[1] Writing for Turner Classic Movies, Richard Harland Smith observes: “While hewing closely to the crime-shouldn't-pay maxims of the newly minted Production Code, the violence is often disarmingly brutal, with a double hanging late in the film being as disturbing as it is coyly elliptical.”[1] In San Francisco in the 1850s, a city where gold fever has left shipowners short-handed, Bat Morgan, a sailor come ashore, is robbed and nearly shanghaied aboard another ship.

Managing to escape, he sticks around town to pay back those responsible and then to take a cut in the action in the vice district.

He organized the various gambling houses (and other forms of vice implied but, for Code reasons, not explicitly shown) into a consolidated enterprise in alliance with a corrupt city boss, Jim Daley, and thereby comes into conflict with a crusading newspaper run by Jean Barrat, the daughter of the recently murdered publisher, and idealistic editor Charles Ford.

The resulting outrage provokes a public outcry, and when Morra is arrested and jailed, a lynch mob gathers, crying for his blood.

When the lowlife of the Barbary Coast determine to take revenge by wrecking the press and burning the city, Bat Morgan convinces them to do otherwise.