Five Christopher Plummer performances worthy of your attention.

The actor Christopher Plummer has died at the age of 91. He was a talented and versatile actor, often to be seen in the 1960s and 1970s in second-lead roles, yet never quite becoming the enormous star that he deserved to be. Here are five of my favourite performances.

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)

Immediately before he was lovable Austrian Georg von Trapp, Plummer played this very different figure in Anthony Mann's epic movie, his first big-screen appearance in six years (though he had built up a formidable reputation as a stage and television actor). Whilst thoughtful, the movie is too long. But Plummer's performance. atypical for him, is commanding—a mercurial, complex psychopath. I am undecided as to whether I prefer Plummer's Commodus to that of Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator. The movie was a massive box-office flop, and so did nothing for his career. Fortunately the singing von Trapps came to his rescue.

Battle of Britain (1969) 

I confess that I always have and always will love Battle of Britain. Plummer plays no-nonsense Squadron Leader Colin Harvey, one of four roles, along with Robert Shaw's unnamed Squadron Leader, Laurence Olivier's Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding and Trevor Howard's Air Vice-Marshall Keith Park, that give the movie its spine. Plummer also has to carry the main romantic subplot, as the pressures of the battle tear apart his marriage to Susannah York's Maggie. I don't know for certain, but I presume Plummer's is the role originally earmarked for Michael Caine, before scheduling conflicts forced Caine to take a smaller part. A testament to Plummer's success is that it's very hard to imagine Caine in the role. Instead, we end up wishing there was more Plummer.

Waterloo (1970)

Another sprawling epic, Sergei Bondarchuk brings Russian sensibilities to the multi-star war movie, and the result is all the better for it, in my view. Plummer is second lead again, as the Duke of Wellington, and he doesn't appear on screen until nearly forty minutes have passed. But once he strolls through into the Duchess of Richmond's ball, he absolutely steals the movie from Rod Steiger's Napoleon. No-one has encapsulated the essence of the Iron Duke the way Plummer does here. (Stephen Fry's Wellington is a great tour de force, but an entirely different approach.) Plummer's finest performance.

The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)

It's a brave man who steps into the shoes of David Niven, but this is precisely what Plummer does here, as retired gentleman thief Sir Charles Litton. Blake Edwards' '70s Panther movies are messy, and in some ways the best one can say about Return is that it's the least messy, but it does boast two great performances, from Catherine Schell as Lady Litton, and from Plummer. Plummer eschews any impersonation of Niven, and instead plays Litton as if he is a version of the Saint—and not Roger Moore's Simon Templar, but Leslie Charteris'. Why did no-one ever let him play that role for real?

Murder by Decree (1979)

Plummer's second go at Holmes has him investigating the Jack the Ripper murders, with a plot drawn from Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. In my view, it's a lesser entry in the Holmes canon. James Mason's Watson seems too old for Plummer's Holmes, though Frank Finlay's Lestrade is perfect. In the pantheon of Holmes portrayals, I wouldn't place Plummer with the greats, Rathbone, Cushing, or Brett. But he's up there with other interesting interpretations such as Nicol Williamson and Robert Stephens, and far above the 'could you nots' of the likes of Richard Roxburgh and Rupert Everett. (I omit Douglas Wilmer from the greats only because I have not seen enough of his work in the role, and leave out Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller because, for all the merits of their performances, neither is really playing Conan Doyle's detective.)

Honourable mentions go to Plummer's role as Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King (1975), in which he's easily overlooked, as he's not in it very much, and the movie is so dominated by Connery and Caine; and from his seventies and eighties, when he developed a fine line in character parts, his Doctor Parnassus in Terry Gilliam's flawed but interesting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Indeed, I can't remember seeing a performance by Plummer that was actively bad, which is more than I can say of a lot of actors. Even in Star Trek VI, where he is unapologetically chewing the scenery, he gives us a better class of chewing the scenery.

RIP.

 

2020 Movies #1: 1917

1917. UK; dir. Sam Mendes; scr. Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns; starring George Mackay and Dean-Charles Chapman; DreamWorks Pictures/Reliance Entertainment; 2019

Unsurprisingly, 1917 has been compared with all the great First World War movies of the past - All Quiet on the Western Front, La Grande Illusion, etc. But the movie it reminded me of most is the Coen Brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou? It has the same sense of a picaresque, episodic journey through the landscape, with encounters that can border on the surreal and transitions that can sometimes seem dreamlike.

There's a lot in 1917 that's very good indeed. There are two strong performances at its heart from Mackay and Chapman, even if individual episodes are sometimes over-burdened with celebrity cameos - look, it's Andrew Scott! And there's Mark Strong! Can Benedict Cumberbatch be far behind? (Spoiler: he doesn't turn up until quite near the end.)

