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We shall all be back
I discovered recently that Leslie Howard's Pimpernel Smith (1941) is freely available on the Internet Archive. I love this movie. It's not the weirdest propaganda that Britain produced during World War II, but it's right up there with the Archers and Ealing Studios.
In 1934, Howard had starred with Merle Oberon and Raymond Massey in the definitive film version of Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel for Alexander Korda; in the spring of 1941, he produced, directed, and starred himself in a wartime reboot that won my heart the first time I saw it with its unabashedly intellectual, eccentrically numinous, unapologetically anti-Nazi hero. Where Percy Blakeney only plays at being an apolitical fop, Professor Horatio Smith of the Cambridge Museum of Antiquities really is a terrific nerd. He lectures on Greek myth at the drop of a chiton. He carries a photo of Aphrodite Kallipygos in his wallet where most men keep a pin-up or a picture of their best girl. For every trick up his sleeve, he has a smear of blackboard chalk on the tweed of it, and he may or may not have once misplaced an entire Thursday. Above all, he's quixotic enough to set out singlehandedly to rescue scientists, artists, writers, all sorts of dissident and endangered people out of Germany right before all hell breaks loose—his best disguise is a broadly drawn version of himself, the archaeologist so unworldly, he'll tramp cheerfully through the Anschluss to excavate the rumor of an ancient Aryan civilization predating the Semitic Near East. (It's racist tosh, of course, but so irresistible to the Nazis that they let him right in.) The natural opponent of such a quicksilver figure is the ponderous villainy of Francis L. Sullivan's Reichsminister von Graum, satirically introduced failing to fathom the famous English sense of humor which is said to be their secret weapon, but the film is wise enough to know that his blunt-force self-importance does not make him a trivial enemy, but a vicious one. It knows, too, that a damned elusive professor's true match is not statuesque eye candy but an equal deceiver like Mary Morris' Ludmilla Koslowska who can see through his cover story at once, Athene with Odysseus. Throw in a cadre of eager students including a rebuke to still-neutral America, a ticking timeline and the mysterious whistle of "There Is a Tavern in the Town," and it's all fun and games until someone gets caught by the Gestapo.
Less swashbuckling than its predecessor, Pimpernel Smith is still not quite a straight thriller, which suits a hero who never carries a gun and emerges from the misdirection of a hiding place saying apologetically, "I'm almost ashamed to have used that old trick, but it nearly always works." The script by Anatole de Grunwald, A. G. Macdonnell, and Wolfgang Wilhelm elides most of its action sequences into evocative images, of which the eeriest and most important is a scarecrow bleeding; it's much more careful to track the skirmishes of conversation in which someone is almost always double-speaking, even if just with poetry. Some of its jabs at the enemy are as witty as the juxtaposition of a pastoral tourist poster with the sound of Nuremberg jackboots, others as blatant as a propaganda officer proudly declaring, "In Nazi Germany, no one can hope to be saved by anybody!" but it does not mock complacently. The film's concentration camps are gentler than the reality, but the dedication uses words like persecuted and exterminated in reference to the victims of the Nazis. Especially nowadays, there's a real bite to Smith's impersonation of a press agent for the German American Bund, come to allay reports of genocide by showing some American journalists around a model camp. ("The truth is, the American people only pretend to be democratic. At heart they are one hundred percent National Socialists.") As retellings do, it downplays some elements of Orczy's story while sharpening others, which means viewers who love the angst of identity porn may be disappointed by its reconfiguration of the central relationship; I who break out in hives over plots which rely on intelligent adults not speaking to one another am just fine with it. There's no teasing doggerel about the Shadow as there is about the Scarlet Pimpernel, but Smith does troll the Reichsminister mercilessly over the authorship of Shakespeare. The photography by Mutz Greenbaum is crisply transparent until it begins to darken into the supernatural expressionism which always makes the film feel as though it should have been Howard's last. Even more than Sir Percy, it's the role into which he put his masks and his mysticism, personal and national. Smith has to be mortal, not infallible, or the story becomes as weightless as a cartoon, but the line between the unworldly and the otherworldly that thinned so readily around the actor to begin with here barely exists at all. "You're so human."
