It was my day off today and due to the Coronavirus I spent
most of it at home …again … so to escape the 4 walls I switched on the
television and found by accident one of my favourite old WWII propaganda films –
Leslie Howard’s “Pimpernel Smith”.
One of Leslie Howard’s breakout roles as a film actor came
in 1934 when he starred as “The Scarlet Pimpernel” in the original film adaptation of Baroness
Emmuska Orczy and Montagu Barstow’s 1905 stage play and 1908 historical
novel.
In 1938 Leslie Howard decided he wanted to make a propaganda
film attacking the Nazis for their internment policies and wrote a film
treatment which updated the Pimpernel character for the (then) modern times. By 1941 there was considerable government
interest in making films slagging off the Nazis and so Howard got the money to
produce and direct his film and much fun was had at Herr Hitler's expense.
It was a smash at the box office too - the
3rd most successful film in the UK of 1942.
The Sir Percy Blakeney character becomes Professor Horatio
Smith an eccentric Cambridge Don who goes on archaeological digs in pre-war
Nazi Germany that are thinly veiled excuses to break dissenting intellectuals
(I can’t remember if it’s explicitly stated that a lot of them are Jews) out of
Nazi concentration camps. He is
accompanied on his travels by a bunch of American students (presumably in an
attempt to persuade the USA to join in the war) who rumble his antics in
springing people out of Nazi camps and help him out along the way…
It’s all played as a light comedy which is
odd in retrospect given what we now know about what actually went on at Nazi
concentration camps. It also produces a
nice line in running gags as Leslie Howard tells a succession of Nazi henchmen
with a faux expression of innocence that all he’s doing is “trying to find evidence
of Ayran civilisation” etc – the implicit jibe being that he thinks
that Nazi Germany is not civilised anymore…
Underneath the rather camp comedy there’s a nice thread of
sinister threat. Francis Sullivan gives
a wonderful performance as General von Graum – effortlessly switching between
comedy buffoon and truly malevolent bully with such grace that the clear stupidity
of his character never comes in the way of his portraying the man as a true and
credible threat. Perhaps because the
audience knows that the Nazis aren’t all as fun as General von Graum by the bombs that might fall on their cinema...
The main plot of the film (warning – 78 year old spoiler
coming) is General von Graum using the daughter of one of the prisoners
Ludmilla Koslowski (Mary Morris) as a femme fatal to uncover Leslie Howard/Professor
Horatio Smith’s true identity. General
von Graum is using the threat of murdering her father to force her into spying on
Professor Smith for him.
Unfortunately Professor
Horatio Smith’s idea of the perfect woman is a marble statue of Aphrodite in a
museum. Smith likes his women ideal and never ageing ... ironically Mary Morris lived much longer than Leslie Howard and suddenly I realised where I'd seen her before ...or after... as Penna in the 1984 Dr Who story Kinda...
A nice subtle touch that I’d
previously missed despite watching this film hundreds of times before is that
to underline Professor Horatio’s supposed asexuality there are lots of
paintings of semi-naked Greek women around the place. For example the huge canvass behind General
von Graum’s desk as well as various nude paintings scattered around the
embassy. Of course it turns out
eventually that Professor Horatio Smith is not actually as asexual as he imagines himself to be and he
actually falls in love with Mary Morris.
Don’t worry they both escape over the border but not before Leslie
Howard has a scene in which he gives General von Graum a piece of his
mind. General von Graum boasts that
Hitler is about to invade Poland and Smith replies...
Professor Horatio Smith : 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.
Before tricking him and skipping over the border…
Now there aren’t many films – propaganda or otherwise – that
can be said to have directly affected the real world but this film really
did. Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg a Swedish
businessman saw the film (at a private showing – it being banned in Sweden at
the time) and it inspired him to “do something like it”. He and others saved thousands of Jews from
the gas chambers with false passports and devious trickery before...
The other thing, of course, that makes Pimpernel Smith
lastingly moving is the death shortly afterwards of Leslie Howard. Howard died in 1943 when flying to Bristol
from Lisbon, on civilian KLM Royal Dutch Airlines/BOAC Flight 777.
It was shot down by Luftwaffe fighter
aircraft.
The reason for this action
against a civilian plane remains unexplained to this day with theories as
diverse as …
Someone mistook Howard for Winston Churchill and it was a
messed up assassination
The Nazis just shot down planes and didn’t care which ones
too much
It was an error of judgement and the civilian plane was shot
down by mistake
Howard was on a top-secret mission to dissuade Francisco
Franco from joining the Axis powers so Hitler had the plane shot down
And possibly the most emotionally satisfying explanation (even
if it may stretch credulity) - Joseph Goebbels took his depiction in Pimpernel
Smith so personally he directly ordered Howard’s assassination.
The actual pilots said they didn't know why they shot the plane down but they could have been directed vaguely in the area knowing...
Well, we'll never know... the story dissapears into the fog like Pimpernel Smith himself but ...
"I'll be back. One day we'll all be back..."
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