The first Hollywood film to deal with the Spanish Civil War, Blockade stars Henry Fonda as a farmer whose love of the land is so deep as to instill courage in the Spanish peasants as they fight the Nazi-aided Franco forces; he falls in love with Madeleine Carroll, unbeknownst to him, a Fascist spy. But the climax reflects the filmmakers' interest in the Spanish struggle far more than in the Hollywood formula: as a starving townspeople watch their food supply blown to bits, Fonda asks, "Where is the conscience of the world?" With echoes of Guernica and a pro-Loyalist stand (which is understated, but audiences in 1938 needed no program to tell the players), Blockade was completed against enormous pressure to abandon the project, then was condemned by the right wing in America and banned altogether in France. It reflects German emigré director William Dieterle's growing alarm at the situation in Europe. It was produced by the foremost producer of socially conscious films in the thirties, Walter Wanger, and written by John Howard Lawson, who was later jailed as one of Hollywood's "unfriendly ten."