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.
Tags: magnificent obsessions, movies, rochelle smith, scarlet pimpernel
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The Anthony Andrews one is the only one I’ve seen, and I highly recommend it — it’s a lot of fun! It’s also not a pure adaptation of the book; as I recall, it’s a combination of The Scarlet Pimpernel and Eldorado, the sequel.
Yep, the book has a sequel! There’s actually a whole series, five or six books and two or three short story collections. They get increasingly ridiculous as they go along (at least one novel has Robespierre haunting the countryside in disguise to unearth the Scarlet Pimpernel. ‘Cause, um…Robespierre himself had oodles of time on his hands, apparently), but they’re still fun.
There’s also one that stars…
SPOILER!!!
Chauvelin’s daughter as the victim who needs to be rescued.
END SPOILER!!
There’s also a Broadway musical that I recall being quite fun.
I only know one song from the musical well (Falcon in the Dive) but I think it’s superb. I’ve vaguely heard other ones (I think We Seek Him There and one about Sir Percy getting dressed or something?) but I can sing along with every word of Falcon in the Dive. It’s really badass, but you do have to remember who’s singing it and then cringe a little.
Edit: Cringe may be the wrong word, actually. Not knowing anything about the variances of the plot of the musical, though, it’s just one hell of a villain song.
I loved the Scarlet Pimpernel as a teen (with the same issues as the third act expressed by the author of this piece), and tried reading some of the sequels. I recall that the ones I read focused intently on the Pimpernel’s gang of noblemen, and not enough on Marguerite or Percy, so wasn’t able to really finish them.
I should give them another try.
I was in a production of the Broadway musical in high school, and I LOVED it. “Falcon in the Dive” is so dramatic, and also now every single song is running through my head, including the one where all the guys dressed up in over-the-top costumes that required them to all shave their legs.
They didn’t have the sequels in my public library system when I was in high school, so I never read them. Maybe I should give them a try! (Is it awkward that I’m posting this a week late? I’ve had a terrible cold since the 4th and didn’t realize this was live until today.)
They seek him hyeah
They seek him theah
Those Frenchies seek him everywheah
Is he in heaven?
Is he in […]*
That dimmed elusive Pimpernel!
Wot?!
(*tasteful elision of “the other place”)
I loved that movie, and Leslie Howard in it, as a young little lady, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01i19qog8Pw
http://youtu.be/ku_voNMo9Z0?t=50m57s
This comment was a beautiful reminder of the time I was living with some musical-theater actors and their company put on The Scarlet Pimpernel. This song was all I heard from them for about a month, and the accent got more and more outrageous every time. It’s cracking me up just thinking about it.
WATCH THE 1982 ONE. It’s the one I grew up watching (that became more awesome when I realized that it’s Sebastian Flyte, Gandalf and Dr. Quinn). I think it treats Marguerite a lot better than the ’99 one, and Anthony Andrews is aMAZING.
I would really like to hear your thoughts on it.
I remember this one, too. 🙂 Jane Seymour is an excellent substitute for Merle Oberon, isn’t she? In terms of looks, I guess I mean.
The 1982 one got a lot of play in my house growing up, except that it was a VHS tape, recorded from a network broadcast, and one that GETS CUT OFF HALFWAY THROUGH THE ENDING SWORDFIGHT because we didn’t set our VCR to record “extended” or whatever you had to do back in the Cold War.
My sisters and I probably averaged two viewings a month of that one. Gandalf is a hateful motherfucker in it.
I was going to ask if you were my sister, but our VHS recorded from the PBS broadcast was complete (with bonus pledge drive banter from 1989 or something).
Gandalf is a gross creeper and I feel so bad for poor Dr. Quinn (but her brother was kind of a hottie).
I didn’t actually find out the specifics of what happened in the end until my AP European History teacher had us watch it one Friday where he didn’t really feel like teaching. After it was over, he put on Bennie Hill’s “The Scarlet Pimple,” which probably would get him fired today.
I think my favorite part of it now is the extreme Cockney accents of the French soldiers. And how Chauvelin is the BIGGEST ASSHOLE IN THE WORLD for a) wearing clothes that an English nobleman finds cheap and b) advocating for democracy.
That was the one I grew up watching, too!
And then my family got out the book from the library, to do as a read out loud thing for a long drive to the beach. (About eight hours of driving, I think.) Having grown up with the movie, which is all about Dashing Action Hero Man In Clever Disguises, I have to admit that I did not give the book a very favorable reception. The whole family was a bit baffled. Why was it spending so much time on the guy’s wife? Where were all the action sequences and clever disguises?
But now this article makes me want to go back and try reading the book again, with a little more objective distance, and a lot less “Why this is about this woman when it could be about this dude I already like?”
