In Dashiell Hammett's 1943 adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play, it's not just the Rhine that needs watching, but America's living rooms. Paul Lukas, in a performance that won him an Academy Award, plays Kurt Muller, a German anti-fascist leader who with his wife (Bette Davis) and kids has sought refuge in his mother-in-law's Washington, D.C. home. However, not even the nation's capital is safe from fascism. An opportunistic Rumanian count, a guest in the family's home, threatens to turn in Muller to his friends, the local Nazis. A family besieged, Europe besieged--action on the home front is thus linked to the war front, stressing the importance of each person's ongoing commitment to the war effort. Hollywood films during the war years often served political needs, and Warner Brothers, a strongly anti-fascist studio, urged its viewers to a renewed patriotism, here taking the form of a family uniting to expel an “other”--early glimmerings of a cold war mentality.