"Pimpernel" Smith (1941)
The man the Gestapo hates!
Eccentric Cambridge archaeologist Horatio Smith takes a group of British and American archaeology students to pre-war Nazi Germany to help in his excavations. His research is supported by the Nazis, since he professes to be looking for evidence of the Aryan origins of German civilisation. However, he has a secret agenda: to free inmates of the concentration camps.
- Date of release
- 1941-07-28
- TMDB
- 7.1 / 10 (32)
- Runtime
- 2h 0m
- Genres
- Adventure, Drama, Thriller
- Director
- Leslie Howard
Casting
- Leslie Howard — Professor Horatio Smith
- Francis L. Sullivan — General von Graum
- Mary Morris — Ludmilla Koslowski
- Hugh McDermott — David Maxwell
- Raymond Huntley — Marx
- Manning Whiley — Bertie Gregson
- Peter Gawthorne — Sidimir Koslowski
- Allan Jeayes — Dr Benckendorf
- Dennis Arundell — Hoffman
- Joan Kemp-Welch — School-Teacher
- Philip Friend — Spencer
- Laurence Kitchin — Clarence Elstead
Interesting facts
- Based on: The Scarlet Pimpernel
"Pimpernel" Smith is a 1941 British anti-Nazi thriller, produced and directed by its star Leslie Howard, which updates his role in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) from Revolutionary France to pre-Second World War Europe. The British Film Yearbook for 1945 described his work as "one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda".
Production
Leslie Howard had been aware of the Nazis in Europe and had developed a film treatment in 1938 based on the rescue of an Austrian anti-Nazi leader. The A. G. Macdonell story of "Pimpernel" Smith took the novel The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy into modern times.
Having played the leading role in the film The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Howard took on the updated project as the first film he directed and co-produced.
Howard formed his own company to make the movie and raised finance through British National. It was called "British National's most ambitious production to date."
In September 1940 Howard tried to get permission from Sam Goldwyn to use David Niven in the lead.
Production on "Pimpernel" Smith began in early 1941.
Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.
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