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Tell them England hath taken me
Pimpernel Smith (1941), directed by and starring Leslie Howard in one of his last roles, is an extraordinary film. Patches of it fit oddly, but so much of it is numinous, it qualifies as a propaganda film only if one allows the same of Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1943), with which it might not make a bad double feature. —Then I ran across Matt Staggs' call for smart heroes, with the result that I never finished this paragraph and instead spammed Jeff VanderMeer's blog with Leslie Howard. Read there for the hero as intellectual. But I mean it about the strangeness, the ritual quality of the last scene between Horatio Smith and Reichminister von Graum in film noir shadows and a mask of streetlight:
"We shall make a German empire of the world! . . . Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man."
"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."
This is more than an effort by a freedom fighter to distract or unsettle the man who holds him at gunpoint; it goes beyond any stiff upper lip: it is hieratic, potent as an oracle. Smith will disappear in the seconds when von Graum's back is turned, leaving behind him only a ghost of cigarette smoke and a whisper out of the dark: "I'll be back . . . We'll all be back." But this is no comfortable re-enactment of settled history. The film is set in 1939, made in 1940—Britain is under the Blitz, America is not yet even in the war; there are no hindsight assurances. So it must be prophecy (and I hope to God someone has studied all the strata of selves in this film, Howard as Smith as Pimpernel, his war efforts on and off screen, all the ways in which he and his character shift in and out of diagesis), sympathetic magic, summoning. Imago. And Howard's ghost is still speaking out of that dark.
I am going to write to Criterion. I should not have needed interlibrary loan to fetch this film on staticky tape from St. Louis. The same goes for Major Barbara (also 1941), which I watched with my father this afternoon. Gabriel Pascal and George Bernard Shaw seem to have been a charmed combination—as I prefer the 1938 Pygmalion to any other version I know, I may like this film even better than the production I saw and fell in love with at Brandeis in 2000. It's opened out some from the playscript, but not to its detriment; and whether it's the atmosphere of wartime or the particular interaction of personalities, it's weirder, spikier than I remember, starting out a comedy of manners and ending up on the borders of science fiction. Rex Harrison, Wendy Hiller, Robert Morley (and I was personally gladdened by the presence of Robert Newton, whom I discovered a few weeks ago in Jamaica Inn (1939) and who along with Emlyn Williams went promptly into my character-actor pantheon),* a bit part by Stanley Holloway, and cinematography by David Lean that I wanted to hang on my wall. And a library copy that someone had clearly left in the car one hot afternoon, so the sound kept wobbling in and out regardless of characters' voices or background effects; we finally cranked it up to eleven and I corked my ears with Kleenex against the louder passages. This is a little silly. If Armageddon can get a Criterion release (thank you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xterminal, I think), then for the love of language so can Leslie Howard and George Bernard Shaw.
I will talk tomorrow about The Fall (2006), whichericmvan and I saw last night at the Kendall Square Cinema, and which gets storytelling right. In the meantime, I have some letters to write. And photographs to sort. And stories I owe people. And . . .
*In that alternate universe where Powell and Pressburger's A Wizard of Earthsea came out the year I was born, Robert Newton played Heathcliff opposite Merle Oberon. Stop the world, I want to get off and visit a video store.
"We shall make a German empire of the world! . . . Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man."
"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."
This is more than an effort by a freedom fighter to distract or unsettle the man who holds him at gunpoint; it goes beyond any stiff upper lip: it is hieratic, potent as an oracle. Smith will disappear in the seconds when von Graum's back is turned, leaving behind him only a ghost of cigarette smoke and a whisper out of the dark: "I'll be back . . . We'll all be back." But this is no comfortable re-enactment of settled history. The film is set in 1939, made in 1940—Britain is under the Blitz, America is not yet even in the war; there are no hindsight assurances. So it must be prophecy (and I hope to God someone has studied all the strata of selves in this film, Howard as Smith as Pimpernel, his war efforts on and off screen, all the ways in which he and his character shift in and out of diagesis), sympathetic magic, summoning. Imago. And Howard's ghost is still speaking out of that dark.
