The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 17

() PAGES 17-28 MOVIES RESTAURANTS MUSIC BOOKS ART FEATURES COMICS WOMEN'S ively S4STS MONTREAL, SEPTEMBER 29, 1973 Montreal gift to the acting profession -si i Ml I I TNk 1 1,,, hi mimniiM inw 'm i iinir irniiim in ninm By JACK KAPICA of The Gaztttt Every now and then, one of Montreal's native sons who has reached stardom' in Hollywood comes home and galls us with stories of how wonderful life is in the Big Time. Not that they mean to. But it gets hard to suppress that sinking feeling that Montreal is nothing more than a farm team supplying actors for consumption In other cities, in other countries. And we poor devils must content ourselves by following their careers while munching popcorn in the movie theatres. But Montreal's proudest gift to stage and screen, Christohper Plummer, has been returning home with more than a sentimental journey in mind.

He's been here to work. Last year, it was to star in the detective saga The Pyx, which was written, produced, directed and acted entirely by Canadians, with the sole exception of co-star Karen Black. The film will be released next week, in both English and French versions. And last week, Plummer was back again filming a daring venture by the as-yet unborn Global Television network. In a kind of You-Are-There format, he will appear in a half-hour interview (with host Patrick Watson) as Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, the character he played in the 1969 film Waterloo.

CONSOLING It's a consoling thought for Montrealers' that Plummer's presence here wasn't a mute jeer at those who couldn't supply him with enough opportunities 25 years ago, but that he was here accepting prestigious job offers. And he's satisfied with his work Montreal. "Sure, I enjoyed making The Pyx," Plummer was saying over Eggs Benedict at the Ritz this week. "It's the first Montreal film with international pretentions I've made. "What I particularly like about it is that it's a pleasantly entertaining commercial.

film, and that's the kind we need in 1 hear it's doing well in Ottawa. "It's Important to make money. Canadian films have been too arty till now. Hell, you can sneak in your messages and your art later, when the industry gets going." The Pyx will be quite a change for Plummer, who is 'now best known for his portrayal of the aristocratic Wellington or for the role of Julie Andrews' two-dimensional husband in The Sound of Music. In The Pyx.

he gets to play hard-nosed detective Dick Henderson, and growl a few words in Quebecois joual, something that amuses him to no end. Broad-shouldered and ruggedly handsome in his 40s, Plummer is a man of distinction, showing few traces -of having lived through spotlight, Plummer has earned respect through solid performances in a variety of roles that seldom registered as box office smashes except for the perennial hit The Sound of Music. A few years ago. he played the lead in Oedipus the King, a film faithful to the Greek classical mode, right down to the gory ending in which Oedipus puts out his own eyes. "That was an incredible time," said Plummer.

"We were shooting it in a tiny town in northern Greece, just near the Albanian border. I arrived the day before the military junta, and all the set was in a panic. "But a wonderful thing happened then. It seems all the Greek artistic and journalistic community, those who feared for the freedom with the new regime, fled to the safety of our set. Suddenly, we were crowded with big names.

"I mean, you'd lift a cow. and my God! there would be, Mikis Theodorakis! The chorus and crowd scenes were packed with the strangest assortment of high-level artistic people hiding from the new government." More recently, his part of Wellington in Waterloo gave Plummer cause for a new adventure. A natural for the role with his easy aristocracy and superb voice, Plummer plunged into Wellington the man and quickly became a Welhngton buff. IN COMMON In fact, Plummer has another thing in common with the man he portrayed a slight sense of shame at his birth place. Plummer blushes to admit he was actually born in Toronto though he moved to Montreal before his first birthday.

Wellington, born in Ireland, excused this breach of good taste by saying, "Just because one is born in a stable, he is not necessarily a horse." "You have to be very careful with Wellington," said Plummer, getting more serious. "There's no scriptwriter in the world who can write lines as good as those Wellington spoke." So Plummer has demanded and received a strong hand in the filming of the interview for Global TV, recommending character traits and ways of approach to interviewer Patrick Watson. But, for the time being at least, Montreal-' ers won't get a chance to see him as this new Wellington. Filmed by the Montreal production house Look-Hear Productions, the show will be seen only in Ontario, where Global makes its debut in January. There's talk of bringing the series (which includes Zoe Caldwell as Catherine the Great, Eli Wallach as Pancho Villa, John Colicos as Judas and Kate Reid as Queen Victoria) to television here, but it's still just a vague idea.

