Also at odds with Baumer is Otto Horst, who has been ordered to procure false identification cards for German saboteurs assigned to blow up an American port at the end of a radio broadcast delivered by Hitler.

The play Margin for Error was based on an incident that occurred in 1938, when New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed Police Captain Max Finkelstein to head a special squad of Jewish officers tasked with protecting the German consulate in the city from protestors.

[1] Otto Preminger had directed and starred as Baumer in the Broadway production of Claire Booth Luce's play, which opened on November 3, 1939, at the Plymouth Theatre, where it ran for 264 performances,[2] and he reprised the role for a national tour in the summer of 1940.

[3] According to the New York Times, 20th Century Fox purchased the screen rights for $25,000 in the spring of 1941 but temporarily shelved the property because studio executives felt Boothe's "statement of the opposition between fascism and democracy had become self-evident to the point of banality.

"[4] In April 1942, William Goetz, serving as interim studio head while Darryl F. Zanuck was fulfilling his military duty, greenlighted the project and assigned it to director Ernst Lubitsch.

[5] Preminger thought the screenplay by Lillie Hayward was "awful" and hired newcomer Samuel Fuller, on leave from the United States Army, to help him revise the script.

The men agreed Luce's original play, written as a call to arms, had to become a morale booster for a country firmly entrenched in World War II.

However, Margin For Error, while undeniably entertaining in a B-movie manner, is hardly indicative of his talent, suffering from a plot that alternates between cliche and head-scratching reversals, some unimpressive acting and a limp denouement.