Harold Young | The Scarlet Pimpernel / 1934

exquisite corpse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lajos Bíró, S. N. Behrman, Robert E. Sherwood, Arthur Wimperis, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, and Alexander Korda (screenplay, based on the play and fiction by Baroness Orczy), Harold Young (director) The Scarlet Pimpernel / 1934

 

The major conceit of the 1934 British historical fiction, The Scarlet Pimpernel, is that the notorious hero of the British underground who helps to save the French aristocracy from the guillotine of Maximilein Fran Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, is none other than Sir Percy  Blakeney (Leslie Howard), hiding under the guise of a British fop so extreme in his effeminate mannerisms and role as clothes advisor to the Prince of Wales (Nigel Bruce) that no one, not even his wife, the beautiful Lady Marguerite Blakeney (Merle Oberon), might possibly suspect him as being the man who endangers his life time and again by returning to France and leading those about to be beheaded to safety. No queer, this fiction and film posit, could be so virile as to achieve those heroic deeds.

     It’s even hard for the audience of this film to comprehend that possibility since we are shown very few pieces of evidence of Percy’s actual heroic exploits. For most of the movie Sir Percy spends his time at his large estate rhyming couplets to create the popular poetic ditty that expresses the question on everyone’s mind:

 

                               They seek him here.

                               They seek him there.

                               Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.

                               Is he in heaven?

                               Is he in hell?

                               That damn elusive Pimpernel.

 

     Not only is this “poem” quoted three times in the film, but is actually subject to literary analysis, perhaps giving it the honor of the most talked about piece of poetic drivel ever put to screen.

     When he isn’t quoting his poetry or advising the Prince of Wales of the necessary flare of his sleeves (“Open up your sleeves, man. Let your ruffles take the air. Let them flow! Let them ripple!”), he spends most of his time whispering into his cohort’s ears or covertly passing on small slips of paper containing messages like schoolboys announcing, “I’ll meet you in the library at midnight.”

     That event turns out to be one of the major comic moments in the movie, in which both the Pimpernel and Chauvelin snooze through the purported meeting.

     The only “action” we actually witness him participating in is while dressed up in drag as an old gypsy hag, as he ferries out several former French aristocrats while driving a covered cart inside of which, she declares, is her son suffering from the plague. Obviously, the soldiers determine not to search the cart.

     The last time he poses in harm’s way, he is dressed as a French soldier. Only in the last scene is his life truly endangered, and even then, he knows that the soldiers outside that the villain Chauvelin (Raymond Massey) has ordered to shoot him, are his own men.

      His heroic adventures, accordingly, are mostly a bore, while his absurd encounters with other males outside of his own secret society, cause them to flee and the film’s audience to chuckle in delight. Women, of course, love him just as many females continue to adore gay men who will share the latest fashion gossip and appreciate their attire.

      How Marguerite could possibly have fallen in love with this queer, even before his transformation into a fop, remains unexplained throughout the work, although it is clear that she is now most unhappy in the marriage.

      But she has her own problems given the fact that she has unintentionally betrayed some of the very members of former French royalty who her husband is attempting to save, sending them to the guillotine by sharing their whereabouts and status with Chauvelin, partly in response to the fact that the male head of that particular family had interned her in a brothel in response to his son’s attempt to marry her, presenting us with the shades of a story similar to Sweeney Todd. Chauvelin continues to haunt her throughout this tale, moreover, by capturing her beloved brother Armand St. Just (Walter Rilla) and threatening her with his death if she does find out who the real Pimpernel is at the movie’s requisite grand ball.

      Her discovery that the Pimpernel and her husband are one in the same through a large family portrait portraying the Pimpernel insignia on a finger ring, only complicates events, instead of resolving them. But if nothing else, it certainly restores her love of her husband and explains the enormous transformation of his personality since their marriage.

      She and Sir Percy escape the net Chauvelin has put around their French hideaway, Le Leon d’or tavern, but it means the end of any further attempt to save the French mean and women from the guillotine, proving what Percy has himself explained would happen if their group were to be unmasked. Sir Percy, presumably, will now go back to his more masculine heterosexual self, quoting Shakespeare instead of his silly ditties, but I can assure he will not be half as much fun.

    Why it took six significant writers to cook up this barebones plot and dialogue is beyond explanation. Perhaps each of them contributed, like a cadavre exquis, one line of the poem.

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).