Morton goes to see his friend John Harkness and is introduced to a film actress, Julie Bannon, and is attracted to her.

He also apparently has made a date with Lisa Muller, who is angry when Morton shows up two hours late.

Morton is glad that his violent temper did not cause him to lose control and that the woman's screams are all in his mind, until he goes to his own bedroom for the night and finds his wife there, dead.

Film critic Bosley Crowther was caustic in his review of the film, "As hopeless a bout with insomnia as ever you want to endure is pictured in wearying progression in Twentieth Century-Fox's Night Without Sleep, which landed yesterday at the Palace with the Walcott-Marciano fight pictures and eight acts of vaudeville ...

Without spark, without inspiration, without intelligence and without suspense, this bleak exercise in morbid mooning moves slowly and barely, if at all.