The Scarlet Pimpernel (London Films). If there is anything better suited to the cinema than the spectacle of a guillotine, dripping with blood and buzzing up & down like a sewing machine, it is the spectacle of Leslie Howard in 18th Century coattails, making gestures of polite affection toward Merle Oberon. The Scarlet Pimpernel, derived from Baroness Orczy's famed best-seller (3,000,000 copies), contains both, picturesquely inlaid against an Alexander Korda background of tumbrels, old inns, the coffee rooms at Black's Club and Citizen Robespierre, snarling in falsetto.
A scarlet pimpernel is not,...
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