THAT DEMMED ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL
KARNICK, S.T.
THAT DEMMED ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL TV Reinvents Baroness Orczy’s Hero By S.T. Karnick This hasn’t been a good century for heroes. After the First World War, serious American fiction turned instead to...
...Marguerite proves the masked one, pretending to be a seamstress in an unsuccessful attempt to sneak into France...
...He needs to be so, for his task is formidable...
...This process was already discernible in 1905, for instance, when the Baroness Emmuska Orczy, an English immigrant from Hungary, wrote a novel that looked back more than a hundred years to redefine heroism in a revealing way...
...High-brow intelS.T...
...Such films invariably went to great lengths to show the hero’s faults and even his similarity to his foe...
...Popular movies have started to display this reversal, as well...
...Sir Percy is much more straightforward...
...Orczy opened her book with Sir Percy in disguise, first as a captain of the French guards and then as a wizened French hag driving a cart full of plague victims...
...In the book, Marguerite inadvertently betrays a man to the secret police before her marriage to Percy, and Percy disdains her for concealing it from him, because in doing so she has betrayed him, too...
...The good characters in the film are unambiguously good, the evil characters are unequivocally wicked, and it’s all great fun to watch...
...Fu Manchu), the Rocketeer, the Grey Seal, Secret Agent X, etc...
...In the opening scene, the Scarlet Pimpernel (played by Richard E. Grant) simply walks into a prison, overcomes the guards, takes the aristocratic prisoner out, and escapes by coach: no disguises, no subterfuges, just a bold, aggressive blow against the Terror...
...Of course, in the nineteenth century, such serious novelists as Scott and Dickens— and even such confirmed cynics as Thackeray and Twain—had frequently created heroic characters...
...The film spends much time in grimy prison cells, taverns, brothels, and slimy cobblestone streets, and shows a mob storming the squalid prison where Percy and Marguerite are being held, hacking prisoners to death with homemade weapons in an appalling, bloody frenzy...
...intellectual trends always end up changing low-brow entertainment, if only at a distance (which is why high culture is worth fighting for...
...Percy is just under thirty and “undeniably handsome— always excepting the lazy, bored look which was habitual to him,” and he is “always irreproachably dressed, . . . with the perfect good taste innate in an English gentleman...
...On the major television networks we now find Martial Law, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Walker, Texas Ranger...
...Set in 1792, in England and France during the early years of France’s post-revolutionary Reign of Terror, The Scarlet Pimpernel presented a new kind of hero, well fitted for the twentieth century...
...In a climactic swordfight, Sir Percy disables Chauvelin but refrains from killing him...
...And like Orczy’s novel, the film is careful to remind us that the British government, under Pitt, has decided to “Let ’em murder,” judging that Britain was not “fit to embark on another arduous and costly war...
...Some, like Sir Percy, profess to do their heroic deeds simply for the sport of it, but they are all actually motivated by anger at injustice: They are crusaders, devoted to a code of honor far more rigorous than what is practiced by the rest of society...
...The character through which the providers of popular entertainment learned to sneak heroes into a society losing faith in heroism no longer has to hide behind masks, deceptions, and trickery...
...And when, in the twentieth century, high culture abandoned the hero, popular culture kept him alive in innumerable pulp novels, magazine stories, movies, comic strips, radio shows, and plays...
...The first installment, called simply The Scarlet Pimpernel—which aired on March 7 and is to be followed by two sequels—presents a Sir Percy Blakeney very different from Orczy’s original and from earlier movie versions starring Leslie Howard, David Niven, and Anthony Andrews respectively...
...But at least our fictional heroes no longer have to hide behind secret identities, and some writers and filmmakers now feel comfortable showing real heroism without embarrassment...
...Crude but wholesome pulp gave way to the lurid paperbacks of the 1950s, with the rise of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and dozens of even less scrupulous imitators...
...The disguises and trickery for which the original Scarlet Pimpernel is famous give way to gun, sword, and fists...
...Last summer, for example, in six of the top eleven boxoffice films, at least one major character explicitly offers up his life for another person’s sake...
...Many of these heroes are more than a little offbeat, but they are certainly not antiheroes...
...But this anti-heroism may have begun to change in the late 1990s—and once again, The Scarlet Pimpernel is leading the trend, this time in a new series of films co-produced by the Arts & Entertainment cable-television network and the BBC...
...Karnick is editor-in-chief of the Hudson Institute’s American Outlook magazine...
...He “was rich, his wife was accomplished, the Prince of Wales took a very great liking to them both,” but Blakeney is a coward and a fool...
...Batman became the subject of a camp television series, Richard Lester nimbly presented The Three Musketeers as farce, and Roger Moore took over the role of James Bond from Sean Connery...
