This thriller film is placed just after World War II and tells about a GI paratrooper (Humphrey Bogart) who traces his war time pal who has gone AWOL to a treacherous city populated by gamblers, cops, and the smoky, suspicious Lizabeth Scott.
Morris Carnovsky is a nightclub owner with a gambling sideline and Marvin Miller as his brutal baby-faced thug.
The plot is much like earlier Bogie classics The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon.

Lizabeth Scott in, her performance is ambiguous and the film's cynical edge, and view of small-time hoodlums with big dreams casts a dark shadow unique to Hollywood's postwar films.

Bogart is Captain Rip Murdock, a former Army paratrooper, who starts out trying to find out why his Sergeant and pal Johnny Drake (William Prince) has a Yale pin with the name "John Joseph Preston" on it, and more importantly, why Johnny bolts rather than accept his Congressional Medal of Honour for his wartime heroism.
Rip's investigation leads him to Gulf City, a tropical paradise of the south with secrets, double-crossing, murder, and such mayhem as tossing Molotov cocktails at sinister smoothie Morris Carnovsky and his psycho henchman Marvin Miller to make them talk.
Lizabeth Scott is the mysterious Coral Chandler, the kind of women men go gaga for against their better judgment.