Tim Kerry (Harry Carey), a beat cop in Hell's Kitchen, welcomes home his son Ritzy (Bruce Cabot) after he finishes his two year prison sentence. Ritzy tells his dad he'll go straight, and he may even mean it to some degree. But then his old gang gets in touch with him, now headed by the widow of the old gangleader, Claire Morelli (Wynne Gibson), and Ritzy decides to go for the easy money. Ritzy gets his dad to get him a job as a technician working on the police radio system so that he can get the radio to malfunction when the gang does a payroll robbery and thus give them time to get away before patrol cars can arrive or even know about the robbery. Ritzy does this in return for half of whatever the gang's take is. In a secondary plot, Ritzy is trying to take up where things left off with Julia, a girl from the neighborhood, but her budding relationship with a novelist, Barney (Glenn Ford) may get in the way.
This is not a boring film, because there are some good actors in it and because the plot is so simple that the plot holes and bad direction don't make it incomprehensible. Plus some of the plot holes are just howlingly funny. For example, the police are staking out a place prior to raiding it, and rather than have plain clothes officers acting nonchalantly or being out of sight there are half a dozen of them in uniform stuffed behind a staircase, and they are all visible. Who do they think they are fooling? After a robbery, cops are on stakeout again, this time in plain clothes, waiting for Ritzy to appear. When he does show up the police make their move. Why wait until now? Since in the previous scene they don't even seem to know who the robbers are, how did they find their hide-out to stake it out? Why did they not just arrest the rest of the robbers prior to this? Is Frank Drebbin of Police Squad the police commissioner?
Robbery scenes are alluded to and not shown taking place, because that would require time and resources. And Harry Carey, Wynne Gibson and Bruce Cabot must have fallen on very hard times for them to agree to star in this turkey. Do note the presence of a teenage looking Glenn Ford (he is actually 23) as the novelist in just his second credited film appearance and also Bruce Bennett as a member of the gang before going to Warner Brothers and becoming a serviceable supporting actor there.
I personally wouldn't bother with this one unless you want some laughs. In case you do, there are plenty of plot holes I did not mention in this review.
