Leslie Howard, Propagandist and Patriot

When I began film-going in the 1940s and 1950s Leslie Howard was still an important figure. The story of his mysterious death when in April 1943 the unarmed airliner flying from Lisbon to London was shot down by German JU88s was repeatedly discussed in newspaper articles, each one suggesting a new explanation for the tragedy. Had the actor-director been mistaken for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was also travelling at that time? That was Ian Colvin’s solution in his book Flight 777. Churchill himself thought it might be true. The Howard family had its own opinion. Leslie Howard had been the target; a revenge instigated by Propaganda Minister Goebbels for Howard’s pro-British broadcasts and films.

All of which made these films, happily still being revived in the cinemas during the 1940s and 1950s, rather special. And of course Howard was very good. To those of us who felt oppressed by the sport-mad culture of mid-twentieth-century Australia the actor’s embodiment of the intellectual as man of action was very appealing. In The Scarlet Pimpernel his Sir Percy Blakeney effortlessly dominated Raymond Massey’s malignant—and much taller—Chauvelin with his wit and eloquence. When George Cukor’s 1936 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet was released to television in the early 1960s, Howard’s Romeo was a revelation. He was slightly too old for the part, but so was Norma Shearer’s Juliet, and they were both sumptuously photographed in the romantic style of the period. Although he was an accomplished stage actor, Howard’s performance was superbly attuned to the camera. He spoke the verse in his beautifully modulated voice with a clarity seldom equalled in the later Shakespearean films.

In 1955 there was a re-release of Gone with the Wind and a whole new generation was introduced to Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara, Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler and Howard’s Ashley Wilkes. It was a part Howard disliked, and his character is overshadowed by Gable’s charismatic Rhett Butler; but the film would not have worked as well as it does if Howard had not made the divided Ashley so believable. About the same time there was a revival of the 1938 Pygmalion, co-directed by Howard and Anthony Asquith, with Howard as Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza. For those of us reading Bernard Shaw for the first time he was Professor Higgins, and has remained so; with Shaw’s insistence that Eliza will marry Freddy seeming perverse. Howard’s Higgins and Hiller’s magical down-to-earth Eliza belong together—such is the persuasiveness of great screen acting.

Inevitably when I taught a course in Propaganda in Film, Howard’s “Pimpernel” Smith was on the list of films. By a happy chance one of the surviving cast members, Basil Appleby, was production manager on a film being shot near Bathurst when “Pimpernel” Smith was being screened for my students in 1985, and I was able to persuade him to tell us what it was like to be directed by Leslie Howard. With the very British aplomb that was a feature of his teaching as one of the foundation staff at the Film and Television School, he described how Howard would arrive on set late in the morning—he wasn’t known as “leisurely Howard” for nothing—greet all the crew at the Denham Studios by name, and ask after their families, all of whom he seemed to know from other films, before getting under way. Since this was the first time Howard had directed, the editor and principal writer were on the set with him.

Basil said he also noticed Howard’s very attractive French “secretary”, Violette Cunnington, who would follow the director between takes with cries of “Lesleee” to get him to sort out some detail. They made a good team, he thought. Basil soon realised she was Howard’s mistress. There was no secret about this on set, any more than there was about the star’s Hungarian origins. Basil said, “I decided not to mention Violette to my mother. She was an ardent fan of Leslie Howard’s and would have been shocked.” Basil pointed out for us Violette’s cameo in the film as the girl in the powder shop, played with Howard. Once you are in the know, the attraction between them is obvious.

At the time Basil was only twenty-one and interested in photography so Howard let him take the stills for the production. He brought these with him to the lecture and later allowed me to copy them. They are not so much stills representing actual scenes in the film but snapshots from the shoot, and for that reason very revealing. Howard is captured virtually alone with his thoughts as he works out a sequence. There was little heating at Denham and the crew is shown rugged up in scarves and coats. The star picked up an infection and Basil took a shot of Howard with a thermometer in his mouth, a half-smoked cigarette between his fingers.

I have always been grateful for the time Basil Appleby spent with us. He is a sensitive, observant man and brought alive the personalities behind the making of one the great films of the Second World War as only a participant could.

Leslie Howard’s achievements in the early years of the war have been illuminated by an affectionate memoir by his son Ronald, In Search of My Father (1981), and most recently by an important full-length biography, Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2013) by Estel Eforgan. Ronald Howard provided a detailed account of the family’s—Violette included—return from America to Britain literally days before the outbreak of war. A staunch patriot, Leslie decided to stay so he could “be of use” to the war effort. Before long young Ronald had joined the Navy and his father was broadcasting to America on the BBC.

