The Scarlet Pimpernel - English jingoism at its peak

There is something fascinating about discovering a whole underclass of literature. Not the books that are ranked highly by academics, that are studied in the institutions, but the books that sold in vast numbers. Who read them? What magic do they contain? What attitudes to they represent?

Perhaps some kind of answer can be seen from watching The Scarlet Pimpernel, Alexander Korda’s 1934 film version of Baroness Orczy’s novel. I haven’t read the novel, but if the film is anything to go by, it comprises one-dimensional characters and wooden dialogue. Perhaps that can be ascribed to the early date of the film – just a few years after sound films began. Perhaps the low quality of the dialogue betrays more than more sophisticated films the underlying assumptions.

The film version contains some of the  most stilted action I have seen in the cinema, and yet it was watchable throughout. Why? For the characters of Leslie Howard, as the Pimpernel, and Raymond Massey, as Chavanel, his French pursuer. But it’s more than just the acting. The film is appallingly watchable as a monument (if it is to be believed) of horrific British popular xenophobic attitudes during the 1930s, attitudes that seem to be favourable to the aristocracy per se; not the aristocracy that has achieved anything in particular, simply the aristocracy that somehow deserves to be protected, by the English royal family and everyone else in England – rich or poor.

Did such an attitude really exist? This is the Carlyle/Dickens version of the French Revolution, a viewpoint that persists even today, when attitudes to Robespierre remain hopelessly divided over their attitude to the Incorruptible. For Carlyle, and Orczy, and in the popular mind, Robespierre is the worst villain the world has ever known. Sending aristocrats to the guillotine  - how could anyone do such a thing! Only in France! The film makes the most of its aristocratic suffering by a touching scene in the prison the night before the aristocrats are due to be executed. One child is washed in a tin bath, other children play blind man’s buff, while some of the adults play chess: touching signs of humanity.

In contrast, another scene that celebrates the aristocracy is a glittering ball in London, which the Pimpernel and his wife attend. The highlight of the evening is a menuette where all the aristocrats dance gently in the wonderfully grand ballroom – it looks hexagonal or even octagonal. As they take their partners for the dance, they are depicted as if participating in a religious ceremony. This is the aristocracy, the film seems to be saying, that we all aspire to.  

More generally the film is loaded with large helpings of jingoism. At the climax, Howard recites the famous Shakespeare lines from Richard II, “This scepterd isle, … This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”. Such crass praise of England strikes a very uncomfortable note in the middle of the UK’s protracted Brexit death agonies.

But the two main male characters redeem the film. I cannot say the same for Merle Oberon, who as the Pimpernel’s wife is given a horrific part where she is shown to be a beautiful yet unreliable and foolish woman – clearly never the hero, only doing what she can to redeem her tarnished image (she is after all a woman, and can aim no higher in a film of 1934). Massey is convincingly chilly with his Scottish accent, and perhaps because he is the only aristocrat in the film not wearing outrageously exaggerated costume. The actor playing Robespierre looked suspiciously to me like Kenneth Williams.

But Leslie Howard was watchable throughout. For an English hero, he was the antithesis of James Bond. This is no macho figure. The Pimpernel affects in everyday life a camp effete attitude, a view emphasised by his wife who keeps complaining that he is no longer a man. Yet even when he drops his mask, Howard never looks as though he would win any combat through strength. Remarkably, he hits nobody and wins all his battles by cunning. What happened to English heroes like Howard? When did Howard become Bond, thereby guaranteeing the success of hundreds of muscle-building gymnasiums and vitamin supplement suppliers?