Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 17-July-11
Spoiler Rating: Low

"Pimpernel" Smith (1941)

In 1934 Leslie Howard starred in an adaptation of the novel The Scarlet Pimpernel, in which a British fop (or so he seems) rescues aristocrats from the turmoil of the French Revolution. Seven years later Howard produced, directed, and starred in "Pimpernel" Smith, an updated adventure which transplants the action into his own time. Rescuing continental Europeans was a serious concern in 1941 as the shadow of Nazi Germany was spreading. Howard uses the idea of an undercover hero to create an engaging thriller while sticking it to the enemy.

The premise of "Pimpernel" Smith is actually easier to swallow than that of The Scarlet Pimpernel. The protagonist of the 18th-century tale promotes his alibi by pretending to be appallingly shallow, yet none of his longtime acquaintances asks why he didn't act that way before 1789. In "Pimpernel" Smith, the hero is a professor of archeology, and since everyone knows that dons are absent-minded and unworldly, he doesn't need to try very hard to secure his persona. (He's also a bachelor, unlike his literary predecessor, and lives among other absent-minded dons.) By his own admission, Professor Smith wasn't always the heroic type, but he realized he could not sit by and let great artists and thinkers be snuffed out by Hitler. The movie opens after he has created a stir as a mystery man who smuggles luminaries out of Germany and has attracted the attention of a smug Nazi general bent on his capture (Francis Sullivan).

Over the summer holidays Professor Smith recruits several Cambridge boys for a dig in Germany which is aimed, he says, at finding archaeological evidence of a bygone Aryan race. This provides excellent cover for his cloak-and-dagger operations, but it also puts him in such close quarters with his students that they figure out his secret identity. Being red-blooded Brits, Scots, and Americans, they insist on joining his next mission. This involves a scientist's daughter snared in a Nazi net (Mary Morris) and a number of face-to-face encounters between the professor and his nemesis. One of the movie's highlights is watching the two men try to outwit each other, since both are clever and one so clearly needs deflating.

During the adversaries' conversations and Professor Smith's final speech, Howard mocks the Nazi craving for importance ("Shakespeare was German!"*) and predicts that such a narrow-minded, honor-free endeavor as the Third Reich will inevitably fail. It's potent stuff. Exposing the enemy as a bunch of evil but pathetic wankers is more rousing, at least to me, than waving flags to tout your own side's virtues. After Howard died in 1943, shot down by the Nazis in a commercial plane along with other travelers and crew, some people speculated that he was assassinated because of his anti-German declarations and work for the Allies. Whether or not Germany really had it out for him, he did a fine job in "Pimpernel" Smith of mixing his "you suck, Hitler" message with exciting, old-time adventure.

*The Nazis did claim that Shakespeare was German, if not literally then in spirit.

Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.