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 1905 adventure novel by Orczy, the film is about an eighteenth-century English aristocrat (Howard) who leads a double life, passing himself off as an effete aristocrat while engaged in a secret effort to rescue French nobles from Robespierre's Reign of Terror.

In 1792, shortly before the Reign of Terror, vengeful French mobs are outraged when aristocrats are saved from death by a secret society of 20 English noblemen known as the "Band of the Scarlet Pimpernel."

The Scarlet Pimpernel, their mysterious leader, is Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy English baronet and friend of the Prince of Wales.

Citizen Chauvelin, the newly appointed French ambassador to England, discovers that Armand St. Just, Marguerite's brother, is one of the Scarlet Pimpernel's agents.

Chauvelin orders Armand's arrest and uses the threat of his execution to force Marguerite into helping him discover the identity of the Pimpernel.

Realising that she has betrayed her own husband, she rushes out of the room, only to be presented a letter from Chauvelin announcing that he has discovered the Pimpernel's true identity as well.

Chauvelin exults at the sound of gunfire, but Percy returns to the tavern very much alive; the soldiers are in fact his men.

[2] When the announcement went out to the press, the reaction from the Pimpernel's many fans was negative; the pug-nosed Laughton was thought a poor choice to play the suave Sir Percy.

Andre Sennwald wrote in The New York Times that "'The Scarlet Pimpernel' is stirring to the pulse and beautiful to the eye, and it weaves the richly textured background of those tingling months of the French Revolution into an enormously satisfying photoplay.