever contract with United Artists that they fund two other films of his choice (the second was never made). Connery plays Detective Sergeant johnson, ajaded lawman who kills a suspected paedophile. In long takes and wide/close montages, johnson reveals a Marnie-like secret: he too has paedophiliac feelings. This time the law is right - and Connery's character's moral imperative is not to challenge it but to admit to his profound inability to live up to its demands.

Yet the film's unflinching exposure of how authority is open to corruption by weak men makes it as oppositional a work as the first Lumet picture.

No Connery picture better exemplifies the actor's attitudes towards authority than The Man Who Would Be King (1975). John Huston - who thought the late scenes in The Offence among the best film-making he'd ever seen - had long wanted to make a movie of Kipling's novella about two ex-army rogues (Connery's Danny; Michael Caine's Peachy) mistaken for Great Men by the tribespeople of Kafiristan. Gently gorgeous in several ways, the film is a massive Ealing com-edy, a mythic Dad's Anny, about Freemasonry, the farce of succession and the birth of tolerance (the pan-and-scan video currently on sale in the UK is a desecration, but there are plans for a theatrical release in 70mm this summer).

Two scenes are relevant here. In the first, drip-ping with irony and played for laughs, Connery teaches the locals to "stand up and slaughter your enemies like civilised men" and insists that, in an army, you "must not think". With precisely the same subject as the "tin-pot" scene in The Hill, it comments deliciously on the Bond series and is deeply anti-military.

The second may be the best scene in Connery's career. By a fluke, he is crowned King of Kafiristan. In his first courtly encounter with his subjects, he is asked to adjudicate on a dispute: a peasant asks permission to raid a neighbouring village. He refuses consent,announcing instead a new co-operative system: a proportion of each village's annual harvest will be stored centrally, to help those whose crops fail. As an actor, this is Connery's primal scene. Here he is, making the law. All the lawmen he plays elsewhere, all those guys who challenged authority because it had been corrupted, are downstream of this moment, living in worlds struggling to remember what the law - made earlier, by others - is for.

But the scene is more resonant still. In a film that criticises the English way fiercely (Connery the Scottish Nationalist surely got some kick out of playing it), it quietly rages against Freema-sonry, inherited privilege and (especially) the cor-ruption of power. The interloper king's ruling could so easily have been a feudal or fascist one. But the final irony of The Man Who Would Be King is that the undeserving wielder of power wields it wisely - and even so the system is still wrong.

Unhappy with his earnings, Connery then sued the distributor, Allied Artists, with such success it went bankrupt. In fact, he has sued almost every Hollywood studio, which suggests that he sees them as a movie-world establishment, a cinematic officer class. There's a Robin Hoodness to this - the proceeds even sometimes go to charity - that must surely help endear him to the public (he played Hood in Robin and Marian, 1976).

Raymond Williams has written on the problems of communication and identity which arise when working-class people move from bookless, powerless worlds into book-filled, powerful ones. Perhaps Connery's first contacts with the very well read left him feeling out of his depth, but his love of books is clearly more than a cultural keeping-up-with-the-joneses or it would have faded as soon as he made it big. Instead, the acquiring of knowledge becomes an increasingly important theme in his films.

He left Darroch Secondary School, Edinburgh, in 1943, at just 13. Though bright, he hadn't read much. In 1954, as a beefy member of the chorus in the stage musical South Pacific in Manchester, he was asked by fellow Scot Matt Busby, manager at Manchester United football club, to join the team. Connery asked friends what he should do. Robert Henderson, an American actor in the cast, advised him that a soccer career would be over in ten years, but you can act until the end of your days. The part in South Pacific had been no more than a fun spin-off of bodybuilding (he got it via a Mr Universe competition), and Connery had not then considered the stage as a career. But Henderson went on to say something that seems to have captured Connery's imagination: "To be an actor you need to be able to look like a miner, and to have read Proust."

This he did, within the year (though he wouldn't get to play a miner until 1970, in Marry Ritt's under-valued The Molly Maguires, Connery's biggest commercial flop). By the late 50s, he was already beyond mere beefcake, onstage and in television: he appeared in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie; played Proctor, the lead in Arthur Miller's The Crucible; and Hotspur in a 1 5-hour BBC series based on Shakespeare's historical plays.

PART 3