Frenchy De Vere
Art Neuendorffer
'Pimpernel' Smith (1941)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034027/
.
Directed by Leslie Howard
.
Leslie Howard .... Professor Horatio Smith
Sebastian Cabot .... Bit Role (uncredited)
-------------------------------------------
Black Patch (1957)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050196/
.
George Montgomery .... Marshal Clay Morgan
Leo *GORDON* .... Hank Danner
Sebastian Cabot .... *Frenchy De Vere*
.
<<Montgomery plays a one-eyed lawman, who once loved the woman now
married to the character played by Leo *GORDON*. Leo *GORDON* was one
of the great western villains and a pretty decent writer of scripts.
In this film, he steals the show ---- playing a more sympathetic and
well-rounded sort of cowpoke.
-------------------------------------------
http://www.godseye.com/stat/en/w/i/l/Talk~William_Shakespeare_12b8.html
.
<<In Star Trek VI: The UndiscoVERED Country, the Klingon chancellor
*GORKON* says that "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have
read him in the original Klingon." According to an interview on the
Star
Trek 6 SE DVD this is in reference to the Nazis, who claimed
Shakespeare
as their own and made a similar claim. German critics "claimed"
Shakespeare long before Nazis were dreamed of. "Shakspere's poetry is,
upon the whole, near akin to the German spirit: hence he is appreciated
in Germany more than any other foreign poet, and regarded with almost
native affection. -- SCHLEGEL, FREDERICK, 1815-59, Lectures on the
History of Literature, pp. 274, 276.
.
I think the idea that the Nazis claimed Shakespeare as a German author
may be originally a British WWII propaganda myth. Hmmm? Yes that's
right: I think we may be dealing with an urban myth, stemming from a
British patriotic myth, according to which the Nazis propagated a
patriotic myth that Shakespeare was German. At any rate, there's
a suggestive bit of dialogue in the 1941 film Pimpernel Smith
(US reissue title *Mister V* ).>>
---------------------------------------------------------
Great sense of style and screen presence, 1 November 2004
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034027/usercomments
.
Author: Howard Schumann from Vancouver, B.C.
.
Returning to England before the war, Leslie Howard was a towering
figure in the British government's anti-Nazi propaganda policy, making
patriotic radio broadcasts and movies that lifted the spirits of the
British people in the dark days of the war. One such film was Pimpernel
Smith in which Howard plays Archeology Professor Horatio Smith who
doubles as a British spy, undertaking to help refugees escape from
the Gestapo. Based on the novel The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness
Emmuska Orczy and modeled after the 1934 film of the same name,
Pimpernel Smith is said to have influenced Raoul Wallenberg, known
for his heroism in rescuing Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust.
.
In the film, Professor Smith takes six students with him on an
archaeological dig in Germany, presumably to find out whether or
not there was an early Aryan civilization in Germany. Smith tries to
convince Gestapo leader General Von Graum (Francis L. Sullivan) that
he is just a learned professor, reading from The Jabberwocky by Lewis
Carroll and telling him his theory that William Shakespeare was really
the Earl of Oxford. Imagine that! The Professor's wit and wisdom are
no match for the humorless Nazis and they seem to fall for each of
the professor's tricks. Unfortunately, the Nazis are depicted not
as mass murderers but only as bumbling clowns who speak English
as well as Winston Churchill.
.
When Smith is wounded, the students catch on to what he is up to and
agree to help him in his attempts to secure the release of pianist
Sidimir Koslowski (Peter Gawthorne). In his clandestine cat and mouse
game, he meets Koslowski's daughter Ludmilla (Mary Morris) who is
working for the Nazis in order to save her father and the two form a
bond. Howard's role as Professor Smith is one of his most acclaimed in
a career that included roles as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind and
Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel. He had a great sense of
style and screen presence and his death in 1943 on what was most
likely an intelligence gathering mission for the British
left the film industry bereft of one of its brightest stars.
--------------------------------------------------
William Shakespeare
General Comments on the Works: Part II
http://www.geocities.com/litpageplus/shakmoul-gencomms2.html
From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American
Authors,
ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols.
*****
Shakespeare is the first among the great English poets since the Old
English period in whom the Teutonic spirit again overpoweringly asserts
itself, and presses into its service all those elements of foreign
culture which were assimilated by the national character. In him we
find
again that soul-stirring note of deep feeling, that simple boldness of
poetic expression, which plunges us, without preparation or mediation,
apparently without any effort at artistic effect, -- into the very
heart
of the subject; in short, he has that genuineness of sentiment which
is a chief characteristic of Germanic poesy. -- TEN BRINK, BERNHARD,
1892-95, Five Lectures on Shakespeare, tr. Franklin, p. 33.
