Margin for Error

Margin for Error (1939), a play by Clare Boothe. [Plymouth Theatre, 264 perf.] Karl Baumer ( Otto Preminger), the Nazi consul in New York, is a blackmailer, a thief, and a double‐crosser. He has only contempt for America, a contempt that explodes into a fervent wish to break relations with the country after a Jewish policeman, Officer Finkelstein ( Sam Levene), is assigned to guard him. Despite Finkelstein's precautions, Baumer is murdered. The death is especially embarrassing to Finkelstein since he could have had several chances to stop it—for Baumer was poisoned, and stabbed, and shot. Finkelstein is eventually able to pin the poisoning on a young American Nazi, and finds reasons for looking the other way when he learns who the stabber and shooter were. When his captain appears, Finkelstein tells him of the triple methods of murder. The captain, who has known and disliked the consul, can only ask, “Did it kill him?” Burns Mantle called the work “the first successful anti‐Nazi play to reach the stage, a rare combination of melodrama and comedy.”