The caped crusader… The Elusive Pimpernel (1950), BFI, Cinema Unbound

I had agreed to do it, but my heart remained unconvinced… I hate remakes! 

Michael Powell

  

In her informative, and witty introduction, the BFI’s Bryony Dixon explained the troubled gestation of a film most of those involved weren’t that keen to make. The story had been very successfully filmed by Alexander Korda in 1933 and by Samuel Goldwyn were keen on a Technicolor remake whilst Korda was keen on a further pay out on the rights. But apart from Powell and Pressburger’s wariness, David Niven also didn’t want to do it, fearing he couldn’t match technique of the previous Pimpernel, Leslie Howard, in effectively playing two characters.

 

I watched The Marvels (2023) with my son over the weekend and it does occur to me that Baroness Orczy’s character is one of the original superheroes, a man of almost uncanny wit and intelligence whose secret identity is to play a buffoonish nobleman, Sir Percy Blakeney, who’s own wife doesn’t even suspect that he is the man rescuing French aristos from La Guillotine.

 

Bryony said that there are not many prints around and at one time even Powell thought it was a lost film but luckily it does survive and today the BFI were presenting a good Technicolor print with lovely colours even if there were one or two issues with the sound but this is what our analogue fetish is all about. The film also doesn’t appear to have been available on home media since the VHS era… hopefully that will be rectified for, whilst it’s not an Archer’s classic, it’s certainly a well-made and delightful film: Mr Niven may be no Leslie Howard but he is the very best David Niven and that is quite enough for this good humoured romp through post-revolutionary France.

Cyril Cusack

 

Korda did not agree and quoted the French navet, meaning a turnip, feeling that this film was perhaps a Super Navet – Super, Super Turnip. P&P’s Hollywood screening with Goldwyn also did not go well, as the great man walked out on them, leaving his wife to pass on his legal threats. By all accounts film failed to cover anything like its production costs which is not surprising given that it wasn’t released in the US for another five years… studios barely releasing non-confirming product is not a new thing in Tinsel Town.

 

Time, and our familiarity with the film maker’s style have worked in favour of our deeper appreciation of the film. There are fabulous locations with chateaux in Loire Valley and Mont St Michel, especially near the end as the quick tides confound Chauvelin’s men surrounding the rock. Despite their reluctance, the filmmakers had a good time making the film, enjoying the locations and the wine and it shows in the good humour of the cast.

 

This is certainly a film more sinned against than sinning… and some would have you believe the same for The Marvels although there’s nothing quite as outlandish as that film’s super heroics in the Pimpernel’s world in which the laws of physics and drama are firmly adhered to. By day, Sir Percy and by night, or other time requiring it, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and the whole of France know his name.

 

Margaret Leighton

All revolutions are started by idealists. Some of them end in… runs across the date 1792 written in running blood red as the camera shifts to the view of La Guillotine slicing another aristo’s head off. IN the midst of this great terror the legend grows of a man who is staging daring rescues of certain nobles, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Immediately Powell and Pressburger show us an audacious rescue with Mr Niven quite unrecognisable as a rustic hag. His band have created a trap for the revolutionaries and lock them in a tower as they rescue a family.

 

Cut to a band of revolutionary troops guarding the Loire who dare this invisible adversary to cross. They meet an old crone (or similar but acceptable modern term) and let her pass with her cart full of melons only for a squadron of French troops to arrive in seeming hot pursuit, but it’s another bluff as these are more of the SP’s men, forcing their way past the checkpoint to safety and to England!

 

Now we meet the scheming Chauvelin (Cyril Cusack) who has managed to apprehend Armand St. Juste (Edmond Audran) a French MP but who has a sister Marguerite Blakeney (Margaret Leighton) married to a useless Englishman Sir Percy Blakeney (David Niven). Chauvelin tries to exert power over St Juste but is shocked to see a message from the Pimpernel taped to the bottom of his glass. They may seek him here, but he's always there...

 

Bustin' some rhymes

Now, in a possible nod to Blimp, we find Sir Percy in the steam baths at Boodles Club in London where he annoys the old generals and English gentry with a poem he has made up about the mysterious masked man:

 

They seek him here

They seek him there

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere

Is he in heaven or is he in… well

That damned elusive Pimpernel

 

None of the older gentlemen are impressed with this fop but meanwhile he’s organising his men in a back room just as the old soldiers discuss how he and his kind need to be enlisted to see real action. But Blakely is not the brightest popinjay in the smart set, that’d be the Prince of Wales (Jack Hawkins, playing against type) who arrives in the latest fashion only to be deflated as Blakely tears into the design from all angles.

