This storyline may sound somewhat familiar: a mild-mannered Archeologist battles 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 bravery. But this isn't a big-budget production from George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg - in fact, while it may have been the inspiration for the 1981 film you're probably thinking of, this film came out forty years before that!

Forty years before the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, British actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had made with his own funds, earned from his appearance in the Hollywood blockbuster Gone With The Wind(1939), in which he portrayed 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 the Third Reich. 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 an incredible feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States.

Howard portrayed the title role of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover as an foppish professor of archeology to smuggle victims of persecution out of Nazis Germany. During one such daring effort, he is wounded, revealing his secret to his admiring students, who 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 his ruthless Nazi adversary who has been assigned to track him down.

This movie is even credited with inspiring Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, who in 1942 attended a private screening of Howard's latest picture 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 tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Hitler's concentration camps. It is doubtful whether any other movie has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.