Gad, Leslie Howard is divine as an English fop, Sir Percy Blakeney, a fellow who claims he "can't rise above anything more than three syllables" ("nonsense," his wife Merle Oberon pouts, "you were a man once..."). He is also devilish clever as the Scarlet Pimpernel, whose band of British aristocrats-a forerunner of the Secret Service?-daringly swoop their French brethren away from the Revolution and Madame Guillotine. ("You Frenchies go all to pieces around the neck," quoth Sir Percy. "Sink me, what a mess.") Alexander Korda's depiction of the French Revolution is rather one-sided, but The Scarlet Pimpernel is delightfully atmospheric and genuinely romantic, and its script filled with double entendres. It is justifiably a classic if only for Leslie Howard's performance as the tortured hero masquerading as a nitwit in front of the wife who once loved him. The Pimpernel of Baroness Orczy's novel was an aristocrat in an age when only the well born were esteemed to possess an immortal soul; his efforts on behalf of world nobility are duly noted here but also ironically undercut by the portrait of English aristocracy from which he hails: if ever there were a society of bored and useless dandies whose cravated necks seem to be aching for a lesson, this is it.