Los Angeles' Little Tokyo is the backdrop for a sympathetic portrayal of interracial romance which Samuel Fuller imbeds in this police melodrama about the murder of a nightclub stripper. Two detectives, a Caucasian (Glenn Corbett) and a Japanese (James Shigeta) fall in love with an artist (Victoria Shaw) whom they meet in the course of the investigation. She chooses Shigeta, but not before the competition brings out neuroses born from racial stress and cultural ambivalence. Typically, Fuller's American landscape is a diverse amalgam of visual oddities and offbeat characters with their own obsessions and doubts; here, Anna Lee's alcoholic abstract expressionist painter, Mac, recalls Thelma Ritter's outre mother-figure in Pickup on South Street. The rare optimism Fuller shows in depicting the affair between Shigeta and Shaw is counterbalanced by a visual tension achieved by sharp intercutting and few if any dissolves; and by the growing sense that jealousy and neurosis can sometimes lead to murder.