This story may sound somewhat familiar: a resourceful archeology professor battles the rising power of pre-war Nazi Germany in a thrilling adventure with the future of the Western world at stake. He has a very common surname and is known for his daring bravery. But this isn’t a Lucas and Spielberg blockbuster; in fact, although it might have been the inspiration for the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981, this movie was released in 1941!
Forty years before the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, English actor Leslie Howard released a film he had produced and directed with his own funds, generated from his role in the Hollywood blockbuster Gone with the Wind ( 1939), in which he played the character that will always be associated with him: the honorable gentleman southern intellectual Ashley Wilkes.
Howard was passionate about the war effort and concerned about alerting a broader public to the growing threat from Nazi Germany. Howard also wanted 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 Europe. The result was a surprising feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States.
Howard played the lead role of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover as an absent-minded archeology professor to smuggle out victims of the Nazi state’s persecution. During one of these daring adventures, he is wounded and reveals his secret to his admiring students, who enthusiastically join him in his fight. But things get complicated when one of his students brings a mysterious woman into his inner circle. Smith becomes involved in a game of cat and mouse with his ruthless Nazi adversary who has been assigned to track him down.
The film is even credited with inspiring Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish humanitarian, who in 1942 attended a private screening of Howard’s last film with his sister Nina. ‘On the way home,’ his sister recalled, ‘he told me this was the kind of thing he would like to do.’ Wallenberg mounted a rescue operation in Budapest that, according to conservative estimates, saved 15,000 Hungarian Jews from Hitler’s gas chambers. It is doubtful that any other film has inspired an act of heroism on this scale.