The plot may seem somewhat familiar: an unassuming Professor of Archeology 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 big-budget production from George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg - in fact, while it may have been the inspiration for the 1981 movie you're probably thinking of, this movie came out in 1941!

Forty years before the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, English actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had created with his own funds, generated 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 was concerned with alerting a wider audience to the growing threat of the Third Reich. Howard also desired 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 Germany. The result was an amazing feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the USA.

Howard portrayed the title character of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover as an foppish archeology professor to rescue victims of persecution out of Nazis Germany. During one such daring rescue, he is wounded, which discloses 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 Gestapo 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 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 15,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazi concentration camps. It is hard to imagine that any other movie has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.