The plot may seem somewhat familiar: an unassuming Archeologist struggles against the growing might of pre-war Nazi Germany in a thrilling adventure with the fate of many 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, while it may have been the inspiration for the 1981 movie you're probably thinking of, this movie came out forty years before that!

In 1941, British actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had created 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 create a movie 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 amazing feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States of America.

Howard portrayed the title role of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover as an absent-minded archeology professor to rescue victims of persecution out of the Third Reich. 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 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 tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Hitler's concentration camps. It is hard to imagine that any other movie has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.