Los Angeles' Little Tokyo is the backdrop for a sympathetic portrayal of interracial romance which Samuel Fuller imbeds into this police melodrama. Two detectives, a Caucasian (Glenn Corbett) and a Japanese-American (James Shigeta) fall in love with an artist (Victoria Shaw) whom they meet in the course of a murder 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 tensions and obsessions; here, Anna Lee's alcoholic abstract expressionist painter, Mac, recalls Thelma Ritter's outré 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, as the investigation proceeds, that jealousy and neurosis can sometimes lead to murder.