This storyline might sound somewhat familiar: an unassuming archeology professor 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 bravado. But this isn't a blockbuster from Lucas and Spielberg - in fact, while it might have been partial 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 directed and produced with his own funds, generated from his role in the Hollywood blockbuster Gone With The Wind(1939), in which he played 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 wanted to make 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 Germany. The result was an incredible feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States.

Howard played 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 Nazi state. During one such daring rescue, he is wounded, revealing his secret to his admiring students, who enthusiastically join him in his fight. 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 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 concentration camps. It is doubtful whether any other movie has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.