Archive Picks and Pans Review: The Scarlet Pimpernel By People Staff Published on November 8, 1982 12:00 PM Share Tweet Pin Email CBS (8-11 p.m. ET) Baroness Orczy’s adventure stories are the basis for this rousingly suspenseful melodramatization of an English royalist’s escapades during the French Revolution. Anthony (Brideshead Revisited) Andrews is dynamic as the foppish Sir Percy Blakeney, who doubles as the Pimpernel, rescuing French aristocrats from the guillotine. Jane (East of Eden) Seymour is his beautiful Marguerite, and Ian (Amadeus) McKellen plays his archenemy, the villainous revolutionary Chauvelin.