We shall all be back
2020-05-30 15:48I 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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