The screenplay is clever, and doesn't play out the way you anticipate. People you expect to die live, and people you expect to live, at least until much later in the movie, die. Most unexpected, perhaps, is the treatment of the British officers. They are all incredibly reasonable - not a General Melchett or even a Captain Darling among them. Of course, it's good that there's a corrective to the typical Blackadder presentation (Richard Holmes' The Western Front is useful on this topic), but the lack of any venal glory-hunters at all makes 1917 feel a bit like Saving Private Ryan; this is a movie that pays lip-service to the idea that military commanders don't necessarily know what they're doing, but doesn't really tell that story.

It is, of course, a bravura technical achievement. The various long-shots are put together seamlessly to give the impression that this is one take, and it thoroughly deserves the Oscar for Cinematography (and it's a travesty that it wasn't even nominated for Best Editing). I am not in the least surprised that it won the Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Picture, as it is the sort of technically impressive movie that seems to be saying something profound that appeals to those who vote in such awards.

But there's the nub of it. What actually is 1917 saying? What's it about? One might say that it's about comradeship, about taking on a task that you don't really believe in because it's important to someone else. Or it might be about the horrors of war. The trouble for the latter is that the dreamlike nature of parts of the movie distance the viewer from full engagement. Yes, there are dead bodies of men who have been buried by shellfire, or French civilians who have ended up in the river. But these scenes don't feel as affecting as they should. And the transitions from one episode to another, whilst clearly delineated, are sometimes done in such a way as to override logic (Mark Strong's company, for instance, appear out of nowhere, and disappear back into nowhere). A cynic might suggest that the prime motivating factor in making this movie was that Mendes enjoyed shooting the opening sequence of Spectre (the Mendes Bond movie that isn't mentioned in the publicity), and wanted to see if he could do that at full movie length.

In the end, beneath the extremely impressive surface gloss, 1917 feels a little bit hollow.

D-Day movies

A friend's Facebook last week linked to this article by David Denby, the New Yorker's movie critic, about the 1962 movie The Longest Day, a telling of the events of 5 and 6 June 1944. I get the impression Denby is a respected critic, but I find this article wrongheaded on a number of levels. For a start, there's a xenophobic dig at the cowardice of the French. The piece has a number of errors (John Wayne plays an officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, not the 101st, and Kenneth More plays a British naval Commander, not an Irish general). Also, two of the points on which he criticises The Longest Day (the depiction of the sea-wall at Omaha Beach, and the lack of portrayal of Canadians) appear to be lifted from the Wikipedia article on the movie. All in all, I get the impression that it is quite a long time since Denby actually saw The Longest Day.

For Denby, The Longest Day is a forgotten movie, and rightly so. It is aimless, because it attempts to present the story from all perspectives. It is not a movie for our time. And it falls far short of Stephen Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. This is not an uncommon comparison (and one now invited by the Blu-ray packaging of The Longest Day, which deliberately evokes the poster for Ryan). The Longest Day is often used as a whipping boy for those who want to show what a great movie Ryan  is. They often, like Denby, give the impression that that they haven't seen The Longest Day recently, and, indeed, that they are not particular familiar with, nor like very much, war movies as a genre. Very often, as Denby does, critics will note the way that the older movie fakes for dramatic effect, whilst overlooking the way in which Ryan does this as well, at least as much. And they always note how the deaths are more realistic in Ryan, as if the use of gory effects inherently renders a character death more meaningful.


Obviously, I disagree with a lot of this. True, the mass of characters in the 1962 movie, generally dressed alike, means that it can often be hard to follow who is who, especially amongst the American front-line troops. But there are plenty of deaths in The Longest Day that unsettle the viewer. You don't need to show someone's head being blown up by a 20mm shell - a parachute slowly disappearing into a well can be just as disturbing. At the time, this was a very significant movie. It marked the point at which war movies became more epic and multi-stranded than they had generally been in the 1950s. And allowing the French and German characters to speak in their own languages was a notable innovation. If The Longest Day is forgotten today, it has as much to do with it being made in black and white - an aesthetic decision rather than a commercial one - as it does with any other qualities of the movie.

This is not the first time I've dealt with this sort of material. I wrote a fanzine article back in 2004 about Saving Private Ryan and the related television series Band of Brothers (which I rate very highly). I tidied that up a little, corrected a few points, and uploaded it to Academia.edu. I got the following response from my old friend Derek Macleod:

I think the references to previous war films in Ryan won't bug me now that I can think of it as an homage (albeit partly unintentional) to classic war movies, rather than a new take on the war film.

I agree with that. I think it's hard for anyone with a familiarity with the 1960s war movie not to see how much Ryan draws from them - I deduce therefore that those who praised it (and continue to praise it, as Denby does) as a "new" sort of war movie simply weren't familiar with the genre.

On one point I do agree with Denby: Saving Private Ryan is more of a movie for our times than The Longest Day - but not in the way that Denby wants it to be. He sees it as a post-Vietnam movie, imbued with cynicism about war and the military. I see it as much more of a flag-waver, a return to pre-Vietnam values. Where The Longest Day is a movie about the collaborative fight, Saving Private Ryan appeals to American exceptionalism. It is D-Day how the Americans want to remember it; The Longest Day is closer to how it was.