The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934 film) portrayal of Sir Percy Blakeney. "The Scarlet Pimpernel" was the sixth most popular film at the British box office during 1935–36. The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934 film) The Scarlet Pimpernel is a 1934 British adventure film directed by Harold Young and starring Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon, and Raymond Massey. Based on the 1905 play by Baroness Orczy and Montagu Barstow and the classic 1908 adventure novel by Baroness Orczy, the film is about an eighteenth-century English aristocrat who leads a double life, appearing as an effete aristocrat while engaged in an underground effort to free French nobles from Robespierre's Reign of
The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel he was supposed to have concealed. Esther is now living in one of the poorer parts of Paris while a number of astute jailbirds are plotting to obtain her money and wealth by forcing her to choose between marrying one of their gang, Citizen Merri, or face death. The Pimpernel takes on the guise of Citizen Rateau, a tall, cadaverous-looking creature, with sunken eyes and broad, hunched up shoulders and a dry rasping cough that proclaimed the ravages of some mortal disease. Can he rescue Esther and her English lover Jack Kennard from the evil plot? Lucile Clamette and her