The plot may seem somewhat familiar: a mild-mannered Professor of Archeology goes up 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 bravery. But this isn't a blockbuster from Lucas and Spielberg - in fact, although 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 the first Indiana Jones movie, British actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had directed and produced with his own funds, earned from his role 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 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 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 professor of archeology to rescue victims of persecution out of the Third Reich. During one such daring adventure, 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 Gestapo adversary who has been assigned to hunt him down.

The film 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 lead a rescue operation in Budapest that, conservatively estimated, saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Hitler's gas chambers. It is doubtful whether any other film has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.