Pimpernel Smith

I finally saw this movie, which sovay has written about eloquently several times. It's a retelling, more or less, of The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring (and directed by) Leslie Howard, who played the Scarlet Pimpernel in the 1934 film. Pimpernel Smith was made in 1941 and set in 1939; in this version, it's a mild-mannered archaeology professor who spirits people out of Nazi Germany.

It's a *smashing* film. I loved the 1934 Scarlet Pimpernel, but I love this version equally well, maybe better. The ending soliloquy was like lightning, and if you feel dispirited about the voracious viciousness of the power structure today, it may electrify you as well. I'm going to quote sovay's post, because no one can say it better than she has:

The final soliloquy is still as good as everyone remembers—hauntingly prescient, spoken as prophecy in a year in which the outcome of World War II was far from assured. A thin-faced professor in the shadows of a railway station, unarmed at gunpoint, his eyes glinting like a cat's in the dark. An anti-Nazi picture made during the Blitz by a Jewish man, his half-immigrant's quintessential Englishness carefully learned, deeply felt. He did not live to see the winning of the war his character so confidently predicted; he vanished into history like the last word into a curl of cigarette smoke and shadows of their own spiraled up around his disappearance. If he foretold his own death, he made a spell of it:

"May a dead man say a few words to you, 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."

I have thought of them more and more often these last four years. He was right then, that ghost speaking out of the dark. May he still be right now.

If you want to see just the monologue--but really I recommend the whole film, because there are so many brilliant moments (bleeding scarecrow and aftermath! "American journalists" tour a concentration camp!)--you can view it here. The lines quoted above start at 2.21, but you won't want to miss what comes before (the whole scene is 5.30 minutes).