Most recently, Plummer was involved with the sad demise of the musical version of Edmund Rostand's classic play Cyrano de Bergerac. Plummer, nose built out about four inches, starred as the irrepressibWswordsman Cyrano. The musical version, called simply Cyrano, started in Toronto and headed for Broadway via Boston, but it was a disastrous drive. SENSATIONAL "We had sensational press," said Plummer, slightly incredulous. "But it was too bad a time in New York, in the early summer.

When everybody leaves the city for the summer, it's disastrous for a play. But we had no choice, we just barged in It would have succeeded in the fall, I think. "I'm sorry it wasn't well received. But and I'm not being pompous here I think I should have directed it myself. "You see, it was like Oedipus the King, which was almost too faithful to the original.

You have to tamper with the script to make a musical, you have to be disloyal to the original, and change it. "Cyrano should have started with Cyrano the man, and not with Rostand's play. The choreographer, Michael Kidd, did a great job with the material he had. Anthony Burgess wrote a great adaptation, extremely witty, perhaps a bit too clever for the music. "My real difference of opinion, I guess, was the music, which didn't rise to the level of the script.

But I think that someday Cyrano will be a great musical." Plummer isn't boasting about directing a play, either. It's his ambition now, and he's already had a good start. He is, at present, directing a stage show of readings from Shakespeare's love scenes, with actress Zoe Caldwell "and himself. The show has opened in Washington last week, and gained critical and public acclaim. "It was my first start as a director," he said.

"True, it was an easy thing to direct, with just two people reading, and you can move the show anywhere because there are almost no production costs. NEVER DONE "Strangely enough, a reading of Shakespearean love scenes hadn't been done before, so I liked the idea. It was thrown together in a panic, I had only a couple of weeks. "But I worked in a fever, and perhaps the speed helped. All the scene choices were excellent.

I didn't have the time to think about them too much. "But it's an absolute triumph in Washington, and now we have bookings all over the world." And with that, Plummer was off again, all over the world. And Montrealers can't grab and keep him any more, because he belongs to the world. We can only take pride in the fact that Montreal has raised a great actor. Harvey Hart wants good movies, not just 'Canadian' movies (Gazitte, George Cree) top of 'the idiot's profession' Montreal was the place that gave his career a start.

"Really," he said, "I began the idiot's profession all actors are idiots in the cradle, where we all start. "But I got my first real break with the old Montreal Repertory Theatre. That gave rise to a lot of good actors." 1 That was in his mid-teens, holding up his own with the best of them. It wasn't until he was 17, when he got his professional start with the Canadian Repertory Company, now defunct, in Ottawa. Since then, it was a matter of a slow but steady rise to international stardom, with an awesome reputation' for being a great actor as well.

Never in the brightest centre of the the movie middle-men. Or, as he asks, if Fortune in. Men's Eyes has played successfully world-wide, why does MGM say they still have to make up some money? "Now you wonder why filmmakers always go broke. There is always that step which Canadian filmmakers I hope can avoid where they get taken. The Fellinis of this world have been taken, the Alfred Hitchcocks have been taken.

The way the exhibition and distribution system setup is, something revolutionary has to happen so filmmakers actually are able to make money if their films are making money." (Fortune was made for $1 million and Hart estimates it has earned two or three times that in two years of release). "But it's actually set up so they're" ripped off entirely by the distributors. I don't know how this is going to work out with The Pyx. I hope it's a nice honest accounting so that the creative people can get their bread because they always invest the most. CREATIVE "No one else is asked to give as much as the creative people.

The distributor doesn't care. He looks out and says, Well, okay I'll do you a favor and we'll see how it does. So what does he invest?" Hart says the selling approach is often lackadaisical. "Can't we learn how to get the best box office for each picture? not to treat them all like throwing them in and saying 'well take your choice, people. But to really take as much care with the distribution and exhibition of the picture as the creative people take with the making of the picture.