Shortly after the younger Howard’s book was published, Jeffrey Richards, a pioneer in the analysis of film as a historical source, wrote “The Englishman’s Englishman” an essay on the relationship between these broadcasts and “Pimpernel” Smith. According to Richards, Leslie Howard in his films and broadcasts stood for “a mystical belief in the spiritual values, the ideals, the civilisation of the English-speaking peoples”. This was embodied in his persona of the thoughtful pipe-smoking intellectual. But there was more to Howard and his films than that. Privately he made no secret of his Hungarian Jewish heritage—he even mentioned it to Basil Appleby. From as early as 1938 Howard, who spoke fluent French and German, kept himself informed about the Nazi persecutions. As “Pimpernel” Smith evolved into a story of a seemingly absent-minded professor of archaeology who with the aid of his students rescues talented artists and scientists from the clutches of the Gestapo, the film became a darkly satiric attack on Nazi ideology.

We don’t know if Howard was able to see the famous German propaganda film Stukas, but it was possible for both sides to acquire enemy films from neutral countries. Hitler is supposed to have viewed The Great Dictator (his reaction is not recorded) and Goebbels knew about “Pimpernel” Smith.

Stukas celebrates many of the values Howard was attacking. It relates the adventures of the members of a squadron flying Stuka dive bombers during the Battle of France. The action sequences employ a vast resource of actuality film combined with mock-ups of tilting cockpits in the UFA studio and back projection. There is a powerful shot taken from a Stuka in combat of a formation of Spitfires peeling off to attack, and the camera gun footage is excellent. They are of course winning, so the action is relentlessly upbeat, with fliers regularly arriving in camp to proclaim victories. The squadron commander and the medical officer play a two-handed version of Siegfried’s Rhine journey on the piano and when there are losses it is all for the glory of the Fatherland, with the sacrifice celebrated rather than mourned. Stukas concludes with one of the most famously preposterous sequences in any war film. One of the fliers has recovered from his wounds but remains depressed. His nurse takes him to Bayreuth to see Gotterdammerung. When he hears Siegfried’s Rhine journey the now-revived flier leaves the theatre and rejoins his comrades. Stukas concludes with them all flying off to bomb London singing Stukalied, part of a rousing score by Herbert Windt, who had composed the music for Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s famous film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Reportedly Stukas was a great success with the Hitler Youth.

“Pimpernel” Smith sends up this kind of Nazi ideology with relish. Francis L. Sullivan’s villainous Von Graum wears a white uniform like Goering’s, has a music-hating aide called Wagner, and reads out very funny extracts from P.G. Wodehouse and Lewis Carroll to see if the British sense of humour could be their secret weapon. Wisely Howard and his writers never allow Von Graum to become a caricature. He is wily and dangerous, a worthy adversary for our British hero representing civilised values. If this were not enough, Howard and his writers portray the Ministry of Propaganda as dolts who become easy victims of a ruse in which Professor Smith’s students are disguised as American reporters representing isolationist newspapers.

Even now this is a lot of fun, but the satire is always sharp. We are never allowed to forget that the Nazis are cruel and uncivilised:

Smith: When a man holds the view that progress and civilisation depend upon the hands and brains of a few exceptional spirits, it’s hard to stand by and see them destroyed.

Many scientists did manage to get out of Germany, as had a large number of artists and musicians, aided by men and women like the characters in the film. Most of them were Jewish, but this was not publicised. As Estel Eforgan points out, Leslie Howard’s film was alone in advocating rescuing anyone. To its director-star’s eternal credit, “Pimpernel” Smith gave Raoul Wallenberg the idea for his operation to save the Jews in Hungary.

Howard’s next film was The First of the Few, a biopic about J.R. Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire. He had battled cancer to finish his work and died in 1937 just after the plane was accepted into service. The film is at once intensely romantic and a docudrama. Howard, now very much the insider, was able to uncover the extraordinary story of the six-pounds-a-week draftsman who became fascinated by aerodynamics and studied the flight of birds to create the deadly fighter that could outfly the German planes. The film opens as documentary in a style similar to the later Frank Capra Why We Fight films. We see a globe followed by an animated map showing the spread of German power followed by newsreel clips of the fall of France. Clips from Hitler, and Goebbels at the 1934 Nuremberg rally and the simulated voice of a radio broadcast by the British traitor William Joyce are cut together to portray the threat to Britain in September 1940.

