Leofwine_draca 'PIMPERNEL' SMITH is a delightful wartime adventure flick starring Leslie Howard as an updated version of the Scarlet Pimpernel. This time around, he's an archaeology professor who goes to Nazi Germany with a handful of students in order to do some studies. Secretly, he's helping enemies of the Nazis to escape from their oppressors. Howard is excellent in the mild-mannered lead role, delivering a surprisingly humorous performance with lots of character work and one liners. The Nazis are obviously depicted as bumbling idiots, which makes for plenty of funny situations, and the narrative works well with a mix of genre elements.

bkoganbing World War II brought Leslie Howard the opportunity to bring up to modern times one of his most beloved parts, that of The Scarlet Pimpernel. This time he's Horatio 'Pimpernel' Smith, archaeologists by day and rescuer of some of the finest intellectual minds in Germany who are marked for death by Adolph Hitler.In The Scarlet Pimpernel Howard is a Georgian fop as his cover for the dashing, unknown, and elusive pimpernel. Substitute fop for tweedy as he's now an Oxford archeology professor and his cover is a beaut. One of the Nazi Aryan racial vanities was that way back in the day there was an Aryan civilization. Being the archaeologist he is, Howard's cover is that he's in Germany on a dig, looking for evidence of that selfsame civilization. He even brings along several students as part of the cover.In one scene Howard is wounded when he's disguised as a scarecrow and a Nazi guard shoots at it to make a point. That does lead to him being found out by his students, one of them being David Tomlinson, later the father in Mary Poppins. To a man, they all decide to stay and help him with his work.Howard's a bachelor here so he doesn't have wife Merle Oberon and her family dirty laundry to compromise him as he did in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Here he's dealing with Mary Morris who is collaborating with the Nazis to keep her musician father, Peter Gawthorne alive.Taking the place of Howard's relentless foe Chauvelin as played by Raymond Massey is Francis L. Sullivan as General Von Graum of the Gestapo. Sullivan is a favorite character actor of mine and a joy to watch in any film he does whether a good guy or the baddest of bad guys as he is here.Leslie Howard directed this film himself and it's interesting to speculate had he survived World War II whether he would have done more work behind rather than in front of the camera. In directing Pimpernel Smith, he certainly had the advantage of knowing his character well.And you shouldn't pass up an opportunity to get to know him too.

iph-1 Others have given plenty of praise. I was disappointed about a few small details, and will mention three instances from that classroom scene and moments after it. First, I found it hard to believe that some of the students (such as David Maxwell) were much less than middle-aged, and indeed Hugh McDermott was 33 (and 3 months) in July 1941. After World War I there were a lot of older men in universities as they had been called up from school; but I don't think this was true in 1939 before the second lot of trouble with Germany started. Second, did young Americans in 1939 really say things like "a rough house is just my meat" when they meant they enjoyed a bit of a fight? I doubt it. It sounded very antiquated, stilted, out of tone with the rest of the dialogue there. (By the way, McDermott was of course British, and his supposedly American accent here is a bit odd at times too.)Third, I recognize that Leslie Howard had an awful lot to do on this movie; but his attention to detail lapsed in the moment when the professor walks through a college cloister and recites a snatch from the first stanza of Jabberwocky: "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble ...". In "gyre and gimble" he makes both Gs hard but this is correct only in "gimble". A fastidious learned professor would -- and actor of Howard's stature surely should -- know that "gyre" is a perfectly good English word going back centuries, and that, like "gyrate" and "gyroscope", it begins with a soft G (that is, it sounds like "jyre"). There is no plot reason for Prof. Smith to pretend to get it wrong: as I see it, the point of him reciting the lines is that he is a dreamer, rather other-worldly, and fond of such things as this rhyme from a fantasy for children written by an eccentric mathematics don; not that he is not sufficiently erudite to pronounce such a word as this correctly. Indeed, if he were really chiefly a working secret agent, only pretending to be a Cambridge scholar, he would be more likely to make such a mistake; if it were a deliberate error by the professor, it would be counterproductive. Therefore it is an error by the actor-director, not an error (deliberate or otherwise) by the character.

didi-5 A modern update of 'The Scarlet Pimpernel', featuring the same lead actor, this pokes fun at the regime of the Third Reich while making some patriotic statements about England (note the Rupert Brooke quote) - as a morale booster in the context of the 1940s it must have been effective. Certainly it did anger the Nazis who objected to their portrayal as buffoons who proclaimed that the world could only be ruled by violence, while the English cleverly circumvented this with references to their superiority (the Shakespeare/Earl of Oxford debate, those saved - doctors, intellectuals, scientists - the archeological proof against German doctrine on Aryan culture). Of the players, Howard of course was excellent (better than his 30s portrayal of the French Revolution Pimpernel, in fact), there is a meaty and satisfying role for the lesbian actress Mary Morris (otherwise spotted as the multi-armed doll in 'The Thief of Bagdad', the German chauffeur in 'The Spy in Black', etc.), a marvellous German general from Francis L Sullivan (the lawyer in 'Great Expectations' and the beadle in 'Oliver Twist'), and good support from numerous character actors as the refugees and the pupils - plus Suzanne Claire's amusing French shop assistant. A hugely enjoyable film, and taken in context of when it was released, a very brave attempt to lampoon the Nazis and give the English audience courage in getting through the war.