If you’re a member of my family, you’ve learned to run when you hear the words “Scarlet Pimpernel.” Not only have I read the book more times than I’ve bothered to count, but for a while I was watching the 1934 film adaptation several times a year. At one point, I could clear a room just by waving the VHS tape in the air. Even now, with my obsession noticeably cooled, my parents still tense when the name comes up. Perhaps, if they make no sudden movements, the topic will slide.
Though it can be hard not to take such hostility personally, the truth is that I can’t blame my family for their weariness. The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy, first appeared in book form in 1905. From a certain point of view, its popularity should probably have peaked in about 1908, before it was justly consigned to the dustbin of history. The prose ranges from competent to silly. The plot spends about forty pages on crowd scenes before any of the main characters are introduced. And the final act of the book could justifiably be called downright offensive. (We’ll get to that later.) When people ask me about my favorite books, The Scarlet Pimpernel never comes up. I’m afraid they’ll make me turn in my English major card.
So what fueled my obsession with this silly, dated book for so many years? The answer is simple: Marguerite St. Just. The book has a loose, somewhat meandering structure, but I think a strong case can be made for Marguerite being the thread that ultimately ties it together.
To briefly sum up the plot: The book is set during the French Revolution, at the moment when the overthrow of the aristocracy begins to slide toward violence and paranoia. The eponymous Scarlet Pimpernel is the superhero alias of a man, suspected to be English, who has been smuggling imperiled aristocrats out of France to safety. Known to be daring, clever, and a master of disguise, he’s a threat the revolutionary leaders are desperate to neutralize. One of the chief republican spies, Chauvelin, contacts Marguerite St. Just, a former friend and former Parisian actress. Marguerite, now known as Lady Blakeney, had married a stupid English aristocrat and moved to England shortly before the revolution began. She and her brother Armand (her only family) are pro-revolutionary, but Chauvelin eventually threatens to accuse Armand of treason if Marguerite does not agree to spy on her friends in an attempt to track down the Scarlet Pimpernel. The entire middle portion of the novel consists of her moral dilemma: Spy on her friends, with the intent to betray one of them to his death? Or allow her beloved brother and most steadfast supporter to be killed? Without giving away her decision, I’ll just say that both Chauvelin and Marguerite end up guessing the Scarlet Pimpernel’s true identity, leading them to rush to France: Chauvelin to arrest him, and Marguerite to warn him his cover is probably blown.
It’s the middle portion of the novel, with a genuinely tough morality puzzle at its heart, that fuels my obsession with the book. Marguerite’s relative safety in London high society allows her choices to shift from the primal desire for self preservation to more academic questions of how, when, whether, and why a person might be willing to endanger others. In many ways, the story is one of a woman torn between conflicting images of respectability, the pressures of her own conscience, and love for her mortally endangered brother. If this were a different book, Marguerite, who is repeatedly described as “clever” and “fascinating” as well as beautiful, would be a femme fatale. She would be Chauvelin’s tool, heartlessly seducing men to achieve whatever outcome she wanted, for unfathomable feminine reasons of her own. Perhaps because this book is written by a women, Marguerite’s story instead has real pathos and emotion, buried beneath the silly prose. She repeatedly uses her feminine wiles throughout the book, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes not. But she is consistently portrayed as a real, layered person, who longs to do right but who cannot always determine exactly what that right might be.
To make matters worse, Chauvelin is constantly stacking the deck of social pressure against her. One of my favorite scenes, just for pure dastardliness, is the one in which he first presents the choice of Armand’s life or the Scarlet Pimpernel’s. Marguerite is alone in a box seat at the opera: visible, public, somewhere she can’t make a scene, but still private enough that a man can threaten the lives of her loved ones and not be overheard. In fact, Chauvelin repeatedly employs tactics that should be recognizable to anyone who’s had a creepy old acquaintance they can’t quite avoid. It’s elements like this, and Marguerite’s frequent use of feminine prattle as a cover for deeper motives and emotions, that tip my appreciation of the book over into obsession. Though I’ve read many better written books, I’ve yet to read a book with a heroine exactly like her.
Then things start to break down. After the tension and crunchy dilemmas of the middle portion of the book, we come to the third and final act. Marguerite’s character arc is developed nicely: after being forced into a number of no-win situations, she finally has a chance at redemption. Unfortunately, that chance is spoiled by a broad streak of anti-Semitism. Though the storyline could be read as an attempt to complicate deep-seated prejudices, in the end it feels more like trying to have your cake and eat it too. Sure, the Jew in question ends up being far more valuable to justice than any of the other characters could have guessed at the time, but that doesn’t keep the book from explicitly describing him in a way intended to invoke disgust and revulsion. Even the supposed protagonists view him with horror and pity. When I was a teenager, I was able to brush this element of the story aside as archaic and ridiculous. As I grew older, and learned more about the history of anti-Semitism (including the Dreyfus Affair, which played out in the years leading up to the book’s publication), my cavalier attitude became a lot less comfortable.