.
*****
To praise Shakespeare is unnecessary, at least in countries of Germanic
language. It would be rudeness to suppose any cultivated man or woman
to
be ignorant of the works of the greatest poet of all times who shows
the
whole world and mankind as in a glass. . . . The high, lasting, and in
some sense unique position Shakespeare occupies in the literature of
the
world has thus been acknowledged, but it would be wrong and foolish to
exalt him above all other great poets; as has been done by some, in
Germany especially. Shakespeare is indeed a poet "for all time;" but
every great poet is that. We cannot understand why he should have a
superior privilege to Homer, AEschylus, Aristophanes. Dante, Cervantes,
Moliere, Goethe, Byron. Shakespeare was an Englishman of the
Elizabethan
era, every inch of him sharing the prejudices and superstition of his
time and of his countrymen. We see that the true criterion for judging
Shakespeare is his own time. Looking upon him in that light we shall be
truly just to him. The form of his works, which is undoubtedly faulty
at
times, belongs to his time and to his country. The spirit of his poetry
is and remains the precious possession of mankind, among whose teachers
and prophets he will always occupy the front rank. -- SCHERR, J., 1874,
A History of English Literature, pp. 73, 83, 84.
.
*****
The monarch of mankind! they are proud words those, but they do not
altogether over-estimate the truth. He is by no means the only king in
the intellectual world, but his power is unlimited by time or space.
From the moment his life's history ceases his far greater history
begins. We find its first records in Great Britain, and consequently in
North America, then it spread among the German-speaking peoples and the
whole Teutonic race, on through the Scandinavian countries to the Finns
and the Sclavonic [sic] races. We find his influence in France, Spain,
and Italy; and now, in the nineteenth century, it may be traced over
the whole civilised world. His writings are translated into EVERy
tongue
and all the languages of the earth do him honour.... All the real
intellectual life of England since his day has been stamped by his
genius, all her creative spirits have imbibed their life's nourishment
from his works. Modern German intellectual life is based, through
Lessing, upon him. Goethe and Schiller are unimaginable without him.
His influence is felt in France through Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and
Alfred de Vigny. Ludovic Vitet and Alfred de Musset were from the very
first inspired by him. Not only the drama in Russia and Poland felt his
influence, but the inmost spiritual life of the Slavonic story-tellers
and brooders is fashioned after the pattern of his imperishable
creations. From the moment of the regeneration of poetry in the North
he
was reverenced by Ewald, Oehlenschlager, Bredahl, and Hauch, and he is
not without his influence upon Bjorllson and Ibsen. -- BRANDES, GEORGE,
1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol. II, p. 411.
.
*****
Nor even in his plays is Shakspeare merely a dramatist. Apart
altogether
from his dramatic power he is the greatest poet that ever lived. His
sympathy is the most universal, his imagination the most plastic, his
diction the most expressive, ever given to any writer. His poetry has
in
itself the power and varied excellences of all other poetry. While in
grandeur, and beauty, and passion, and sweetest music, and all the
other
high gifts of song he may be ranked with the greatest, -- with Spenser,
and Chaucer and Milton, and Dante, and Homer, -- he is at the same time
more nervous than Dryden, and more sententious than Pope, and more
sparkling and of more abounding conceit, when he chooses, than Donne or
Cowley, or Butler. In whose handling was language ever such a flame of
fire as it is in his? His wonderful potency in the use of this
instrument would alone set him above all other writers. -- CRAIK,
GEORGE
L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the
English
Language, vol. I, p. 591.
.
*****
Although the dialect of Shakespeare does not exhibit the same relative
superiority as that of Chaucer over all older and contemporaneous
literature, its absolute superiority is, nevertheless, unquestionable.
