"Pimpernel" Smith (1941) on Netflix
NR19412hAdventureDramaThriller
In the spring of 1939, Cambridge archaeologist Horatio Smith brings British and American students to Nazi Germany to dig. The regime backs his excavation, unaware that he frees its prisoners.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.2/102,034 votes
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Plot summary
Horatio Smith's excavation in Nazi Germany in the spring of 1939 is staffed by British and American archaeology students. Smith tells the authorities his work is looking for the Aryan origins of German civilization, and they support it. His real purpose is to free Nazi prisoners. The Gestapo's General von Graum is determined to learn the identity of the man carrying out those rescues. He compels Ludmilla Koslowski to work for him, using the threat to her father's life. Her father, Sidimir Koslowski, is a Polish democrat in Nazi hands. Smith learns of this and promises Ludmilla that her father will be freed.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about "Pimpernel" Smith (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film helped inspire the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to mount a real-life rescue operation in Budapest that saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi concentration camps in the last months of the Second World War.
- When "Pimpernel" Smith reached Sweden in November 1943, the Swedish Film Censorship Board banned it from public viewing, fearing its critical portrayal of Nazi Germany would harm Sweden's relations with Germany and jeopardise its wartime neutrality.
- The film may have been one of the reasons Leslie Howard was killed in 1943; the airliner he took from Portugal to London on 1 June 1943 was shot down by the Luftwaffe. Others blamed mistaken identity, believing Howard and his agent Arthur Chenhall were Winston Churchill and his bodyguard.
- In September 1940 Leslie Howard tried to get permission from Sam Goldwyn to use David Niven in the lead.
- The film was the screen debut of David Tomlinson, who said Leslie Howard tried to seduce Mary Morris during the making of the film, treating her being gay as "a challenge to be overcome"; she rebuffed him.