Oh, The Scarlet Pimpernel was one of many obsessions in high school! My 9th grade self will vouch heartily for the 1982 adaptation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz02Pg0104U
ZOOKS! What a coincidence, I just finished reading the book last week. 🙂 My only previous exposure to the story was the musical, which, rereading the synopsis, was verrrry different from the book. Still fun, though.
I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE. I’ve never read the book, but some years ago in high school I stumbled across a DVD of the Leslie Howard version at the Dollar Tree. I bought it for a laugh – what the hell is a pimpernel? Is it like a pumpernickel? – and then ended up absolutely in love with Leslie Howard. The minute changes in his face, his eyes, his posture, every time he switches identities; the way he can be inexplicably cruel to Maguerite and yet you feel his own pain beneath the bitterness.
I immediately looked him up online to see why I’d never heard of him. (I hadn’t seen Gone With the Wind yet.) Turns out, he was killed in WW2. What an absolute shame.
A year later I met a girl who had an equally obscure obsession with the Pimpernel, but with the Ian McKellen 1980s version. We swapped DVDs and each concluded that our original version was the best. It’s really hilarious to watch the American and British adaptations side by side. The American adaptation has the (innocent and lovely and well meaning) imprisoned nobles give a mournful little speech about how “We brought this on ourselves, really. Oh, if only we hadn’t fallen out of touch with our constituents.” The (1980s) British adaptation is about “Those awful Frenchies killed the king but WE FOUND THE PRINCE and now we can RESTORE THE MONARCHY HUZZAH HUZZAH!!!” It’s amazing.
I’m so shocked to hear that the book’s focus is on Maguerite, because both these movies centered resolutely on the Pimpernel. I’ll have to read it, even despite the anti-semetism.
Leslie Howard was in an updated WWII propaganda version, called Pimpernel Smith, where he’s an archaeologist helping people escape the Nazis. I think it was the last film he did before he died. It’s pretty good, worth watching if you’re a fan of his original Pimpernel.
I love the book (Marguerite was like a dream of being a classy lady for me) but I can’t read past the channel crossing or to the scene in the inn at most. After that the anti-semitism is really hideous.
There’s also the Scarlet Pimpernel episode of Blackadder, which is hilarious.
YES. I was so excited when I stumbled across that.
Aaaah someone else who is obsessed with that story! I was on a huge Pimpernel kick recently and devoured the delightfully melodramatic musical and every Scarlet Pimpernel fic I could find on AO3. For a really really good female-focused version of the story I strongly encourage everyone here to read “A Complex Problem” (http://archiveofourown.org/works/596520) which is a retelling of the story in which the Pimpernel has always been female, and works in all the social complexities such a change would entail, and is still from Marguerite’s perspective. The only warning I would give is that it kinda assumes knowledge of the Pimpernel’s identity from the start.
I also would be remiss in not letting people know about the Takarazuka version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, a Japanese production in which all the roles are played by women, featuring the most attractive versions of the Pimpernel and Chauvelin I have yet to see. Here’s a recap with lots of excellent screenshots: http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/316843.html. Again, assumes prior knowledge of the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel
Bless you for that fic recommendation! I loved it–the tension between Peggy and Marguerite is so taut, and the way being female changes Peggy’s methods is very well done.
I think that fic is all I have ever wanted. I had a college roommate that spent three weeks one year trying to track down a DVD of the Takarazuka production that wasn’t super expensive. I think she eventually just gave up and downloaded. It’s pretty magical.
ODD’S LIFE! I read the book as a young and formative adolescent and it was AMAZING. I read it a lot. I had an old volume of four books about the Scarlet Pimpernel, but the first one was obviously the best. I was kind of into the (super transparent) Pimpernel thing, but I was really, really into Marguerite and how amazing she was. I really loved how she seemed like an actual human being, which was, as you said, probably due at least in part to the author being a woman. (Side note: how many times did I whisper the author’s name to myself as a nerdy youth, trying to imagine how this mystical being’s name might be pronounced? A LOT.) I sort of glazed over the rampant anti-Semitism and let myself skim the worst of it (“it’s not as awful because it’s old-timey shit and it doesn’t happen anymore!” she thought), though I haven’t reread the book in several years because, uh, yeah no thank you please, I’m very uncomfortable now.
I…don’t have any memory of the Leslie Howard adaptation? I mean, I must have watched it with my mom, but I don’t remember anything from it. I DO remember seeing the Elizabeth McGovern adaptation and being SUPER disappointed in it, though. Marguerite was dumb and not as badass, and all of their interactions were just weird. I loved how she was the focus of the book and wish that an equivalent film adaptation existed. I dunno, I loved that book with the aggressive fervor of bookish girls and it has inexplicably stuck with me for a long time. Thank you for writing this! Going to have to see the Leslie Howard version again now, and investigate the Sir Ian McKellen (!) version, too.