The final soliloquy is still as good as everyone remembers—hauntingly prescient, spoken as prophecy in a year in which the outcome of World War II was far from assured. A thin-faced professor in the shadows of a railway station, unarmed at gunpoint, his eyes glinting like a cat's in the dark. An anti-Nazi picture made during the Blitz by a Jewish man, his half-immigrant's quintessential Englishness carefully learned, deeply felt. He did not live to see the winning of the war his character so confidently predicted; he vanished into history like the last word into a curl of cigarette smoke and shadows of their own spiraled up around his disappearance. If he foretold his own death, he made a spell of it:
"May a dead man say a few words to you, for your enlightenment? You will never rule the world, because you are doomed. All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred, and still you will have to go on—because you will find no horizon, and see no dawn, until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers, and one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words."
I have thought of them more and more often these last four years. He was right then, that ghost speaking out of the dark. May he still be right now. This incantation brought to you by my elusive backers at Patreon.
In 1934, Howard had starred with Merle Oberon and Raymond Massey in the definitive film version of Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel for Alexander Korda; in the spring of 1941, he produced, directed, and starred himself in a wartime reboot that won my heart the first time I saw it with its unabashedly intellectual, eccentrically numinous, unapologetically anti-Nazi hero. Where Percy Blakeney only plays at being an apolitical fop, Professor Horatio Smith of the Cambridge Museum of Antiquities really is a terrific nerd. He lectures on Greek myth at the drop of a chiton. He carries a photo of Aphrodite Kallipygos in his wallet where most men keep a pin-up or a picture of their best girl. For every trick up his sleeve, he has a smear of blackboard chalk on the tweed of it, and he may or may not have once misplaced an entire Thursday. Above all, he's quixotic enough to set out singlehandedly to rescue scientists, artists, writers, all sorts of dissident and endangered people out of Germany right before all hell breaks loose—his best disguise is a broadly drawn version of himself, the archaeologist so unworldly, he'll tramp cheerfully through the Anschluss to excavate the rumor of an ancient Aryan civilization predating the Semitic Near East. (It's racist tosh, of course, but so irresistible to the Nazis that they let him right in.) The natural opponent of such a quicksilver figure is the ponderous villainy of Francis L. Sullivan's Reichsminister von Graum, satirically introduced failing to fathom the famous English sense of humor which is said to be their secret weapon, but the film is wise enough to know that his blunt-force self-importance does not make him a trivial enemy, but a vicious one. It knows, too, that a damned elusive professor's true match is not statuesque eye candy but an equal deceiver like Mary Morris' Ludmilla Koslowska who can see through his cover story at once, Athene with Odysseus. Throw in a cadre of eager students including a rebuke to still-neutral America, a ticking timeline and the mysterious whistle of "There Is a Tavern in the Town," and it's all fun and games until someone gets caught by the Gestapo.
