'Pimpernel' Smith (1941)
Directed by Leslie Howard

Film Review

Baroness Emmuska Orczy's famous story The Scarlet Pimpernel is effortlessly transposed from revolutionary France to Nazi Germany in this inspired adventure yarn, which is easily one of the most effective and entertaining pieces of anti-Nazi propaganda to come out of a British film studio during the Second World War.  The film was produced and directed by Leslie Howard, who had previously played Orczy's 'demned elusive' hero in a celebrated 1934 adaptation of her play and who reprises the role, this time reincarnated as a scatterbrain English university professor, to great effect.  Pimpernel Smith (1941) was the first of three propaganda films that Howard directed, followed by the equally laudable The First of the Few (1942) and The Gentle Sex (1943).

Although it is far more subtle than most wartime propaganda films of this era, Pimpernel Smith left its audience in no doubt as to the nature and magnitude of the threat posed by Nazi Germany in the early 1940s.  Francis L. Sullivan's humorous portrayal of a Nazi general (Von Graum) may be an amusing caricature but it also carries with it a terrifying reality, the single-minded obsession with power and conquest that would take not just Europe, but the entire world, to the brink of Götterdämmerung.  In several memorable scenes with Von Graum, the hero, played to perfection by Howard, exposes the absurd vacuity of the Nazi ambition, an insane drive for supremacy that could only end in humiliating defeat amidst the inferno of a world ravaged by war.  Howard's words have a chillingly prophetic ring to them, and his final scene in the film seems to presage his own death just two years later, when the commercial airliner he was travelling in was shot down by the Luftwaffe.

Leslie Howard's standout performance - possibly the greatest of his career, certainly the most inspiring - is matched by equally sterling contribution from his co-stars Francis L. Sullivan and Mary Morris.  At first, Sullivan's obese, chocolate-scoffing Nazi general would seem to be better placed in a pantomime, but as the film develops it proves to be a very apt characterisation, his amiable surface buffoonery mirroring the apparent fecklessness of Howard's Smith.  It soon becomes apparent that both characters have a more profound side to them, but whereas Howard's absent-minded professor is shown to be a resolute champion of British ideals, ready to lay down his life in the name of decency and compassion for others, Sullivan's comedy Nazi is ultimately revealed to be a thoroughly despicable villain, a man who is convinced Shakespeare is German and who doesn't think twice about shooting a man in the back.  There is nothing more loathsome, nor more pathetic, than a clown without a sense of humour.

As the film's alluring femme fatale, Mary Morris has a far more solid presence than either of the two lead male protagonists, although it takes some time before her true nature is revealed to us.  Her character is obviously intended to represent the innocent masses who are caught up in the clash of ideals represented by Smith and Von Graum, ordinary people whose individual choices will determine the future of western civilisation.  It is no accident that one of the students who accompanies Smith on his adventure is a young and slightly cynical American.  At the time the film was made America had yet to enter the war and so the inclusion of an American character, supporting a Briton's lone fight against Fascism, carried a huge symbolic weight.   The propaganda value of Pimpernel Smith is hard to gauge but it was an enormously successful film on both sides of the Atlantic and still rates highly as a classic of British cinema.  Although the film was banned in Sweden, it was seen by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who took inspiration from it and followed the hero's example to save the lives of many thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Film Synopsis

On the eve of WWII, Horatio Smith, an eccentric Cambridge history professor, leads a party of students to Nazi Germany to look for evidence for an ancient Aryan civilisation.   Smith's archaeological expedition is in fact an elaborate charade to conceal his real purpose, which is to rescue the inmates of a Nazi concentration camp, including the world famous pianist Karl Meyer.  This is not Smith's first adventure of this kind, and his successful exploits have made the humourless General Von Graum determined to unmask and execute the man who is known only as The Shadow.  To that end, Von Graum enlists the help of Ludmilla Koslowski, threatening to kill her father, a Polish newspaper editor, if she fails in her mission.  Through one of Smith's students, Ludmilla discovers that the Professor and The Shadow are one in the same man and pleads with Smith to rescue her father.  At first suspicious that Ludmilla may be luring him into a trap, Smith makes up his mind to save her father, fully aware that it is only a matter of time before Von Graum uncovers the identity of The Shadow...