It stars Tab Hunter and Etchika Choureau and features David Janssen and Will Hutchins, as well as Clint Eastwood, in an early supporting role.

[2] Thad Walker, a spoiled, rich kid from Boston who had gotten in serious trouble with the law, fled to France to join the French Foreign Legion in World War I.

In Paris, with companions, "Duke" Sinclair, Dave Putnam, Tom Hitchcock and Bill Wellman, the boys stop at a bar and learn of the recent formation of the Lafayette Escadrille made up of American volunteer pilots who fly for France.

While off duty, Walker meets and falls in love with Renée Beaulieu, a common streetwalker with some sensitivity; she quits the oldest profession and takes a job, reforming for her American lover's sake.

[5] On December 3, 1917, assigned as the first American fighter pilot to join N.87 escadrille in the Lafayette Flying Corps, Wellman went on to score three recorded "kills", along with five probables and to receive the Croix de Guerre with two palms.

[11] According to information in the Warner Bros. Archive, the original script—with the tragic ending in which Walker dies in combat and Renée commits suicide—was written by Paul Fix.

[9] In Wellman's original cut of the film, Tab Hunter's character is killed in the air while trying to rejoin his squadron; his young lover, stricken with grief over his death, throws herself off a bridge into the Seine River.

[15]Variety echoed other reviews, noting, "What could have been an reasonably good actioneer ... has been badly marred by a flat predictability in plot, intrusion of an inept and, at times, ludicrously irrelevant romance and some quite dreadful dialog.