I am going to write to Criterion. I should not have needed interlibrary loan to fetch this film on staticky tape from St. Louis. The same goes for Major Barbara (also 1941), which I watched with my father this afternoon. Gabriel Pascal and George Bernard Shaw seem to have been a charmed combination—as I prefer the 1938 Pygmalion to any other version I know, I may like this film even better than the production I saw and fell in love with at Brandeis in 2000. It's opened out some from the playscript, but not to its detriment; and whether it's the atmosphere of wartime or the particular interaction of personalities, it's weirder, spikier than I remember, starting out a comedy of manners and ending up on the borders of science fiction. Rex Harrison, Wendy Hiller, Robert Morley (and I was personally gladdened by the presence of Robert Newton, whom I discovered a few weeks ago in Jamaica Inn (1939) and who along with Emlyn Williams went promptly into my character-actor pantheon),* a bit part by Stanley Holloway, and cinematography by David Lean that I wanted to hang on my wall. And a library copy that someone had clearly left in the car one hot afternoon, so the sound kept wobbling in and out regardless of characters' voices or background effects; we finally cranked it up to eleven and I corked my ears with Kleenex against the louder passages. This is a little silly. If Armageddon can get a Criterion release (thank you,
xterminal, I think), then for the love of language so can Leslie Howard and George Bernard Shaw. I will talk tomorrow about The Fall (2006), which
ericmvan and I saw last night at the Kendall Square Cinema, and which gets storytelling right. In the meantime, I have some letters to write. And photographs to sort. And stories I owe people. And . . .*In that alternate universe where Powell and Pressburger's A Wizard of Earthsea came out the year I was born, Robert Newton played Heathcliff opposite Merle Oberon. Stop the world, I want to get off and visit a video store.
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Major Barbara I believe I have seen, years ago, on TV...
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May your local library have a copy!
Seriously, what is Criterion thinking? How much more historically significant does a film need to get?
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A Canterbury Tale, that I *did* record off TCM; it's lovely.
Armageddon was released by Criterion? *universe ends*
Edited to add: My roommate says the Armageddon release is in keeping with Criterion's current push to release "definitive" editions of cheesy SF movies. He won't consider that the universe has ended until Criterion releases the definitive version of Transformers.
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Good grief. I hope they at least have the decency to release a definitive edition of The Ice Pirates. Honest cheesiness that never was meant to be aught but cheesy deserves some respect, I think.
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Not any time in the near future. Believe me, I've been watching for months.
A Canterbury Tale, that I *did* record off TCM; it's lovely.
It's one of my favorite anythings—movies, books, pieces of music; art. I blame TCM for my Powell and Pressburger craze.
He won't consider that the universe has ended until Criterion releases the definitive version of Transformers.
You're just trying to melt my brain, aren't you?
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Glad to have been of service . . .
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connosueur connissfan! He's excellent in Treasure Island. I can see I'll have to watch Jamaica Inn.Is the overall story line of Pimpernel Smith that of The Scarlet Pimpernel, only set in WWII instead of the French Revolution?
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It's a flawed film, be warned. I have no familiarity with the original novel, but its onscreen incarnation is really two movies unsatisfactorily spliced, and one of them is mostly Charles Laughton. The initial set-up is classic melodrama: our heroine, Mary Yellan (Maureen O'Hara), is a strong-minded Irish orphan who has come to live with her mother's sister Patience (Marie Ney) on the coast of Cornwall circa 1750. Unfortunately, Patience's husband Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks, who I'll also now watch for) is the leader of a gang of wreckers, who have that night decoyed a ship onto the rocks, knocked all its crew on the head like seals, and gone home with the loot. Expecting a warm welcome from her well-remembered aunt, Mary is dismayed to find the Jamaica Inn a locked-and-barred fleapit with the kind of murky reputation to which words like "Burke," "Hare," and "murder hole" are usually appended, the beautiful Patience a wan shadow of herself, and Joss a possessive brute to whom she is hopelessly devoted. It doesn't help that when Mary peers curiously down into the taproom, she finds a gang of ruffians (played by a fine array of British character actors) whose discontented mutterings about their takings—with all the ships they wreck, shouldn't they be a lot richer by now?—turn on one of their newest recruits, a too-clever young man named Jem Trehearne who speculates out loud that some unknown party is pulling Joss' strings and incidentally skimming the profits. Unfortunately, when seized and searched, he has some unexplained monies of his own to account for, and so the wreckers find a room with nice stout rafters and hang him from them. On some mixed impulse of compassion and horror, Mary cuts him down; and when it becomes clear that her uncle's men will hunt her down as cheerfully as they will the apparent turncoat Jem, shakes him more or less conscious and flees with him down the shore. The good news is, she has one newfound ally in the neighborhood, the genial, if slightly pretentious Squire Pengallan. The bad news is, he's played by Charles Laughton and they are in a Hitchcock film . . .
