After meeting Patian, it is agreed that he will remove the cuffs on the condition that Joe drive the getaway car for a bank robbery.

With his winnings from a crap game, Joe buys a garage in Amesville and settles down, however, within a year, the police are on his trail.

West came up with a treatment which prompted Joseph Breen, then Director of the Production Code Administration, to declare that while his office had handled roughly 3,600 texts over the year, "it is our unanimous judgment, here in this office, that this new treatment by Mr. West is, by far, the best piece of craftsmanship in screen adaptation that we have seen – certainly, in a year.

[3] Raft had been reluctant to play crooked characters but he had left Paramount and wanted to keep his standing as a box-office star.

A reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "it is a story which will exert pulse-quickening effect on audiences of both sexes... plot structure and pithy dialogue are all to the play's advantage.

Finding the law on his trail and needing a stake for a small town hideaway, he knocks over a post office.

But even that, he finds, is a mirage, and he prefers death from the guns of pursuing officers than face a prison term.