This film from director Harold Young is the second big-screen adaptation of Baroness Emmuska Orczy's 1905 novel
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. Leslie Howard stars as Sir Percy Blakeney, a British aristocrat who rescues innocent victims of the French Revolution under the guise of The Scarlet Pimpernel while maintaining the identity of a foppish dandy by day. Even his wife, Lady Marguerite Blakeney (Merle Oberon), is unaware of Percy's heroic alter-ego as he and his band of likeminded masked men save countless people from the guillotine. Perhaps the most famous adaptation of the classic book,
would later be lampooned in 1966's
Don't Lose Your Head
.