Recent Articles of Interest

The plot might sound somewhat familiar: an unassuming Professor of Archeology struggles against the growing might of pre-war Nazi Germany in a thrilling adventure with the future of the Western world on the line. He's got 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 been partial inspiration for 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, this movie came out in 1941!

Forty years before the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, British actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had made with his own money, generated from his appearance in the Hollywood blockbuster Gone With The Wind(1939), in which he played the character that will always be associated with him: honor-bound intellectual Southern gentleman Ashley Wilkes. Howard was passionate about the war effort, and especially wanted to alert a wider audience to the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Howard also wanted to produce a movie 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 an amazing feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States of America.

Howard played the title character of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover as an absent-minded archeologist to rescue victims of persecution out of Nazis Germany. During one such daring adventure, he is wounded, revealing his secret to his admiring students, who enthusiastically join him in his fight. 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 his ruthless Nazi adversary who has been assigned to hunt him down.

The film is even credited with inspiring Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish humanitarian, who in 1942 attended a private screening of Howard's latest film with his sister Nina. "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 15,000 Hungarian Jews from Hitler's gas chambers. It is hard to imagine that any other film has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.