Fritz Lang's only film in Cinemascope is this costume drama about a youth's adventures amid a ring of smugglers, led by a swaggering Stewart Granger. Lang's 18th-century Cornwall is as moody, at times nightmarish, as it is colorful. George Sanders also stars, along with an international trio of actresses--England's Joan Greenwood, in her only Hollywood film; the Nordic Viveca Lindfors, as Granger's mistress; and the Latin Lilliane Montevecchi as a gypsy dancer. The pace is fast, the humor at times on the ribald side. The film represents a side of Lang not often associated with his Hollywood films, but more closely aligned with his earliest German films, and even the broad, comic-book adventure of The Tigress of Bengal (Germany, 1959). Stephen Jenkins notes for London's National Film Theatre, “The main interest of the film is the dialectic established by Lang's sensitivity to the kind of Romanticism associated with his first films, and his desire to criticize and update that Romanticism.”