This story may sound somewhat familiar: a resourceful archeology professor battles the growing power of pre-war Nazi Germany in a thrilling adventure with the future of the Western world at stake. He has a very common last name and is known for his daring bravery. But this isn’t a Lucas and Spielberg blockbuster; in fact, while it might have been the inspiration for the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981, this movie was released in 1941!
Forty years before the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, English actor Leslie Howard released a film that 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 who will always be associated with him: the honorable intellectual Southern gentleman Ashley Wilkes.
Howard was passionate about the war effort and concerned with alerting a broader public to the growing threat from Nazi Germany. Howard also wished 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 a surprising feature film titled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States.
Howard played the lead role of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover as a distracted archeology professor to smuggle out victims of Nazi state persecution. During one of those daring adventures, he is injured and reveals his secret to his admired students, who enthusiastically join him in his fight. But things get complicated when one of his students brings a mysterious woman into his 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 last film with his sister Nina. ‘On the way home,’ his sister recalled, ‘he told me that this was the kind of thing he would like to do.’ Wallenberg mounted a rescue operation in Budapest that, according to conservative estimates, saved 15,000 Hungarian Jews from Hitler’s gas chambers. It is doubtful that any other film has inspired an act of heroism on this scale.