Then we are in a control room during a major attack during the Battle of Britain, and massed German planes are overhead. Spitfires land after a hectic dogfight and the pilots describe in public-school accents what planes they have shot down. They all look impossibly young and were played by Battle of Britain pilots. As they wait for their next scramble the station commander (played by David Niven) tells them about the man who designed the Spitfire. An aerial shot of the plane dissolves to seagulls in the sky over the cliffs of Dover being observed by Leslie Howard’s Mitchell.

For the next half-hour the film becomes a conventional biography, showing his rise in the industry as his designs for various seaplanes win air races for Britain. His final victory in the Schneider Cup provides a deft transition to the anti-Nazi propaganda of the second half. A bombastic official played with gusto by producer Filippo Del Giudice keeps reading out telegrams from Il Duce predicting victory for the Italian pilot. When the British win he still reads out the Duce’s congratulary telegram for the wrong pilot. At the time the film-makers wondered if they should have been building an elaborate set just to have a laugh at the Italians. But the sequence works as a wickedly funny parody of Fascist propaganda.

There is, however, no humour in the film’s treatment of the Germans. Based on real incidents reported in the early 1930s by British aircraft manufacturers, Howard and his writers crafted a sequence in which Mitchell visits Germany and discovers they are planning to re-arm. In the best traditions of melodrama, the designer, who has been “overdoing it”—no mention of cancer—sacrifices his life to give his country the weapon it so desperately needs.

In a telling rebuke to the appeasers, The First of the Few shows the aircraft manufacturers and Sir Henry Royce financing and building the plane behind the government’s back. It is surprising Howard was able to get away with it. When similar criticisms were included in Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp there was a concerted attempt by the government to ban the film.

After a moving death scene evoking the seagulls from the opening we are back at the airfield. The station commander, who was Mitchell’s test pilot, is finishing his story. (The character, Wing Commander Crisp in the film, was a composite of three test pilots who worked with Mitchell so he could be placed at key stages in the narrative. David Niven, of course, makes him very dashing.) There is a scramble, a plane is free and Crisp takes her up. The dogfight was splendidly staged with actuality footage and stunt flying. After shooting down a Messerschmitt 109 Crisp looks up: “They can’t take the Spitfire, Mitch.”

Like “Pimpernel” Smith, The First of the Few was an enormous success with British audiences and is a masterpiece of wartime film-making. Certainly they are both brilliant propaganda but they are the kind of propaganda that can only be made by a democracy. Howard and his writers tactfully criticise failures by the appeasers, and in the earlier work they break the conspiracy of silence by government agencies about the treatment of the Jews. The term “extermination” even appears in the opening titles. The allusions were still oblique, but had he lived there is reason to believe Howard would have gone further.

In the last year of his life Howard directed The Gentle Sex for the Ministry of Information and produced The Lamp Still Burns for Filippo Del Giudice. Howard claimed he had not made a great contribution to The Gentle Sex. But the narration he suggested, and delivers expertly, holds together the different stories of seven women who join the Auxiliary Territorial Services; and one can see his deft touch in the nicely understated performances. Howard, who was making similar observations in his broadcasts, was almost certainly responsible for the way the film looks forward to a new respect for women after the war and the subtle portrayal of the breakdown of class distinction as a result of war service.

The Lamp Still Burns was based on Monica Dickens’s One Pair of Feet, a rather bitter account of her year as a probationer nurse. Its pointed descriptions of autocratic matrons and harsh discipline were toned down at Howard’s suggestion. After all, they were supposed to be encouraging wartime service in the nursing profession. Still the idea that conditions needed reforming was retained. There was also more than a suggestion that something like a National Health Service was needed in the depiction of the hospital as a charity.

For her biography Estel Eforgan has discovered evidence that Howard directed much of the film, with Maurice Elvey—who now has the sole credit—functioning as an assistant director. Certainly the sensitive ensemble acting by fine performers such as Godfrey Tearle, Cathleen Nesbitt, Rosamund John and Sophie Stewart has the quality found in the other works.

It has always been difficult to watch these last films without recalling the Lisbon airliner’s deadly encounter with a squadron of JU88s. So was Howard the target? There is no doubt he and his fellow passengers were murdered. There was ample time for the German planes to see the airliner was unarmed. However, Eforgan has uncovered no definite evidence of a plot to kill the star. But he was one of the great propagandists of the war and well able to influence neutral opinion. The Nazis probably knew about his Jewish background. After the war it was discovered that Noel Coward had been on the Gestapo death list, and he had made only a few films. Why not an international movie star? Whatever the answer, Leslie Howard certainly gave his life for his country.