One of the great film noirs, this unrelentingly brutal crime drama centers on a street-toughened detective's quest for vengeance after his wife is accidentally killed by the gangsters who have been assigned to murder him. Working outside the law's confines, the detective's obsessive search for the culprits leads him into the labyrinthine bowels of mob-corrupted city politics. Much of the plot is based on the U.S. Senate investigations of 1950 that exposed the influence of organized crime upon American politics.