Word: pimpernels
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Keith Memorial--"Scarlet Pimpernel...
...Scarlet Pimpernel (London Films). If there is anything better suited to the cinema than the spectacle of a guillotine, dripping with blood and buzzing up & down like a sewing machine, it is the spectacle of Leslie Howard in 18th Century coattails, making gestures of polite affection toward Merle Oberon. The Scarlet Pimpernel, derived from Baroness Orczy's famed best-seller (3,000,000 copies), contains both, picturesquely inlaid against an Alexander Korda background of tumbrels, old inns, the coffee rooms at Black's Club and Citizen Robespierre, snarling in falsetto...
...scarlet pimpernel is not, as U. S. cinemaddicts may suppose, either a childhood disease or a disgraceful occupation. It is a little wildflower which Sir Percy Blakeney (Leslie Howard), head of a gang of altruistic milords who consider it their duty to rescue French aristocrats imperilled by the Revolution, uses as his signature. Versatile, altruistic, Sir Percy kidnaps deserving members of nobility on their way from dungeon to execution block. On business trips to France he disguises himself with a putty nose and the long skirts of a peasant crone. In London, visiting his tailor or attending prizefights, he behaves...
Lady Blakeney is actually guiltless when her husband first suspects her but circumstances force her into a misplay. Her French brother is in danger. The bad Ambassador of the French Republic (Raymond Massey) promises to spare his life if Lady Blakeney will help him unmask the Scarlet Pimpernel. Lady Blakeney does so, but when she learns that the Pimpernel is Sir Percy, she has a fever of remorse. She follows Sir Percy to France, gets there in time to see him neatly foil a firing squad...
...chief merit of Alexander Korda's historical researches (Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Don Juan) is the quality of adult humor, with which he endows them. Like his previous works, The Scarlet Pimpernel is a lavish period piece, packed with all the paraphernalia of an epoch that the cinema has neglected since D. W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm. Nonetheless, its most engaging moments occur when Sir Percy, puttering in London, chuckles at Romney's portrait of his wife, sneers at the cut of the Prince Regent's newest coat sleeves, describes his necktie...