Thought You'd Watched The First Movie About A Brave Archeologist Battling Nazi Germany? Think Again!

The plot might seem familiar: a mild-mannered Professor of Archeology goes up 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 the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981, this movie came out forty years earlier!

In 1941, British actor Leslie Howard released a film he had directed and produced with his own money, earned from his role 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 Nazi Germany. Howard also desired to make a film which updated 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 United States of America.

Howard portrayed the title character of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover as an absent-minded archeologist to smuggle racially persecuted intellectuals out of Nazi Germany. During one such daring effort, Smith is wounded, which results in 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 track him down.

The film is even credited with inspiring Swedish diplomat 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 Hitler's 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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