Alexander Korda’s The Scarlet Pimpernel at 90
Guest contributor András Forgács reflects on the Hungarian roots of an iconic British film.
Did you know Batman was Hungarian?
It’s a cliché that small nations over claim world-changing inventions: a recurring joke in the biggest box office hit of 2002, Nia Vardalos’ My Big Fat Greek Wedding, is that everything in the world was invented by the Greeks. We Hungarians can recognise this trait in ourselves. From the helicopter to the atomic bomb, we assert ownership of many things, with varying degrees of plausibility. At a stretch that includes superheroes.
Baroness Emma Orczy (1865-1947), a Hungarian-born British novelist, didn’t actually invent Batman, or Spiderman for that matter, but she contributed to their development. Stan Lee, one of the creative minds behind the rise of Marvel Comics, named Orczy‘s 1905 play (and 1908 novel) The Scarlet Pimpernel as an inspiration for his masked heroes. ‘Emmuska’ thus deserves at least a partial credit, as midwife or godmother, to a billion-dollar cultural phenomenon.
Sir Percy Blakeney, Pimpernel’s hero, is a professional fop by day but at night transforms into a masked vigilante: hopping back and forth across the English Channel to save French nobles from the Jacobin bloodbath. Literary critics tend to argue that Pimpernel is an unambiguous refutation of the values of the French Revolution (Sir Percy is rescuing aristos after all).
That ideological slant may well be true of Orczy’s texts: her own politics were notably conservative. Yet the 1934 screen version had a different freighting. Its makers were arguably more interested in (implicitly) critiquing contemporary authoritarianism than bemoaning Enlightenment excesses. The Scarlet Pimpernel was made the year after the Nazis took power in Germany and, as in the aftermath of 1789, Britain was beginning to play host to desperate refugees from across the water.
Sir Percy – as played brilliantly by Leslie Howard – might be considered the quintessential English ‘gentleman-superhero.’ Seemingly aloof, and disconnected from the civil war next door, in reality, he’s passionately concerned with saving lives by secretly orchestrating a league dedicated to rescuing as many members of the French nobility as can be snatched from the jaws of the guillotine.
Pimpernel is a story of resistance and intrigue but its political dimension is counterbalanced by an emotive subplot. The film features a melodramatic love triangle between Sir Percy, his ‘Pimpernel’ alter-ego, and his own wife Lady Blakeney (Merle Oberon) —who remains ignorant of her husband’s secret double life until late in the plot.
Pimpernel was Sir Alexander [Sándor] Korda’s (1893-1956) second great critical and commercial success following hard on The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). The film cemented Korda’s reputation. It also proved Korda’s vision for the British film industry —standing on its own two feet as a competitor to America’s in the brave new world of ‘talkies’— was a viable one. Soon Pinewood would rival Hollywood.
Officially Korda was, in 1934, the studio head at London Films, Pinewood’s predecessor. His hands-on approach to film-making, however, didn’t change after becoming a mogul. Pimpernel’s original (American) director Rowland Brown had a hard time taking notes and found himself let go early on. His replacement, Harold Young, proved more pliant. Although Korda was credited formally as ‘producer’ he was de facto the film's co-director and its true guiding light.
The film exemplifies Korda’s already established method: taking a literary source as inspiration but transforming it radically through sumptuous production design, thereby creating an immersive visual world. It was a trajectory evident even before he’d left Hungary.
Born in the sleepy Great Plain town of Túrkeve (near Szolnok), Korda began professional life as a journalist and film critic in early 20th-century Budapest. The Great War, however, propelled him into film production, where he quickly gained a reputation for economy and speed.
The hungry young man, however, had ambitions to make even a James Bond villain blush: he wanted to unleash large-scale adaptations of classic Hungarian literature on the world’s screens. Korda thought of cinema as the natural development of literature.
To a surprising extent, Korda succeeded: many of his early, literary, movie projects saw daylight, though they were made under the tightening constraints of a losing war. One, Man of Gold [Az arany ember] was an adaptation of a novel by Mór Jókai (19th-century Hungary’s answer to Dickens or Trollope).
Jókai’s novel, which references the ancient Greek myth of King Midas’s ‘golden touch,’ concerns the rise and fall of a merchant ship captain, Mihály Tímár, whose good fortune doesn’t bring him happiness and who starts leading a double life to relieve his boredom. Tímár’s duality of persona partially prefigures that of Sir Percy in Pimpernel −though Man of Gold is ultimately a tragedy for its protagonist, whose hubris brings about his downfall.
The two films share characteristics in terms of plot intricacy, historical setting, and lavish sets/costumes. Pimpernel, however, enjoys the benefits of twenty years of technological development. Man of Gold is a hymn of love to epic Hungarian literature – but Pimpernel is much closer to popular films we still devour today. Its sympathies lie firmly against an oppressor. Anti-hero Citizen Chauvelin (Raymond Massey) Chief Agent of the Committee of Public Safety might as well wear an SS uniform, not a French tricolour-cockade. Sir Percy, conversely, is essentially faultless.
Of course, that statement glosses over the fact that Sir Percy exploits his wife’s wavering allegiance to escape trouble: ‘playing’ her to confuse his opponents. Yet, let’s be honest, who amongst us wouldn’t forgive Leslie Howard immediately for anything? If Lady Blakeney does, perhaps we should too.
They seek him here, they seek him there.
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven or is he in hell?
That damned elusive Pimpernel.
András Forgács W. is a Hungarian-born British screenwriter based in London. His film ‘The Whip’ opens in selected UK cinemas on 4 September.