So You Thought You Had Watched The First Film About A Daring Archeology Professor Battling The Third Reich? Think Again!

The plot might seem familiar: an unassuming Archeologist battles against the growing might of pre-war Nazi Germany. In a thrilling adventure with the future of the Western world on the line, our hero has 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, while it might have influenced the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981, this film came out forty years earlier!

Forty years before the release of the first Indiana Jones movie, English actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had created with his own funds, earned from his appearance in the Hollywood blockbuster Gone With The Wind(1939). Howard had portrayed honor-bound intellectual Southern gentleman Ashley Wilkes. Howard was passionate about the British war effort, and was concerned with alerting a wider audience to the growing threat of the Third Reich. Howard also desired to create a movie which updated 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 incredible movie entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States of America.

Howard portrayed the title role of Professor Horatio Smith, who utilizes his cover as an foppish professor of archeology to rescue racially persecuted intellectuals out of Nazi Germany. During one daring rescue, he is wounded, which reveals his secret to his admiring students. They 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 a ruthless Nazi adversary who has been assigned to hunt him down.

This movie is even credited with inspiring Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who attended a private screening with his sister Nina in 1942. "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 lead a rescue operation in Hungary that, conservatively estimated, saved 15,000 Hungarian Jews from Hitler's gas chambers. It is doubtful whether any other film has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.

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Now available on DVD, Pimpernel Smith serves as a reminder of the power of cinema to change opinion and influence society. A profoundly moving film about the struggle for good in the world, Pimpernel Smith deserves to be seen by today's audience. The Pimpernel Smith DVD can be ordered securely online at www.PimpernelSmith.com Indiana Jones fans won't be disappointed!

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