The setting is Warsaw, Poland, just before the 1939 Nazi Germany invasion. The well-known stars of a Warsaw theater company, "wikt:ham#Etymology 3" actor Josef Tura (Jack Benny) and his beautiful wife, Maria (Carole Lombard), along with the rest of the company, are rehearsing "Gestapo", a play satirizing the Nazis. One of the actors, Bronski (Tom Dugan (actor, born 1889)), even proves that he can pass for Hitler in the street.