Thought You'd Seen The Earliest Movie About A Resourceful Archeologist Battling The Nazis? 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 Lucas and Spielberg – in fact, although it might have influenced 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, this movie came out forty years earlier!

In 1941, British actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had produced and directed with his own money, generated from his appearance 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 especially wanted to alert a wider audience to the growing threat of the Third Reich. Howard also desired 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 Germany. The result was an incredible feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the USA.

Howard played the title character 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 adventure, Smith 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 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," 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 Hungary that, conservatively estimated, saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi concentration camps. 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 Indiana Jones fans will not be disappointed!

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