Think You've Watched The Earliest Film About A Daring Archeology Professor Fighting The Nazis? You Might Want To Think Again!

This storyline may seem familiar: an unassuming Archeologist goes up 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, although it may have influenced the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981, this movie 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 made with his own money, generated from his role in the Hollywood film Gone With The Wind(1939). Howard had played 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 Nazi Germany. Howard also wanted 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 amazing movie entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the USA.

Howard played the title character of Professor Horatio Smith, who makes use of his cover as an absent-minded professor of archeology to rescue racially persecuted intellectuals out of Nazi Germany. During one daring effort, he is wounded, revealing 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 Gestapo adversary who has been assigned to hunt him down.

The film is even credited with inspiring Swedish humanitarian 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 mount a rescue operation in Budapest that, conservatively estimated, saved 15,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazi gas chambers. It is doubtful whether any other movie has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.

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Now available for the first time 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 will not want to miss this one!

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