David Rayner

I read DVD Savant's DVD review of The Scarlet Pimpernel at http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=9717 and...I think that Glenn Erickson has got his review spot on, especially about the upper class Frenchmen all talking like upper class Englishmen and the lower class Frenchmen all talking like Cockney's. But in one part of his review, he mistakingly refers to Anthony Andrews as Anthony Edwards. However, one thing I would like to draw attention to is that this 1982 made-for-television adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel, for the first time on film as far as I know, goes some way to showing the terrible conditions that the young Louis-Charles, the heir to the French throne, was kept in during the turmoil of the French Revolution and how they tried to brainwash him into cursing his parents and denouncing his royal family. In reality, his treatment was so harsh (he was consistently beaten and sexually abused by his drunken jailer), that he was to die from his maltreatment two years after being confined, aged ten years and three months. Sir Percy Blakeney, an English nobleman who, known only as The Scarlet Pimpernel, has saved many aristocrats from the guillotine and who is always one step ahead of the French authorities, succeeds, against seemingly impossible odds, in a daring plan to smuggle the young king out of the prison in a crockery basket and then smuggle him out of the country to Austria. Ten years old English boy Richard Charles is just right as the young king and his performance leaves the viewer wishing that the film had just concentrated on him; his story and his daring escape instead of on so many other sub-plots that only succeed in slowing the film down. For two hundred years, it was believed that Louis-Charles had indeed been rescued from his cell and another sickly boy put in the cell to die in his place. But in recent years, DNA tests on what is believed to be the heart of the dead boy have seemingly confirmed that the little ten years old boy who died in that prison cell in June, 1795, was indeed, The Dauphin, Louis Charles, the uncrowned King Louis XVII. The terrible story of what happened to that innocent little boy is one of the worst tragedies of history and should never be forgotten. Somewhere in this story, there is a potential epic waiting to be made about this most tragic of historical subjects. What really DID happen to little Louis Charles? David Rayner, Stoke-on-Trent, England.
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