Less swashbuckling than its predecessor, Pimpernel Smith is still not quite a straight thriller, which suits a hero who never carries a gun and emerges from the misdirection of a hiding place saying apologetically, "I'm almost ashamed to have used that old trick, but it nearly always works." The script by Anatole de Grunwald, A. G. Macdonnell, and Wolfgang Wilhelm elides most of its action sequences into evocative images, of which the eeriest and most important is a scarecrow bleeding; it's much more careful to track the skirmishes of conversation in which someone is almost always double-speaking, even if just with poetry. Some of its jabs at the enemy are as witty as the juxtaposition of a pastoral tourist poster with the sound of Nuremberg jackboots, others as blatant as a propaganda officer proudly declaring, "In Nazi Germany, no one can hope to be saved by anybody!" but it does not mock complacently. The film's concentration camps are gentler than the reality, but the dedication uses words like persecuted and exterminated in reference to the victims of the Nazis. Especially nowadays, there's a real bite to Smith's impersonation of a press agent for the German American Bund, come to allay reports of genocide by showing some American journalists around a model camp. ("The truth is, the American people only pretend to be democratic. At heart they are one hundred percent National Socialists.") As retellings do, it downplays some elements of Orczy's story while sharpening others, which means viewers who love the angst of identity porn may be disappointed by its reconfiguration of the central relationship; I who break out in hives over plots which rely on intelligent adults not speaking to one another am just fine with it. There's no teasing doggerel about the Shadow as there is about the Scarlet Pimpernel, but Smith does troll the Reichsminister mercilessly over the authorship of Shakespeare. The photography by Mutz Greenbaum is crisply transparent until it begins to darken into the supernatural expressionism which always makes the film feel as though it should have been Howard's last. Even more than Sir Percy, it's the role into which he put his masks and his mysticism, personal and national. Smith has to be mortal, not infallible, or the story becomes as weightless as a cartoon, but the line between the unworldly and the otherworldly that thinned so readily around the actor to begin with here barely exists at all. "You're so human."
The final soliloquy is still as good as everyone remembers—hauntingly prescient, spoken as prophecy in a year in which the outcome of World War II was far from assured. A thin-faced professor in the shadows of a railway station, unarmed at gunpoint, his eyes glinting like a cat's in the dark. An anti-Nazi picture made during the Blitz by a Jewish man, his half-immigrant's quintessential Englishness carefully learned, deeply felt. He did not live to see the winning of the war his character so confidently predicted; he vanished into history like the last word into a curl of cigarette smoke and shadows of their own spiraled up around his disappearance. If he foretold his own death, he made a spell of it:
"May a dead man say a few words to you, for your enlightenment? You will never rule the world, because you are doomed. All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred, and still you will have to go on—because you will find no horizon, and see no dawn, until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers, and one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words."
I have thought of them more and more often these last four years. He was right then, that ghost speaking out of the dark. May he still be right now. This incantation brought to you by my elusive backers at Patreon.
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That's so good!
(Seriously, he raised the hairs on my neck at the right place. Please tell him.)
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Please tell him that I love that he chose that speech!
Which already had me kind of wanting to rewatch this movie sometime, but this post redoubles that. It's such a very good movie, in important and satisfying ways.
I wanted people to know it was immediately available: I rewatched it as soon as I'd discovered it online. Enjoy. Or draw strength. Why not both?
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Same, same, and same. I want to know what he would have done as an actor; I want to know what he would have done as a director and producer. One of my favorite photos of him is from the set of The Gentle Sex (1943) where he looks like even more of a nerd than usual. I would love to have found out what that person did next.
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I love everything about it, not least its almost incidental confirmation that any time a character played by Leslie Howard is smoking a pipe and/or wearing glasses, with the possible exception of that Coke-bottle black-framed pair in Pygmalion (1938), said pipe and glasses are obviously Howard's own.
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It is a movie very much worth loving.
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Amen.
Did you know that Oxfordians take this film as proof that Howard was one of them? Thereby insulting both Howard and Shakespeare.
Nine
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*hugs*
Did you know that Oxfordians take this film as proof that Howard was one of them? Thereby insulting both Howard and Shakespeare.
Oh, my God, the Oxfordianism in this movie is such flagrant trolling! Von Graum claims on their first meeting that Shakespeare has been conclusively proven to be German; Smith drops by the next day to counter that Shakespeare has been conclusively proven to be the Earl of Oxford. "Now, you can't pretend that the Earl of Oxford was a German, can you?" It's garbage for garbage. My heart warmed to see it!
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You're welcome! I was so glad to find it where I could just point people to it. The first time I saw it was a scratchy videocassette interlibrary-loaned from St. Louis.
I am very sad that it is so timely now, but likely the final soliloquy also will be.
