This little snippet is from the wonderful Leslie Howard’s 1941 anti-Nazi film ‘Pimpernel Smith’. In it the bespectacled Howard plays the part of the seemingly mild-mannered Professor Smith, a phoney archeologist, who makes a number of forays into fascist Europe to rescue, among others, anarchist revolutionaries opposing the regime. The playscript originally called for Communist prisoners, but by the time Howard came to shoot the film, in 1940, Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, August 1939) and invaded Finland (November 1939). Howard changed the script and insisted that real anarchists be used as extras in the concentration camp scene. One of the anarchists was my old comrade Albert Meltzer (the be-spectacled chap, second from the right in the prison hut scene). One consequence of Howard’s introduction to the anarchist movement in London of the time was a meeting with Hilda Monte, a libertarian socialist and a prominent but unsung hero of the German anti-Nazi movement. Wife of German-Scottish anarchist John Olday, Hilda and John had helped organise the 7 November Munich beer cellar bombing in which Hitler and many of the Nazi high command narrowly escaped with their lives. It’s possible that Howard, at least partially, based the character of the mysterious Polish woman, Ludmilla Koslowski, played by Mary Morris, on Monte. The film’s final scene at the border crossing — in which Smith confronts the SS General Von Graun in a swirling fog — is, in my view, one of the most spine-tingling in cinema history…
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 00:12:25 +0000