 

We cut back to France and another massed attack on noble property and another audacious rescue by the Pimpernel’s men – should that just be The Pimpernels – high up on the balcony of a gorgeous castle – leading the aristos to safety whilst their leader, dressed as a French fop, leads the hoards away… before making like Fairbanks, shimmying down a long curtain and disguising himself again.

Part Chaney/Part Fairbanks?

These action sequences are well wrought and show a different aspect of Powell’s filmmaking and Pressburger’s writing too; no matter how frivolous the storyline, they prove here that they can be just as entertaining as their peers; the film has a very satisfying scale and a good turn of pace and the humour from Pressburger’s script is handled very well by British actors almost made in Niven’s image, Patrick Macnee, Terence Alexander and Robert Coote.

 

There’s also good chemistry between Margaret Leighton as Marguerite Blakeney and Niven as her husband; she doesn’t know of his double life but there’s a reason for that and the newly arrived Comtesse de Tournai (Arlette Marchal) refuses to speak to her as she, like everyone else, believes she betrayed her class at the earliest opportunity.

 

Well, that, and many other things we will just have to find out as the game between the Pimpernel and Chauvelin is played out right to the bitter end.

A Brian Easdale score also helps to uplift this film and, whilst it is not top-quality Archers it is without doubt as good as many such capers and is fun throughout, especially on 35mm!

 

 

All's fair… The Good Die Young (1954)/ When Giants Fought (1926) BFI Dual Format, out now

‘All the good boys got themselves killed in the war or should have done. The good die young; that’s what we were meant to do. But we didn’t die. Oh no – we fooled them, we stayed alive. And, worse than that, we came back. So now we’re in the way, we’re redundant. We’re not wanted.’

 

Another BFI release from the post war era and one that reveals concerns from the dried-out beginnings of the 1950s with four men in desperate need of an even break and some money. For three of them, the fault is not really their own, they’ve had bad luck, whereas the fourth has made his own luck wasting away opportunity until he has nothing left but to risk the fate of others to find his fortune.

 

It's no surprise that of the actors on show, Laurence Harvey is the real bad apple, but even he comes up with a story of bitterness blaming the War in which the “good” were first to die, as the motivation for his entirely self-centred existence. As with all good noir there is so much shade but also choices to be made and few who had witnessed the sacrifice of the war generation would have much sympathy for his self-pity. The others, on the other hand all retain some relatability which makes the film especially nuanced at a time when few criminal characters could expect to get away with much in British film let alone be willed on by the decent crowd in the darkness.

Harvey, Baseheart, Ireland and Baker

 

Directed and co-scripted by Lewis Gilbert, the story is based on a novel by American writer Richard Macauley and the events transposed to austere London with a number of notable US performers including Richard Basehart and the glorious Gloria Grahame as flighty film star, Denise Blaine. Grahame gives enough here to see why she is still so highly rated; she’s got an almost out-of-time aggressiveness and her timing is superb uplifting every second she is on screen. By comparison, home-grown starlet Joan Collins seems under-powered and more than a little miscast as the rather timid Mary Halsey, a young married who just can’t escape her clinging mother.

 

For Brit-grit and screen presence look no further than Stanley Baker as down on his uppers boxer Mike Morgan, a man clinging onto a career after multiple defeats and going into his last fight with a broken hand and even his brother-in-law Dave (James Kenney, who was so memorable in Cosh Boy) betting against him. But, somehow, Mike prevails and has won enough to retire and look after his wife Angela only Dave is now deep in debt and on the run from some unforgiving gangsters… blood is thicker than water and Mike finds his funds all gone towards the preservation of lost causes.

Gloria Grahame and John Ireland

 

Talking of which, over in New York City Joe Halsey (Richard Basehart) quits his job to try and bring his wife Mary (Joan Collins) back from England where her mother (Freda Jackson) keeps on inventing illnesses and other excuses to keep her girl at home. It’s a heart-breaking choice in the best of circumstances and probably a fairly common scenario for a lot of war brides, but something has to give and there’s no way Joe can get the work he needs and Mary is pregnant, forcing the issue to a head.

