Strong performances by Roberts Mitchum and Ryan form the core of this exposé of big city crime and graft. The action is set around a nightclub where cops, crooks and curious journalists take their drink and Lizabeth Scott tends bar. With Mitchum as a law-and-order cop on the rampage; Ryan, the racketeer, a sympathetically drawn figure of alienation and doom; and both suffering the little-man impotence of middle management in a city run by crime lords and corrupt officials in happy union, the film has its moody layers of complexity that place it more in the noir mode than the gangster genre. Based on a sensational 1927 stage play, this is the second film version produced by Howard Hughes, the first being the 1928 silent directed by Lewis Milestone.