The Versatile Magnificence of Christopher Plummer (1929-2021)

Contrary to popular belief, the late Christopher Plummer did not regularly and derisively refer to The Sound of Music, in which he played one of his most famous roles, as the martinet father with a heart of gold Captain Von Trapp, as The Sound of Mucus. According to his expansive, urbane, entertaining 2008 autobiography In Spite of Myself, his nickname for it in pre-production was in fact S&M.

There were specific reasons for that. While Plummer, who died this week at the age of 91, had made his film debut in the late 1950s, in a remake of the Hollywood classic melodrama Stage Struck, and had recently played a plum role in Anthony Mann’s criminally underrated 1964 historical epic The Fall of the Roman Empire, Plummer did not consider himself a seasoned film actor. That he would be required to sing on this job worked his nerves a little more. While on location in Austria he’d soothe himself by boozing it up a bit, and was dressed down by director Robert Wise for getting sufficiently bloated that it was feared Plummer would bust the buttons of his costumes. It was, in other words, a trying experience that pained him. But it also taught him.

It’s interesting to note that, his over 200 television and movie appearances notwithstanding, Plummer saw himself as a creature of the theatre. At over 800 pages, his autobiography of course contains quite a bit of insight and dish with respect to his movie work — and includes some drolly funny stuff about his getting his feet wet in series television in collaboration with Sonny Grasso, the real-life cop partner of Eddie Egan/Popeye Doyle of The French Connection fame — but he lavishes the most attention to the life, and to the craft, of a stage player. As it happens, while the book reads like a career, and life, summation, few years after writing it, he’d finally win his first, and only, Academy Award, for his work in Mike Mills’ arguably twee but inarguably good-natured “I love my gay dad” movie, Beginners.

When Plummer writes about his daughter, the actress Amanda Plummer (whose mother was another superb performer, Tammy Grimes), his tone is of a loving father, but when he moves on to her work, he’s probing, acute, understanding that their talents are somehow very different. He marvels at the “freedom and daring” that he doesn’t believe he himself is capable of. But if he opted not to delve into the experimental or irrational, he brought so much else in terms of skill to the table that it hardly mattered.

It was in stage work, starting in Canada in the 1950s, that Plummer honed the skills that made him such an exceptional and diverse performer. (Fun fact: Fellow Great White Northerner William Shatner understudied for Plummer in a 1956 Stratford Shakespeare Company production of Henry V and actually had to step in for Plummer when Christopher was stricken by a kidney stone. They would reunite over thirty years later in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, in which Plummer would ham it up almost as shamelessly as old friend.) His often regal bearing often made him feel taller than his actual five-foot-ten height, and it contributes to our mental picture of him as someone who tended to roles of a certain gravitas. And while it’s true that such roles were what he tended to in the latter portion of his career — Lear on stage, and as Mike Wallace on screen in The Insider or as J. Paul Getty (substituting for the disgraced Kevin Spacey) in All the Money in the World — he had a spectacular range.

Plummer is one of the most cold-blooded movie villains of all-time in the 1978 sleeper thriller The Silent Partner. He robs banks dressed as Santa Claus, deposits a decapitated head in a home aquarium, and more, terrorizing aspiring secret-heister Elliott Gould. In the 1987 Dragnet, he was supposed to be the third or fourth fiddle to lead farceurs Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. Instead, playing broad as can be, Plummer, as a sort of Moral Majority huckster, and Dabney Coleman, as the pornographer who’s a target of the holy crusade, steal the movie right out from under the leads. As comfortable in support and character work as he was in a lead role, it was that versatility that contributed not just to the size of his filmography but the generally high quality of it. As a working actor who kept himself very busy, it was impossible to entirely avoid schlock. But even the schlock films he made were kind of interesting: take 1978’s dizzy Star Wars cash-in, Starcrash, which put Plummer in an ensemble including not only David Hasselhoff but, fresh from their triumphant collaboration in Maniac, Harryhausen honey Caroline Munro and Taxi Driver journeyman sleazebag Joe Spinnell. Plummer’s rationale for doing the movie was simple: “Give me Rome any day. I’ll do porno in Rome, as long as I can get to Rome.” Plummer must have been fond of Venice, too, because he subjected himself to the no doubt heavy directorial touch of noted whack job Klaus Kinski, running roughshod over the credited directors on location for the 1988 Vampire in Venice.

Consider that Plummer made his first feature movie, the aforementioned Stage Struck, with director Sidney Lumet, and his last, playing a diabolically clever and not a little bit strident (when necessary) paterfamilias in Knives Out for writer/director Rian Johnson, and you get a sense that this was an actor who was, over a career spanning seven decades, sought out by filmmakers who were after a certain quality, from both themselves and their casts. Consider, too, the other first-stripe directors Plummer worked with over the years:  Nicholas Ray, Anthony, the first Mann, Michael, the second Mann,  Robert Wise, Spike Lee, Mike Nichols, David Fincher, Terrence Malick,  Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, Oliver Stone, Taylor Hackford.

Let’s now go back to the elephant in the filmography, The Sound of Music. The 1965 movie was a massive hit and still beloved today, but in the lofty realms of film assessment it’s a movie that an awful lot of people really enjoy advertising their superiority to. I’ve long thought that before doing such things one really ought to examine the precise quality in themselves that they’re signaling. But beyond that, what’s more irritating is that the best arguments such types can make against the film are lifted from Pauline Kael, anyway. Kael, among other things, characterized the songs as “sickly” and “goody-goody.” And yet John Coltrane took one of them, “My Favorite Things,” and used it as a springboard to redefine harmony. He wasn’t doing it to take the piss — he could do it because the material was strong enough to afford him the opportunity.

As for Plummer’s work in the movie — whose very blatant and insistent heart-tugging is, well, a “thing” whether you like it or not — it’s sincere, thorough, consistent, and credible. And he has genuine, albeit unusual, chemistry with Julie Andrews. If you were an Austrian sea captain falling for a not-too-long-ago nun, your chemistry might be unusual, too. I’ll give Plummer himself a last word on the movie, from In Spite of Myself:  “The critics generally pooh-poohed the enterprise and it’s always been my opinion they were too ashamed to admit they liked it lest their cynical, hard-boiled colleagues of the press might call them sissies and banish them to the nearest convent.”
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Where to stream The Sound Of Music