That is the hope I am holding on to.
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(Thank you.)
I don't know whether that sensitized me or not, but seeing the whole paragraph makes me shivery, like the hair stands up on my arms. It's very good.
It had that effect on me the first time I heard it in 2008. It might just be that good.
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You will never rule the world, because you are doomed ... You are doomed, captain of murderers.
I *loved* Leslie Howard in it. Loved him.
The only thing that would have made it more perfect was you sitting on the couch watching it with us. I associate Leslie Howard with you so powerfully that seeing him was kind of like seeing you, in fact--but not as much like seeing you as actually seeing you would have been.
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I am so glad. This film matters so much to me.
That last speech literally thrilled me--I felt electricity. The filming of it! His face in shadow and light, the intensity of his eye. And I felt like sobbing because it will keep on needing to be said--needs to be said today--but it will keep on being true.
That's why I think it matters beyond me, too.
(It is so beautifully shot, and so perfectly delivered, and I don't even know how to judge whether it was Howard's best role, because it feels most his. I also love him.)
I associate Leslie Howard with you so powerfully that seeing him was kind of like seeing you, in fact--but not as much like seeing you as actually seeing you would have been.
*hugs*
Thank you. I hope someday to see this movie in a theater, and if it is a theater around here, you should all come and watch it with me.
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The Humphrey Bogart action-comedy film All Through the Night (1942) - with Phil Silvers and an astoundingly young Jackie Gleason - is the first film in which Dachau is spoken of, albeit merely as a prison camp. No one outside the Reich knew any better, then, nor would we learn until we got there.
(Tho’ he did not want to leave the ETO, journalist Ernie Pyle’s abrupt transfer to the Pacific Theatre had two consequences: It caused his death, and it meant he was not present when US troops reached the Nazi death camps. We will never know what he would have written. He might have preferred the clean death by Jap sniper bullet.)
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I've had that one mentioned to me!
No one outside the Reich knew any better, then, nor would we learn until we got there.
Something was known; the question was whether it was believed. I wound up trying to track the timeline of American awareness a couple of years ago after seeing Mr. Skeffington (1944), a comfortably soapy-looking women's picture which blindsided me by containing the earliest Holocaust survivor I'd seen in a Hollywood film, and the Joint Declaraton by Members of the United Nations turned out to be late '42. I agree that their knowledge was not ours. I don't detract points for it.
It caused his death, and it meant he was not present when US troops reached the Nazi death camps. We will never know what he would have written.
Who did report first on the liberation of the camps? I know more about the filmmakers who were present, like George Stevens. (I believe some of the footage that ended up in Welles' The Stranger (1946) is his.)
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> Who did report first on
> the liberation of the camps
I haven’t the foggiest - but it’s almost irrelevant, as wartime censorship would have prevented any but the most detached reports. The very reason E Pyle was so popular was that he worked around that to bring real names, faces, details - always mentioned their home towns! - but even his “slice-of-life” stories were carefully sanitized for civilian consumption. (He wrote to his wife, “I am so sick of hearing that ‘f word,’ I wish I would never hear it again for the rest of my life…”)
As with his famous dispatch on “The Death of Captain Waskow,” long on pathos but short on detail - for example, we’re never told what or where was the fatal wound - had he been there, he would have written about the GIs reactions, rather than what they were reacting to.
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Thank you. I might even have known that once: I saw a very good exhibit of her work at the Peabody Essex Museum some years ago. Now that you say it, I have images in mind.
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By the bye, you may wish to add a Caveat Emptor: The film is “Quality Adjusted,” and thus the file is 1.10 GB in size!
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That's beautiful. I don't see why he shouldn't have: John le Carré did.
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You are very welcome. It seemed like the right time for it. And thank you.
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Except that Raymond Massey is far from “humorless,” he’s grinning ear to ear and grinds out his line while obviously fighting not to burst out laughing at Leslie Howard’s totally camp performance!