I have before had occasion to remark that the greatest authors very
often confine themselves to a restricted vocabulary, and that the power
of their diction lies, not in the multitude of words, but in skilful
combination and adaptation of a few. This is strikingly verified by
an examination of the stock of words employed by Shakespeare. He
introduces, indeed, terms borrowed from every art and every science,
from all theoretical knowledge and all human experience; but his entire
vocabulary little exceeds fifteen thousand words, and of these a large
number, chiefly of Latin origin, occur but once or at most twice in his
pages. The affluence of his speech arises from variety of combination,
not from numerical abundance. And yet the authorized vocabulary of
Shakespeare's time probably embraced twice or thrice the number of
words
which he found necessary for his purposes, for though there were at
that
time no dictionaries which exhibit a great stock of words yet in
perusing Hooker, the old translators, and the early voyagers and
travellers, we find a verbal wealth, a copiousness of diction, which
forms a singular contrast with the philological economy of the great
dramatist. In his theory of dramatic construction, Shakespeare owes
little -- in his conception of character nothing -- to earlier or
contemporary artists; but in his diction, everything except felicity of
selection and combination. The existence of the whole copious English
vocabulary was necessary, in order that his marvellous gift of
selection
might have room for its exercise. -- MARSH, GEORGE P., 1862,
Origin and History of the English Language, etc., p. 569.
.
*****
Homer, Job, AEschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius, Juvenal, St. John,
St. Paul, Tacitus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare. That is the
avenue of the immoveable giants of the human mind. The men of genius
are
a dynasty. Indeed there is no other. They wear all the crowns, even
that
of thorns. Each of them represents the sum total of absolute that man
can realize. We repeat it, to choose between these men, to prefer one
to
the other, to mark with the finger the first among these first, it
cannot be. All are the Mind. Perhaps, in an extreme case and yet every
objection would be legitimate -- you might mark out as the highest
summit among those summits, Homer, AEschylus, Job, Isaiah, Dante, and
Shakespeare. It is understood that we speak here only in an Art point
of
view, and in Art, in the literary point of view. Two men in this group,
AEschylus and Shakespeare, represent specially the drama. . . . His
poetry has the sharp perfume of honey made by the vagabond bee without
a
hive. Here prose, there verse; all forms, being but receptacles for the
idea, suit him. This poetry weeps and laughs. The English tongue, a
language little formed, now assists, now harms him, but everywhere the
deep mind gushes forth translucent. Shakespeare's drama proceeds with a
kind of distracted rhythm, it is so vast that it staggers; it has and
gives the vertigo; but nothing is so solid as this excited grandeur.
Shakespeare, shuddering, has in himself the winds, the spirits, the
philters, the vibrations, the fluctuations of transient breezes, the
obscure penetration of effluvia, the great unknown sap. Thence his
agitation, in the depth of which is repose. It is agitation in which
Goethe is wanting, wrongly praised for his impassiveness, which is
inferiority. This agitation, all minds of the first order have it.
It is in Job, in AEschylus, in Alighieri. This agitation is humanity.
-- HUGO, VICTOR, 1864, William Shakespeare, tr. Baillot, pp. 66, 185.
.
*****
For my part, I believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays, like the
conscientious playwright that he was, to fill the theatre and make
money for his fellow-actors and for himself; and I confess to absolute
scepticism in reference to the belief that in these dramas
Shakespeare's
self can be discovered (except on the broadest lines,) or that either
his outer or his inner life is to any discoverable degree reflected in
his plays, it is because Shakespeare is not there that the characters
are so perfect, -- the smallest dash of the author's self would MAR
to that extent the TRUTH of the character, and make of it a MASK.
-- FURNESS, HORACE HOWARD, 1890, ed. New Variorum Edition of
Shakespeare, As You Like It. Introduction, p. viii.
.
*****
Not if men's tongues and angels' all in one
Spake, might the word be said that might speak Thee.
Streams, winds, woods, flowers, fields, mountains, yea, the sea
What power is in them all to praise the sun?
His praise is this, he can be praised of none.
Man, woman, child, praise God for him; but he
Exults not to be worshipped, but to be.
He is; and, being, beholds his work well done.
All joy, all glory, all sorrow, all strength, all mirth,
Are his: without him, day were night on earth.
Time knows not his from time's own period.
All lutes, all harps, all viols, all flutes, all lyres.
Fall dumb before him ere one string suspires.
All STARS are angels; but the sun is God.
.
-- SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1882, William Shakespeare,
Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems, p. 280.
.
*****
"How weak are words -- to carry thoughts like mine!"
Saith each dull daughter round the much *BORED NINE* .
Yet words sufficed for Shakespeare's suit, when he
Woo'd Time, and won instead Eternity.
-- WATSON, WILLIAM, 1884, Epigrams.
---------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer