Christopher Plummer, Herbert Kappler and ‘The Scarlet and the Black’

National Catholic Register, 11 February 2021

Plummer’s von Trapp may be thought the more Catholic role, but it is Kappler’s that is the more Catholic story.

“Priest! Priest!”

The greatest cinema scene in the 60-year career of the late Christopher Plummer concludes with the Canadian actor screaming into the darkness of Rome’s wartime Colosseum, “Priest!” It is a cry of aggravation, desperation, condemnation and, finally, supplication: “Priest!”

A great actor eventually has to do it: play a priest. Sir John Gielgud. Sir Alec Guinness — whose turn as Chesterton’s Father Brown led to his eventual conversion to Catholicism. Sir Anthony Hopkins. Bing Crosby. Spencer Tracy. Karl Malden. Donald Sutherland. Jeremy Irons. Robert Di Niro (several times).

It’s inevitable. The origin of the theological term “person,” employed to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity, has its origin in the Latin word persona. The “persona” was the mask that a stage actor used as a rudimentary costume for his character.

Actors adopt the personas of others, so it follows that at some point it is necessary to play one who acts in persona Christi, the greatest “role” of all. The actor plays the priest because the priest is the greatest of all actors; he acts in persona Christi. The difference is that the role that the priest plays is not about various truths; it is Truth itself.

Register film critic Steven D. Greydanus gave an overview of the magnificent career of Christopher Plummer, who died on Feb. 5 at age 91, focusing on his two most Catholic films, The Sound of Music (1965) and The Scarlet and the Black (1983). 

Plummer had clerical roles himself, playing an archbishop in the miniseries The Thorn Birds (1983) and a corrupt monsignor in a sacrilegious fantasy film called Priest (2011). Yet the two films Greydanus highlights were his most Catholic.

The death of Plummer led newscasts in his native Canada, where he returned over decades to his roots as a classical actor at the Shakespearean Stratford Festival. I saw him play Prospero in The Tempest in 2010. Given that he was then 80, I thought it might be the last occasion to see him on stage. It was for me, but he remained working for many years afterwards.

Plummer, like Guinness, had a certain classical thespian disdain for the silver screen. And like Guinness, who became most famous for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars but was embarrassed by it, Plummer spent most of his career distancing himself from his most famous role, Capt. Georg von Trapp in The Sound of Music. 

In Captain von Trapp, Plummer played a Nazi resister in post-Anschluss Austria. The film was filled with the Catholic faith of his wife, Maria von Trapp, and their family. Yet it was in The Scarlet and the Black that Plummer played his most Catholic role, the Gestapo chief in Rome, Herbert Kappler.

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