"Pimpernel" Smith (released in the USA as Mister V) is a 1941 British anti-Nazi thriller, produced and directed by its star Leslie Howard, which updates his role in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) from Revolutionary France to pre-Second World War Europe. The British Film Yearbook for 1945 described his work as "one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda".
The film helped to inspire the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to lead a real-life rescue operation in Budapest that saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi concentration camps during the last months of the Second World War.
Plot
In the spring of 1939, months before the outbreak of the war, eccentric Cambridge archaeologist Horatio Smith takes a group of British and American archaeology students to Nazi Germany to help in his excavations. His research is supported by the Nazis, since he professes to be looking for evidence of the Aryan origins of German civilisation.
However, he has a secret agenda: to free inmates of the concentration camps. During one such daring rescue, he hides disguised as a scarecrow in a field and is inadvertently shot in the arm by a German soldier idly engaging in a bit of target practice. Wounded, he still manages to free a celebrated pianist from a work gang. Later, his students guess his secret when they notice his injury and connect it to a newspaper story about the wounding of the latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel. They enthusiastically volunteer to assist him.
German Gestapo General von Graum is determined to find out the identity of the "Pimpernel" and eliminate him. Von Graum forces Ludmilla Koslowski to help him by threatening the life of her father, a leading Polish democrat held prisoner by the Nazis. When Smith finds out, he promises her he will free Koslowski.
Smith and his students, masquerading as American journalists, visit the camp in which Koslowski is being held. They overpower their escort, put on their uniforms, and leave with Koslowski and some other inmates. By now, von Graum is sure Smith is the man he is after, so he stops the train transporting the professor and various packing crates out of the country. However, when he has the crates opened, he is disappointed to find only ancient artefacts from Smith's excavations.
Von Graum still has Ludmilla, so Smith comes back for her. The general catches the couple at a border crossing. He has no interest in Ludmilla, so he lets her go. Smith tells Graum that the artefact he holds proves there was no Aryan civilization. Von Graum allows Smith to stand outside very close to the border, hoping to shoot him while he is "trying to escape". However, Smith uses a distraction to escape into the fog, promising to come back.
Cast
Leslie Howard as Professor Horatio Smith
Francis Sullivan as General von Graum
Mary Morris as Ludmilla Koslowski
Hugh McDermott as David Maxwell
Raymond Huntley as Marx
Manning Whiley as Bertie Gregson
Peter Gawthorne as Sidimir Koslowski
Allan Jeayes as Dr. Beckendorf
Dennis Arundell as Hoffman
Joan Kemp-Welch as School-teacher
Philip Friend as Spencer
Laurence Kitchin as Clarence Elstead
David Tomlinson as Steve
Basil Appleby as Jock MacIntyre
Percy Walsh as Dvorak
Roland Pertwee as Embassy Official Sir George Smith
A. E. Matthews as Earl of Meadowbrook
Aubrey Mallalieu as Dean
Ben Williams as Graubitz
Ernest Butcher as Weber
Arthur Hambling as Jordan
Mary Brown as Girl Student
W. Phillips as Innkeeper
Ilse Bard as Gretchen
Ernest Verne as German Officer
George Street as Schmidt
Hector Abbas as Karl Meyer
Neal Arden as Second Prisoner
Richard George as Prison Guard
Roddy Hughes as Zigor
Hwfa (Hugh) Pryce as Wagner
Oriel Ross as Lady Willoughby
Brian (Bryan) Herbert as Jaromir
Suzanne Claire (aka Violette Cunnington) as Salesgirl
Charles Paton as Steinhof
Michael Rennie as Guard Captain (uncredited) Ronald Howard Minor role (uncredited)
Production
Leslie Howard had been aware of the Nazis in Europe and had developed a film treatment in 1938 based on the rescue of an Austrian anti-Nazi leader. The A. G. Macdonell story of "Pimpernel" Smith took the novel The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy into modern times. Having played the leading role in the filmThe Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Howard took on the updated project as the first film he directed and co-produced. Production on "Pimpernel" Smith began in early 1941.