I shall be back. We shall all be back

[sovay]

It is very satisfying to me to see that the contemporary resistance has noticed Leslie Howard's Pimpernel Smith (1941). The final soliloquy is as good as everyone remembers: haunting, numinous, 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 by a Jewish man during the Blitz, his quintessential Englishness carefully learned, deeply felt. He would not live to see the winning of the war which his character so confidently predicted: he vanished into history like the last word into a curl of cigarette smoke and stories spiraled up around his disappearance. He left the silver salt ghosts of a life on film, a curious foretelling of his own death in the fight against fascism. He was right.

"May a dead man say a few words to you, General, 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 prefer the original British title, but I agree that the American poster is striking. If it brings more people to the movie even now, it's doing what it's supposed to. That ghost speaking out of the dark still has something to say.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world."

Good old Puddleglum. Time frames are always a problem. Leslie Howard didn't live to see the triumph, but people who saw the film did. We don't know how long the dark road is, but we'll keep being flames.

[sovay]

Good old Puddleglum. Time frames are always a problem. Leslie Howard didn't live to see the triumph, but people who saw the film did. We don't know how long the dark road is, but we'll keep being flames.

This is a good way of describing things.

What was behind my earlier comment was just the thought that, although I find the callbacks to WWII resistance both heartening and practical (hence reblogging Leslie Howard—always reblog Leslie Howard), we are not quite in analogous positions to most of them: our present administration is much more in the Volksempfänger line than Christmas messages or fireside chats. That makes it a different war. I want to win this one, too, but I'd rather do it without the firebombing or the brain drain. (Or nukes. I'm strongly in favor of no nukes.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I heartily agree with your analysis and wishes.