Articles of Interest

This storyline may sound somewhat familiar: an unassuming archeology professor 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 George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg - in fact, although it may have been the inspiration for the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981, this movie came out in 1941!

In 1941, English actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had directed and produced with his own money, 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 especially wanted to alert a wider audience to the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Howard also wanted to make a movie which updated 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 feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States of America.

Howard played the title character of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover as an absent-minded archeologist to rescue victims of persecution out of the Third Reich. During one such daring rescue, he is wounded, which discloses 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 Gestapo adversary who has been assigned to track him down.

This movie is even credited with inspiring Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, who in 1942 attended a private screening of Howard's latest picture 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 tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Hitler's concentration camps. It is hard to imagine that any other film has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.