As I found myself increasingly unable to re-read the book, I turned more of my attention to the film adaptations. I was already familiar with the 1934 movie adaptation, which I knew cut the anti-Semitic thread from the third act. Another, possibly more well-known adaptation was from 1999, and I assumed would probably do the same. Could the movies be a way to enjoy my favorite elements of the story without having to wade through the bigotry at the end?
It was an intriguing possibility. Because any adaptation of the book must re-write the third act, each adaptation gets an opportunity to re-fashion the ending according to the creators’ own interests and interpretations. Add in the very loose organization of the beginning of the book, with its Paris crowd scenes and a strangely long scene set in an idealized English pub, and screenwriters are left with a lot of leeway in creating a recognizably Pimpernel-ish story while still re-working or updating large sections of the plot. And that’s how I slowly began to realize that the film-makers were reading a very different book than I was.
In Baroness Orczy’s book, the character of the Scarlet Pimpernel is ever-present as a myth, but never as a man. His clever plots provide a frame for the story, and his mysterious reputation has become a faddish fascination among Marguerite’s friends and acquaintances. However, not one line of the book is written from his perspective. Though Marguerite is not introduced until page 40 of my edition, the book is narrated almost exclusively from her perspective from that point forward, with only a few shifts to Chauvelin’s point of view. For that matter, in immediate terms, Chauvelin’s conflict for the majority of the book is not with the Scarlet Pimpernel but with Marguerite, as she struggles to escape his control. It’s a story about a woman, buried in a book about a man.
There is a degree to which a visual medium complicates this approach. The Scarlet Pimpernel, unsurprisingly, does turn out to be someone Marguerite knows. This sort of twist is easy to keep from a person in real life or in a book. (Though I’m never clear on how evident that double identity is supposed to be in the book. I guessed it almost immediately, but just in case it’s considered a spoiler, I’m trying to be vague about it here.) When you have the same actor playing both the Scarlet Pimpernel and Sir So-and-So, however, it’s better to respect your audience enough to acknowledge they’re the same. This, right out of the gate, shifts some of the empathy toward the Scarlet Pimpernel—being a secret agent is hard, and in this particular story, it’s frequently frustrating and undignified as well. In addition to this basic advantage, the Scarlet Pimpernel’s antics are inherently cinematic: ingenious disguises, clever plots, brazen bluffs. The legend of the Pimpernel has to be established in order for the drama of the rest of the story to make sense, so there need to be at least a few scenes portraying him as a traditional action hero: the sort of guy we’re used to rooting for.
The 1934 movie The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon, takes these basic facts and runs all the way with them. And here’s where any pretense I have of being objective falls by the wayside. I do have critiques of this movie, but I also think it’s pretty great. If you thought Howard was dull and bloodless in Gone With the Wind (guilty), you need to see this movie. (Available on Hulu+ as part of the Criterion Collection, but unfortunately not readily available in the US as a quality DVD. Also available on YouTube.) He has an incredibly expressive face that he uses to very good effect, particularly when trying to navigate his fraught relationship with Marguerite.
He also gives an incredibly spot-on performance of the Pimpernel’s English persona: irritating, silly, but still somehow endearing. (Some credit for this probably also goes to the screenwriters for some very carefully crafted dialog. It’s incredibly difficult to make someone sound like a smart man who’s successfully pretending to be stupid, but they pulled it off.)
In addition to all this, and in interesting contrast to the book, there are a few references to the political quandary of respect for national sovereignty vs. the moral imperative to intervene in a genocide, which seem particularly pointed given the historical context. (I’ve seen various release dates given for the movie. If 1934 is the correct one, then it would have been released the same year the Night of the Long Knives occurred, and four years before Kristallnacht.)
Unfortunately, Merle Oberon’s Marguerite does not fare so well. For modern audiences, she begins with the handicap that the mannerisms expected of a “fascinating actress” have changed quite a bit from the 1930s to the present. But there are other problems as well. Chauvelin’s initial threat is moved from the public forum of the opera house to the privacy of a deserted parlor, and the scene is so truncated that Marguerite’s reactions appear erratic and inconsistent rather than anguished but measured. When given a chance to shine, particularly at the ball where Chauvelin is pressuring her to reconnoiter, Oberon does decent work. But the script doesn’t give her many of those opportunities. The focus is on the Pimpernel’s carefully balanced personas, and the tension caused by some fairly justifiable trust issues between his English identity and Marguerite.