That's all." The Pyx (now playing in Ottawa) is being handled well, he says, because the film is allowed to grow and take on its own personality, not rushed or haphazardly booked into the wrong theatres. And unlike the distributors, Hart says he hspcs people see The Pyx with their heads" open, willing to have an experience, and emerge feeling "they haven't been had." Christoplier Plummer on some tough days at Montreal High School. A "theatrical wunderkind" by his own admission, he bounced from prep school to prep school with little ambition but to act. "Montreal High was a seedy, appalling place," he said with a touch of disdain. "But it was the only place where I could act in decent plays.

I mean, where else was I to get a rvjle like Darcy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice?" Except for the shudderng recollection of his high school days, Plummer gives the impression of always having been a Montrealer, never treating it like the home you never can go back to. He comes back every year, to keep in touch with friends and family, from his farm in the south of France or from his home in London. distributors, Hart adds, leads to a (negative) predisposition about what a Canadian movie is supposed to be like. "Why have we got this man on our back for pictures that are made in Canada?" Is there a way to overcome the value judgements? 'Continue to make bloody good movies." There'5. another answer as well, says Hart, something he gleaned from the glory days at the CBC during the '50s, an era when Hart was one of the original so-called Twelve Apostles (along with Norman Jewison and Paul Almond) who formed the nucleus of a production team.

The result? OURSELVES "We turned around and found we were not being like anyone else. We were just being ourselves. The quality started to rise and suddenly we found we had an audience, a very faithful audience, and that was because we were able to do our thing in our way. "But if you have to sit back and analyze 'what is us'? it's boring and destructive. It's like saying, 'what makes the heart beat'? What's the answer? If we can find out what makes it beat, then we can make our own heart, right? But the problem is, when you take it apart, it stops beating.

"So don't question it. Just do your thing and create quality products' that you believe in. Don't try to create something for a market nobody knows about. "It's time to forget, to go on and pass the question about 'What is a "Sooner or later even Canadians will like their own pictures, even before someone else tells them they're good." The crux of the matter is "quality," Hart says, because quality is the thing which reaches people, creating an important distinction: a certain "good" movie is made in Canada; not necessarily that it's a Canadian movie. "There's a great difference." PROBLEMS There are other realities as well, according to Hart, not so much Canadian as universal.

Things like salesmanship and i ijfci' I Jiff 43 pjl Hi? rMJ Irr ill' 7' tn'at j'jjr- 1 1 till 1 it If I tlw-A ji I By JAY NEWQUIST of The Gazette If you agonized through Harvey Hart's superb 1970 film, Fortune and Men's Eyes, you probably felt depressed for a week and made a mental note to stay out of jail. His new movie is The Pyx, a supernatural murder mystery starring Karen Black and Christopher Plummer filmed in Montreal last summer: its lineup is drugs, sex, violence, and the occult. But relax this one's for fun, complete with ritual blood-bath, chiJJs, thrills, and even a few crucified rats thrown in for good measure. Is The Pyx (which opens here next week) the "great Canadian The Toronto-born Hart doesn't care either way since he's not hung up on geographical labels. He just wants to make good films.

Period. "I don't particularly care if The Pyx is the definitive Canadian movie," Hart said this week. "What does that mean? Everyone seems to be concerned about whether it's a Canadian movie. I'm more concerned about whether it's a movie .1 don't even know what a Canadian movie is and people keep asking me about this as if this is a hangup." CLOSET Hart says the "Canadian" distinction is "very bad" for the public and for Canadian filmmakers, a distinction which is made constantly, especially by distributors. "They say, 'Well, we'll play Canadian movies two weeks out of the year and we'll make sure they get seen'.

as if it's like a retarded child in a closet and they'll take him out for two weeks in the year and then they'll put him back. And at least the other relatives will know that he exists nad they'll have done their duty." The way Canadians think about themselves is "bad news," says Hart, "and something has to be done to really break it." The blanket "Canadian" labeling by Grt'i Pritctierd! create quality' Harvey Hart 'ju st -J.