↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Think Youve Watched the Original Movie About Daring Archeology Professor...

This storyline might seem somewhat familiar: a resourceful Professor of Archeology goes up against the growing might of pre-war Nazi Germany in a thrilling adventure with the future of the Western world 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 might have been the inspiration for 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, this movie came out in 1941!

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 appearance 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 especially wanted to alert a wider audience to the growing threat of the Third Reich. Howard also wanted to produce 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 incredible feature film entitled Pimpernel Smith (1941), known as Mister V in the United States of America.

Howard played the title character of Professor Horatio Smith, who uses his cover as an absent-minded professor of archeology to smuggle victims of persecution out of the Third Reich. 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 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," his sister 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 the Nazi gas chambers. It is hard to imagine that any other movie has ever inspired an act of heroism on quite this scale.

Now available on DVD, Pimpernel Smith serves as a reminder of the power of cinema to change opinion and influence society. A profoundly moving film about the struggle for good in the world, Pimpernel Smith deserves to be seen by a wider audience. The Pimpernel Smith DVD can be ordered securely online at http://www.PimpernelSmith.com Indy fans will definitely not be disappointed!

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

---

This article has been robotically scanned and tagged by Prnewsnow with the following search tags. No human manipulation of these tags take place.
| Recovery | Data Recovery | data recovery wizard |

---

4921 readers online...

, Local News