This storyline may sound somewhat familiar: an unassuming archeology professor 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 bravery. But this isn't a big-budget production from Lucas and Spielberg - in fact, although it may have been the inspiration for the 1981 film you're probably thinking of, this film came out 40 years before that!

Forty years before the release of the first Indiana Jones movie, English actor Leslie Howard released a movie he had produced and directed with his own money, generated 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 desired to create a film 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 incredible 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 smuggle victims of persecution out of the Third Reich. 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 Nazi 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 film with his sister Nina. "On the way home," his sister 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 15,000 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.