Two years before Mrs. Miniver gave us the British family under German bombardment, Frank Borzage described the devastating impact of Nazism on a German family. Borzage's 1934 Little Man, What Now? was the first Hollywood film to deal with the spectre of Nazism in Germany, and his 1938 Three Comrades continued that theme. The Mortal Storm is Borzage's most direct treatment of the subject. Opening on the eve of Hitler's ascension to the chancellorship, the film develops a picture of National Socialism--book burnings, chanting, street brutality--and before it is through, its central characters are facing dangerous escapes, treacherous captures and even concentration camps. As always, Borzage focuses on two lovers who attempt to retain their spiritual strength in an insane world: Freya (Margaret Sullavan), the daughter of the outspoken, Jewish professor Roth (Frank Morgan), and Roth's student Martin (James Stewart). They watch as family and friends (including Robert Stack and Robert Young) reveal their conversion to Fascism. The Mortal Storm's melodrama, like that of Mrs. Miniver, was not without its international influence; John Douglas Eames writes in The MGM Story, “Movies like this had a telling effect on public opinion in uncommitted countries,” while the original N.Y. Times review counts the officially-neutral U.S. as one of those, calling the film “a film bomb which is about to explode in American theaters with such force as to dispel public equanimity (if in fact any exists) towards the vicious operation of Nazism....”