 

From dreary suburbia to Knightsbridge hotels and the even unhappier life of glamourous Gloria as flighty Hollywood starlet Denise Blaine married, just about, to American airman, Eddie (John Ireland). The two are moving in increasingly elliptical orbits as she shoots in locations and he gets transferred to Germany; they were clearly equal once but now Denise is showing more interest in her co-stars.

Richard Baseheart and Joan Collins

 

The catalyst for bringing these three desperate husbands together is Harvey’s Miles 'Rave' Ravenscourt, a decorated war “hero” married to Eve Ravenscourt (Margaret Leighton) or rather her money. Rave is your classic public-school waster, disappointed in love, life, war and pretty much everything and who keeps on losing what ever money he has in gambling. Eve refuses to advance him anymore and there’s even a lovely cameo from Robert Morley as Sir Francis Ravenscourt, Rave’s exasperated father. Sir Francis gives the film’s biggest clue yet as to the soulless void behind his son’s relentless flippancy… in the eyes of post-war viewers his ceaseless betrayals surely rank as high as any more physical crime.

Rave it is who pulls the others together after the encounter each other by chance in a public house which, incidentally, is exactly the kind of pub I’ve been looking for after four months of lockdown! He gradually nudges them towards the idea of one big payday and sets out a sure-fire way to rob a post office that will bring them tens of thousands each; more than enough to set them free for a second chance.

 

Rene Ray, James Kenney and Stanley Baker

The film opens with the four of them sat in a car about to undertake the robbery and, having gone full circle, the raid takes place and their fates are played out in a breathless final segment. No spoilers, but at one point a shocked Mike observes that Rave has never seemed more alive than with a gun in his hand and with men to kill…

 

The film is that dark and Harvey’s key lines quoted at the top were cut from the British release as the BFI’s Dr Josephine Botting reveals in her booklet essay; perhaps it was felt that this was too cynical and disrespectful or maybe the powers that be felt it might strike to much of a chord? Dr Botting’s essay gives fascinating background on the production and there’s also an article on Lewis Gilbert from Peter Rankin.

Laurence Harvey and Margaret Leighton - apparently Laurie kept the pictures for "personal use"...

The set includes the worldwide home entertainment debut export version of the film an extended, alternative cut of the film – featuring material not included in the British release version. There’s also Not Like Any Other Director: Lewis Gilbert (1995) an edited excerpt from a 1995 onstage interview with the director held at the National Film Theatre with Michael Caine is on hand to introduce his friend. Gilbert directed Caine in Alfie (1966) and Educating Rita (1983), two of my favourite Michael’s!

 

As is traditional, there are also a selection of delicious shorts from the BFI archive including Midnight Taxi (1946) Norman Hemsley’s look at bustling London after dark and Under Night Streets (1958) Ralph Keene’s documentary showing how an army of workers cleans the London Underground in the four hours between close-down and rush-hour.

Frank Craig goes out to battle Tom Cribb

 

The highlight for me is When Giants Fought (1926), Harry B Parkinson’s tale about the first black contender for Britain’s heavyweight bare-knuckle boxing title in 1810. Frank Craig plays the real-life Tom Molyneaux who fought champion Tom Cribb (Joe Beckett) over 35 rounds in 1910 and, by some accounts, should have won. It is a fascinating film and Frank Craig’s plays Molyneaux with conviction and pugilistic poise.

The story uses the framing device of an old man telling tales in a Holborn alehouse many years later. He regales his audience with the battle of a sailor and soldier for the love of a country maid and this ends up being a wager on the outcome of the fight. The threesome’s reaction to the course of the fight – and the watchers in general – reveals much of the Twenties’ creative’s views of Georgian racist attitudes and some of the language on the intertitles is shocking another century on even although they also reveal which side the filmmakers were on.

In the end Molyneaux is cheated of his deserved victory by Cribb’s team and a lenient referee… and there’s a twist in the tale of love too. All’s unfair in love and boxing.

 

Another reason, if you needed one, to buy this new set. It's available from the BFI online and on the Southbank. Another winner!

Great locations too and Mr Gilbert does a grand job with creating dramatic tension and a sense of place, especially during the closing sequence!