Can we discuss Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation books here? They’re sort-of sequels to the Scarlet Pimpernel books, but they center around female spies, and are also regency romances. This series is one of my favorites.
More info here: http://www.laurenwillig.com/books/#pink
I’ve read a couple of those! Fun stuff, even if the Regency romance angle isn’t really my jam.
Yeah, I like the earlier, more swashbuckling ones better than the later ones, which are more romance-y. However, as romances go, they’re pretty great, since the characters actually do things like save England and thwart Napoleon instead of just hanging around and falling in love.
I would like to second the delightful Broadway musical adaptation!! Yes, I owned and memorized the cast CD. And recorded the Tony’s for the first time just to see a scene from the show. And made a fan website that has been lost to the geocities of the late 90s.
I was reading this, sure you’d bring the 1982 movie into the discussion. How is it possible to be unaware of its existence??? Although, to be honest, it is also my only experience with The Scarlet Pimpernel. So.
Between Anthony Andrews and Ian McKellen, I mean…I’m pretty much set.
Oh my god, I FOUND MY PEOPLE.
I was obsessed with this series. Obsessed. I still am. My hobby is checking every used bookstore I pass for early hardcover editions of any book in the series. I spent a year in high school on BlakeneyManor.com, reading every single Pimpernel adventure. So great. I just bullied my book club into reading The Scarlet Pimpernel by telling them it was like Batman but better.
I am a terrible person to have in a book club.
My university’s musical theater department (which is inexplicably decent) put on a production of the musical version my freshman year. The kids playing the Pimpernel and Chauvelain were dating at the time and this added a delicious amount of sexual tension. I saw it twice. One of my friends described it as being only slightly less gay than watching Batman hump Robin across the stage.
Also worth noting about the 80s version – not only does it have Anthony Andrews, Ian McKellan, and Jane Seymour, but in the small role of the Prince Regent, we see the young Julian Fellowes. I like to think his time playing not-too-bright aristocrats was all grist for the mill of Downton Abbey.
The books themselves — ridiculously overwrought prose and all — are available through Project Gutenberg. El Dorado is pretty much the only one worth reading, though, I think.
The only OTHER one worth reading, I meant to say. The original, of course, stands on its (ridiculous) own.
i am speechless…i had no idea there were other people obsessed with the scarlet pimpernel!!! i saw the 1934 version too young to be anything but alienated by the 30s acting…but literally had every word and mannerism memorized from the 1982 version. jane seymour is SO BEAUTIFUL OMG. and ian mckellan is BRILLIANT as usual. i am swooning just thinking about it.
This is one of my favorite stories of all time! It’s so much fun! I’m not a fan of the Russell E. Grant miniseries. You NEED to watch the 1982 version – it mixes The Scarlet Pimpernel and one of the sequels, El Dorado, and Anthony Andrews is entirely fantastic. Plus, Ian McKellan! The musical is also seriously enjoyable – melodramatic, but very funny.
There’s also Pimpernel Smith, a “modern day” version from the 40s also starring Leslie Howard.
And one episode of the third season of Blackadder does a GREAT parody.
My sisters and I watched the BBC version and wandered around saying SINK MEH! for weeks.
I love The Scarlet Pimpernel, but I overlooked the story’s history for a while–the book is an adaptation of a stage production (or maybe a series of performances). I’d be interested to see the discrepancies between the stage version and the book (the stage version and the screen versions–I’ve wondered if some of the screen deviations have come from stage material), but I haven’t seen any resources with the stage script.
I read somewhere (and I’ll have to see if I can find where) that Fred Terry asked for an alternate ending for the stage play that was used in later performances, which might also have been the basis for the fake execution/sword fight endings in later adaptations, because he didn’t want to do the curtain calls in the Jew costume. I don’t know if it was an early example of anti-anti-semitism (since actors could be a liberal community) or his own faults showing through.
I know I’m a little late to the party, but I have to chime in here — the Jane Seymour/Anthony Andrews version is the only one I’ve seen, and it’s lovely fun, and can stand up to repeated watching. I know when younger I watched it too many time to count, and as some others have said, I was unaware there were any other versions.
The dialogue is witty, Sir Ian McKellen is a wonderful, wonderful villain, and I feel Jane Seymour portrays an intelligent, nuanced Marguerite. The conflicted feelings you describe as loving about her are all very much at play here. And Anthony Andrews–very well cast (swoon). Do watch it! Just my two cents.
It’s hard to believe that the Howard/Oberon Pimpernel movie has not been remastered, yet.
Merle Oberon was simply glorious in it. And Leslie Howard truly shines in the scene where he recites a few lines from the beautiful speech from Richard II, Act 2, scene 1. “This other Eden, demi-paradise…