I have never read Baroness Orczy's original novels (are they still in print?), but the story of "The Scarlet Pimpernel" is familiar enough to me from various film and television versions. During the French Revolution an Englishman calling himself the "Scarlet Pimpernel" carries out a series of daring raids in order to rescue French aristocrats from the guillotine. The Pimpernel is in fact Sir Percy Blakeney, an upper-class gentleman, who in order to allay suspicion assumes the identity of a brainless fop, interested only in drinking, gambling and his extensive wardrobe. (A "scarlet pimpernel" is a common European flower; according to this version of the story it features on Sir Percy's coat of arms, which should have given the French authorities a clue as to who was involved).
To add a further touch of drama, Sir Percy is married to Marguerite, a beautiful French actress, who is desired by the villain of the story, the revolutionary Chauvelin. She is unaware that her husband is the Pimpernel and, to add further complications, he suspects that she may still have some sympathies with the revolutionaries. Although Marguerite is a fictional character, she is described as a cousin of Louis de Saint-Just, who was a real-life revolutionary leader.
This is not the only point at which fact and fiction become mixed. Much of the plot concerns an attempt to rescue the young Dauphin (regarded by French royalists as the de jure King Louis XVII) from prison and take him to England. In reality, of course, the Dauphin died in prison in 1795; had he been freed he would eventually have become de facto King after the fall of Napoleon. The Bourbon restoration of 1814 might well have been more successful had it involved a young man of 29 rather than the elderly childless widower Louis XVIII and the ferociously reactionary Charles X. The scriptwriters seem to have realised at the last minute that their plot involved a major rewriting of French and European history, because the Dauphin suddenly vanishes from the story after going off with a mysterious Austrian nobleman.
This version is a British TV movie from the early eighties, done in the usual period drama style. The Pimpernel is played by Anthony Andrews, who is surprisingly convincing as a dashing action hero, although he rather overdoes Sir Percy's affected foppishness, which is so far over the top that it would not have fooled anyone. I say "surprisingly convincing" because at that time Andrews would have been best known to British audiences for his role as the drunken, effeminate Sebastian Flyte in the television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". Sebastian is another upper-class fop, although in his case the foppishness is quite genuine, not affected. Andrews may have taken on the role of the Pimpernel as a deliberate change of image.
The lovely Jane Seymour as Marguerite makes a charming heroine, although I thought that the best performance came from Ian McKellen as Chauvelin. The film does not really explore the politics of the Revolution in any depth and simply takes the line that the Pimpernel and his friends are goodies and the revolutionaries baddies. Nevertheless, McKellen resists the temptation to play Chauvelin as a straightforward villain, motivated by either bloodlust or self-interest. Rather, he makes him an example of an even more dangerous type of individual, the toxic idealist. One of the great tragedies of the French Revolution was that it re-introduced into European thought the damnable idea that a perfect world was attainable and that the best way of attaining it was to kill a few people- and if that doesn't work, try killing a lot of people. (I say "re-introduced" because something similar had existed in the days of witch-hunts and of the burning of heretics, but the Enlightenment had made this sort of thinking temporarily unfashionable). Chauvelin believes in all sincerity that the Revolution will lead to a better world in the future, and that any action, even the killing of innocent people, is therefore justified if it will advance the revolutionary cause.
The film's main problem is that at nearly 2½ hours it is too long, and contains too little action in what is ostensibly an action-adventure, apart from one reasonably good swordfight between Chauvelin and the Pimpernel. Most of their duels, in fact, are verbal rather than physical; Sir Percy takes any opportunity he can to insult Chauvelin, particularly on his lack of sartorial elegance. The aim of the film-makers was presumably to make something in the swashbuckling style of an Errol Flynn or Stewart Granger film, but "The Scarlet Pimpernel" lacks the dash, excitement and fast-paced action of the classic swashbucklers. 6/10
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