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This movie was a by-product of America's first great Red Scare of the twentieth century, in the wake of the Russian Revolution. At that point, the Wilson administration and Wilson's attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer had begun a concerted campaign aimed at immigrants who supposedly brought their "radical" political beliefs into the United States -- it was movies like this that fed (and fed off of) the mood, and it is most effective in its heavy-handed way at presenting its prejudices and its agenda; the only thing it lacks, as so many of these kind of movies do, is some dramatic balance -- even a sense of humor would suffice, but there's little or none of that, either. Director Fred Niblo took it, and the story, way too seriously, and the results get a little wearying after the first half of the movie. But as an artifact of a forgotten and not too happy time in the United States, it makes fascinating viewing, and belongs on a shelf right next to movies such as I Was A Communist For The F.B.I. (which is actually much more effective).