Archeology struggles against the growing might of pre-war Nazi Germany in a



thrilling adventure with the future of the Western world on the line. He's

got a very common last name, and is known for his daring bravado. But this

isn't a blockbuster from Lucas and Spielberg - in fact, while it might have

been the inspiration for the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981, this film

came out in 1941!

Forty years before the release of the Raiders of the Lost Ark, English

actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had produced and directed with his

own funds, generated from his role in the Hollywood blockbuster Gone With

The Wind(1939), in which he played the character that will always be

associated with him: honor-bound intellectual Southern gentleman Ashley

Wilkes. Howard was passionate about the war effort, and was concerned with

alerting a wider audience to the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Howard

also desired to produce a film that would update his famous role as Sir

Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) from Revolutionary France to

pre-World War II Europe. The result was an amazing feature film entitled

Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the USA.

Howard played the title role of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover

as an absent-minded professor of archeology to smuggle victims of

persecution out of the Nazi state. During one such daring adventure, he is

wounded, revealing his secret to his admiring students, who

enthusiastically join him in his struggle. 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 his ruthless Nazi adversary

who has been assigned to track him down.

The film is even credited with inspiring Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish

humanitarian, who in 1942 attended a private screening of Howard's latest

film with his sister Nina. "On the way home," his sister 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

15,000 Hungarian Jews from Hitler's gas chambers. It is doubtful whether

any other movie has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.