What infuriates me about this otherwise solid movie is that because Marguerite’s story is so circumscribed, those trust issues are never really adequately resolved. The movie features a shortened dénouement that makes sense both in terms of runtime and removing offensive plot elements, but also removes most of the actions that prove Marguerite’s trustworthiness once and for all. The movie then adds insult to injury by calling for a dramatic faint to get her out of the way for the final showdown between Chauvelin and the Pimpernel. (To be fair, she does faint in the book as well, but only after being thrown to the ground and half-smothered with a bag. “Loses consciousness” would probably be more apt.)
Because of these shortcomings, I decided to try the BBC adaptation from 1999, starring Richard E. Grant and Elizabeth McGovern. In my experience, this is the adaptation most people have seen. For a long time, I resisted watching it, simply because I was so entirely in love with Leslie Howard’s performance and I wasn’t sure if I could be objective. However, the idea of a less dated and marginalized Marguerite appealed to me so much that eventually I warmed to the idea. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.
There are things to like about this adaptation. One thing I was most hoping to see was a more visible representation of the sexual tension between the Pimpernel and Marguerite. This does happen. Though the ultimate consummation of their relationship is only implied in the BBC production, at least it’s more than a single kiss ending in a dead faint. Other positive elements include a little more fleshing out of the friendship between Marguerite and her old school friend Suzanne, and some pointed class commentary. (A welcome thing in a story where the aristocrats are all sweet, blameless people that the mean old commoners want to kill out of pure lack of sophistication.) A few small plot touches are certainly intriguing, though they don’t have the power to affect the quality of the movie one way or another. For example, the introduction of a wound to help tie the Pimpernel’s identities together is a nice dramatic touch, but never seems to quite live up to its potential.
Unfortunately, “fails to live up to its potential” was my impression of the movie as a whole. Perhaps because the movie is actually the first installment of a miniseries, it’s crammed with extra characters who clutter up the scenes and make it difficult to emotionally connect with anyone. One woman seems to have been introduced almost exclusively in order to render a female pronoun spoken by another character ambiguous. In addition, the tone is jarringly inconsistent, often juxtaposing scenes of torture and brutality with Pimpernel plots that come across more as wacky hijinks than daring rescues. (One example: A jaunty chase scene, complete with bouncy music, in which the Pimpernel eludes Chauvelin on the streets of Paris, and manages to steal Chauvelin’s own horse in order to escape. Winded, Chauvelin returns to his comrades, whips out a pistol, and shoots one of the Pimpernel’s friends in the head at point blank range. Take that, laughter.)
The dialog is of consistently low quality, and the third act degenerates into a plot soup in which Everyone Gets Arrested and Some People Die. The clunky dialog, wonky plot, and low production values often conspire to make me feel like I’m watching a daytime soap opera: All My Severed Heads. Though there’s nothing wrong with soap opera, I wanted a little more texture, opulence, and nuance to give the story some heft.
Perhaps some of these changes are due to the focus of the film, which revolves around questions of love and control, rather than morality and trust. The book asks how to make morally right choices when none are available, and whether forgiveness is possible afterward. The BBC adaptation affirms the power of True Love, and reminds everyone that being controlling is bad for your relationships.
Marguerite is transformed from an effervescent former actress who tries to dazzle her way out of difficult situations, into a steadfast and upright scion who is calmly certain the Pimpernel will save her. (In one cringe-worthy on-the-nose scene she also chastises the Committee of Public Safety for transgressing justice, right before Robespierre sentences her to death. THESE ARE THINGS THAT HAPPEN.) Though it makes for interesting enough television, I was heartbroken that Marguerite’s noir struggle against impossible odds wasn’t so much relegated to the sidelines as utterly erased.
It’s almost cliché by now to complain that women’s stories are de-emphasized while men’s are given center stage. And it’s true that even Baroness Orczy’s book seems to waver uncertainly between a hero story for the Pimpernel and an almost anti-heroic story for Marguerite. But when I turned to the movie adaptations, I found that Marguerite’s own brand of heroism and fortitude was consistently down-played and erased, in favor of the more comfortable and traditional story of the male action hero who saves us all. I love action movies and I even love male heroes. But I’m still hoping for the time when a woman as wily and stubborn as Marguerite gets to be the one who steals the show and saves the day.
*While finding links for this article, I discovered a third adaptation I didn’t know anything about. It’s from 1982 and stars Anthony Andrews as the Pimpernel, Jane Seymour as Marguerite, and SIR IAN MCKELLEN as Chauvelin. It sounds like the plot revolves around an attempt to save the child Dauphin, which probably means another Pimpernel-centric movie, but SIR IAN MCKELLEN, people. Clearly, I have some more research to do.
