Think You've Watched The Original Film About A Brave Archeology Professor Battling Nazi Germany? You Might Want To Think Again!

The plot might sound familiar: resourceful 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, 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, although it might have influenced the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981, this movie came out in 1941!

In 1941, British actor Leslie Howard released a film he had produced and directed with his own funds, generated from his role in the Hollywood movie 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 the Third Reich. Howard also wanted to produce a film 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 feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States.

Howard played the title character of Professor Horatio Smith, who makes use of his cover as an absent-minded professor of archeology to smuggle racially persecuted intellectuals out of Nazi Germany. During one such daring effort, Smith is wounded, which discloses 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 track 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," Nina 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 gas chambers. It is hard to imagine that 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 Indy fans won't be disappointed!

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