Pimpernel Smith is a British 1941 anti-Nazi thriller, produced and directed by its star Leslie Howard, which updates his role in the 1934 film The Scarlet Pimpernel from Revolutionary France to pre-World War II Europe. The British Film Yearbook for 1945 described his work as "one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda". The film is also notable for helping to inspire Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to mount his real-life rescue operation in Budapest that saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi concentration camps between July 9 1944 and January 17 1945.