Tommy Shea (Audie Murphy) is an aspiring young boxer from the mean streets of Jersey City. Getting laid off from a job means that Shea has to give his all to a boxing career. Unpolished but showing promise, two people take an interest in him: millionaire sportsman Robert Mallinson (Jeff Morrow) and old time fight manager Dave Bernstein (John McIntire). Shea, in turn, takes an interest in Mallinson's beautiful daughter Dorothy (Barbara Rush), but fears he doesn't have the money to support her in proper style. To get this money, Shea decides to work with crooked fight-promoter Harry Cram, even though this means dropping his friend and manager, Dave. Shea begins to rise in the boxing world, but trouble arrives when his racketeer promoter demands Shea take a dive... or else.

The film was Murphy's first following the tremendous box office success of To Hell and Back (1955) and used the same producer and director. Murphy fights with several real life boxers on screen, including Chico Vejar, Art Aragon and Cisco Andrade. Andrade later praised Murphy as being "the first actor I ever saw who wasn't afraid of getting hit hard in a prize fight scene." Female fans of Audie will be delighted with this film - needless to say, he often appears bare-chested and this opportunity to exploit a young actor's "beefcake" potential partially explains the appeal of the boxing movie. Director Jesse Hibbs, a western specialist, made six movies starring Audie Murphy. This one was a departure from their usual westerns, showing us the lurid underbelly of the boxing world: corrupted managers, organized crime, an underdog fighter in love with a girl he feels is out of reach, the friendly and paternalistic trainer who can't hang on to his protégé in the face of greed and corruption. It's refreshing to see Murphy in something else than a western and directed by Hibbs with whom he also gave another strange drama: JOE BUTTERFLY.