The plot may sound familiar: resourceful archeology professor struggles against the growing might of pre-war Nazi Germany. In a thrilling adventure with the fate of many on the line, our hero has a very common last name, and is known for his daring bravery. But this isn't a big-budget production from George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg ? in fact, while it may have influenced the 1981 movie you're probably thinking of, this film came out forty years before that!



Forty years before the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, English actor Leslie Howard released a film he had produced and directed with his own money, earned from his appearance in the Hollywood film Gone With The Wind(1939). Howard had portrayed honor-bound intellectual Southern gentleman Ashley Wilkes. Howard was passionate about the British war effort, and especially wanted to alert a wider audience to the growing threat of the Third Reich. Howard also wanted to make a movie that would update his famous role as Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) from Revolutionary France to pre-World War II Germany. The result was an amazing movie entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the USA.

Howard portrayed the title role of Professor Horatio Smith, who utilizes his cover as an absent-minded professor of archeology to smuggle racially persecuted intellectuals out of Nazi Germany. During one such daring rescue, he is wounded, which results in revealing his secret to his admiring students. They enthusiastically join him in his fight, but things are complicated when one of his students brings a mysterious woman into their inner circle. Smith engages in a game of cat-and-mouse with a ruthless Nazi adversary who has been assigned to track him down.

The film is even credited with inspiring Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who attended a private screening with his sister Nina in 1942. "On the way home," Nina recalled, "he told me this was the kind of thing he would like to do." Wallenberg went on to mount a rescue operation in Budapest that, conservatively estimated, saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi gas chambers. It is doubtful whether any other film has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.