I will save further complaints until you've seen the movie (unless you care about spoilers), but I have several. On the other hand, if a copy were to turn up in a bargain bin for five dollars, I'd probably buy it, and I consider it worth having seen just for the discovery of Robert Newton. He has a marvelous face, much more puckish than classical; he can look both boyish and seedy, which here serves his character well (and Bill Walker in Major Barbara, too, now that I think about it). There is also a beautiful small turn by Emlyn Williams (also to feature in Major Barbara, as Snobby Price), whom I previously knew only as a playwright: here he's a a dark little stoat of a man, neat and vicious, with gold rings in his ears, who whistles merrily whenever anyone's about to die. Joss Merlyn is a murderer, but because it's his trade; he kills for practical reasons, and not unnecessarily. Williams' Harry, wiping a knife on his coat sleeve as he strolls back from dispatching a last sailor, a coil of rope slung over his arm as he estimates Jem Trehearne's height, kills because. He is not any kind of melodrama, he is simply menace, and one of the few true Hitchock touches I could see in the movie. I suppose what I wanted out of Jamaica Inn, in the end, is some version that probably doesn't exist onscreen or on the page—one with much more of Jem and Mary and the wreckers, and much less Charles Laughton. Well, all hail filing off the numbers?
I haven't yet seen Treasure Island! I know; I'm going to get my pirate ballad credentials revoked . . .
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Is the overall story line of Pimpernel Smith that of The Scarlet Pimpernel, only set in WWII instead of the French Revolution?
The basic conceit is the same—a man who hides his keen intelligence behind a disarming facade of foolery, rescuing those in need in a terrible time; in this case, artists, intellectuals, scientists, and non-Nazis of all sorts out of the Third Reich, right before the Anschluss. There is a figure who corresponds to Chauvelin, an official of the government set to track down this elusive figure whose identity no one knows, and there is a woman of romantic interest whose imprisoned family is being used as leverage against her. But aside from one or two initial clunks, it is much more than simply a reprise of Howard's earlier success, for a couple of reasons that I mention in Jeff VanderMeer's blog (for which I hope he will forgive me) and a couple that I will be happy to obsess about if you wish. I really recommend the film.
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Check libraries. I recommend.
I hope Criterion listen to you, though, in the fashion of such companies, I'm not overoptimistic.
Eh. I figure it doesn't hurt to write with something more coherent than "Dude! This is such a good film! Why can't I get it on DVD?!"
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No; I saw the first few minutes on TCM some months ago and then had to leave it. Your description sounds like something I would love.
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Even the 1934 Scarlet Pimpernel seemed like it was talking to the Europe of its time.
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I feel similarly about Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, a screwball satire about a company of actors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who wind up at the center of an espionage plot. It's breathtaking that it was made in 1942, when nothing was safe about the Nazis; there's a real edge to its double-takes and double-talk and fake Führer moustaches that keep falling off. There were no guarantees whose side history was going to come down on. Your only weapons are words and the world that you make into a stage when your theater is closed. And it's brilliant. With all due respect to Quentin Tarantino, I think the definitive film about art vs. Nazis was made sixty-seven years before Inglourious Basterds, and I'd put my money on Lubitsch any day.