#288: The Scarlet and the Black
Gregory Peck and Christopher Plummer play mental chess
This review was originally posted to Twitter on July 3, 2020.
Initial release: February 2, 1983
Director: Jerry London
The Catholic Church during World War 2 has a complicated history. Pope Pious XII’s chief concern was protecting the church, which meant treating the Nazis with kid gloves. But not everyone in the church agreed with that position. Jerry London is a veteran director of television movies and miniseries; with The Scarlet and the Black he gives us a tale of a lone Irish priest who defies both the Nazis and the Vatican’s official neutrality to rescue thousands of refugees and escaped Allied prisoners.
Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who existed in real life, has been helping people escape the clutches of fascism since the beginning of the war. But with the collapse of the Mussolini government and the release of thousands of Allied war prisoners, the Nazis seek their recapture. O’Flaherty (played by the inestimable Gregory Peck, albeit with a bad Irish accent) soon realizes the scope of the impending problem and gets to work setting up a network to hide escapees and others on the run from the Nazi regime.
Opposite him is the SS head of police, Colonel Herbert Keppler (Christopher Plummer.) Keppler has been tasked with recapturing the escapees, as well as managing roundups of Jews for deportations to Auschwitz. He is, in essence, O’Flaherty’s arch-enemy.
What follows is an escalating war of espionage and resistance against an increasingly brutal regime. The Vatican refuses to give O’Flaherty up, which forces Keppler to take ever more drastic measures, to the point of threatening O’Flaherty with death should he leave the Vatican.
Peck, always a fine actor, is a treasure in this film; his O’Flaherty is a complex man, prone to flashes of a hot temper but also absolutely fearless, even outright taunting Keppler by practically dancing right up to the Vatican border line with sniper rifles aimed at him. Plummer is more subdued; while his Keppler does raise his voice, he tends to save it for when he really needs it. More often than not, he utters orders in a calm manner that subverts the expectation of fury we usually expect from SS stooges.
If there’s a problem with this film, it’s the same problem I always have with television: the commercial breaks. Everything must be constructed as such that we have a cliffhanger of sorts every fifteen to twenty minutes; the same is true here, to the film’s detriment. This results in a jerky pacing, the plot moving in fits and starts as the time slot demands. However, London is a decent director who paints Rome with all the grandeur the ancient city deserves; his interior shots are nearly as good; if nothing else, better than TV deserves.
It’s really Peck who carries the film, and to a lesser extent Plummer, but aside from a surprisingly decent script they are aided by a score by none other than Ennio Morricone, whose bombastic score represents the best of early 1980s neo-traditionalism.
This film won’t wow you with its technical prowess or its pacing, but Morricone makes anything better and anyway it’s worth it to watch Peck and Plummer butt heads in a movie that deserves better than its format can really give it.