...And the literary history of the twentieth century shows how quickly popular culture begins adapting to the intellectual forces working their way into the general public...
...We seem, if this new version of The Scarlet Pimpernel is any harbinger, to be coming full circle...
...He is, in short, a very old-fashioned hero: direct, self-confident, bold, clever, and honorable...
...By the late 1970s and early 1980s, even the movies that were still structured as heroic stories typically presented their heroes as tortured souls, injured both physically and psychically by their efforts to do good in an evil world: Dirty Harry, Mad Max, Rocky Balboa, Rambo, John McClane (in the Die Hard series), Paul Kersey (in the Death Wish series), and Ellen Ripley (in the Alien series...
...Orczy’s Sir Percy Blakeney is simultaneously valiant and self-effacing, splendid and ludicrous, gallant and apparently cowardly—a perfect hero for a century that would see much heroism but was unable to proclaim its existence in art...
...Or rather, popular culture kept the hero alive for a while...
...The only guileful character in the film is Sir Percy’s nemesis, Chauvelin, the head of the French secret police, excellently portrayed by Martin Shaw as calmly relentless, fanatical, and seething with anger beneath a barely civil surface...
...The restoration of the culture still requires heroic effort, of course—but that’s why it’s good to see heroes coming back into style...
...But by mid-century, the high culture’s rejection of the heroic had thoroughly infected the popular culture...
...By the 1960s and early 1970s, the movies, too, were full of antiheroes: Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the hippie bikers of Easy Rider, “Cool Hand” Luke, and countless others...
...Unable to believe in the possibility of rising above circumstance and mastering fate, our national authors came to see the human condition as a matter of being buffeted by social and historical forces far beyond an individual’s control...
...After the First World War, serious American fiction turned instead to figures like Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, Dreiser’s helpless victims, Faulkner’s exemplars of decline, and Hemingway’s scarred personalities...
...There is no assurance that this reversal will continue, much less that it portends a significant cultural renewal...
...Like The Scarlet Pimpernel, these narratives were often pure melodrama, with ludicrously ghastly dangers and extravagant villains...
...They are, in fact, anti-antiheroes, and together they show the reversal of a century-long trend...
...Like Orczy’s Blakeney, these characters hide their heroic endeavors behind a mask of foppish indifference or excessive humility, their heroic risk-taking behind a mask of wealthy indulgence...
...When we first meet him, he is cravenly side-stepping a fight with a young Frenchman, for which his beautiful wife dubs him a “turkey...
...Orczy’s solution to the problem of how to present heroes to a modern audience made her book immensely popular, spawning ten sequels, a collection of stories, several movies, and countless imitations: Zorro, Batman, “mild-mannered” Clark Kent, the Saint, the Green Hornet, the Avenger, Doc Savage, the Black Bat, Operator 5, Sir Denis Nayland Smith (implacable adversary of Dr...
...He dives through a window to escape capture, rubs elbows with forgers and prostitutes, demonstrates perfect aplomb when he is captured, overcomes prison guards during his successful escape, and exchanges witty mots with Marguerite at every opportunity...
...All of us wear masks from time to time,” says Sir Percy to his wife, Marguerite (Elizabeth McGovern), but that in fact is something we never see him doing...
...It soon graduated to syndicated television, with such series as Hercules, Xena: Warrior Princess, The Adventures of Sinbad, and The New Adventures of Robin Hood...
...But the new A&E version— directed by Patrick Lau and written by Richard Carpenter—presents him instead as a conventional action hero...
...everything the hero used to be—back in the days before Orczy wrote the original version of The Scarlet Pimpernel...
...In this new version, however, the man she betrayed was a wicked aristocrat who had wantonly killed her parents: Percy can hardly fault her for turning him in, and forgiveness comes much more easily...
...Far from being a useless ninny, Sir Percy is a hero whose well-justified fame is so widespread that men and women throughout England proudly wear ornaments with that “humble English wayside flower,” the scarlet pimpernel...
...Sir Percy is, Orczy tells us, a vain and useless fop: “Everyone knew that he was hopelessly stupid...
...But under cover of his silly persona, Sir Percy Blakeney is in fact “that accursed Englishman . . . the Scarlet Pimpernel, . . . the best and bravest man in all the world,” the leader of a band of English adventurers who arrange the escape of French aristocrats sentenced to the guillotine during the French Revolution...
...The film continually smoothes out what moral complexity the original story possessed...
...He is, in short, smug, superficial, and useless...
...The film shows Paris during the Terror as chaotic, cruel, poor, and hungry for blood...
...This 1990s trend was first visible among books and video games, the lowest-status popular forms...
...And on Broadway, one of the most popular and well-reviewed shows of today is a musical version of The Scarlet Pimpernel...
Vol. 4 • March 1999 • No. 27
