Shane finds his office and apartment have been ransacked and his secretary Miss Murgatroyd has been locked in a closet by Anthony Travers, who is in search of an 8th-century ram's horn rumored to be filled with jewels.

Working all sides of the street, Shane makes deals with each of them to find the horn, and eventually winds up in possession of a package allegedly containing it, but it turns out to be full of sand instead of jewels.

Since they already owned the screen rights to the Dashiell Hammett novel The Maltese Falcon, economical Warner Bros. executives decided to film another version of the book and assigned contract writer Brown Holmes to pen the screenplay.

Showing little regard for the original material, Holmes converted its object of desire – a jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon – into a ram's horn filled with precious gems, changed character names (Sam Spade became "Ted Shane"), altered the sex of one of the criminal masterminds from male to female, and retitled the story, first to The Man in the Black Hat and then Men on Her Mind.

[5] Upon completion of principal photography, art director Max Parker assembled a rough cut that so confused studio heads they assigned Warren Low to re-edit it.

He concluded, "So disconnected and lunatic are the picture's incidents, so irrelevant and monstrous its people, that one lives through it in constant expectation of seeing a group of uniformed individuals appear suddenly from behind the furniture and take the entire cast into protective custody.

"[8] Time Out London noted that although the film can't compare to the 1941 screen adaptation of the Hammett novel, "Thanks to Dieterle's stylishly witty direction and excellent performances, it's nevertheless enjoyably and quirkily funny, at least until just before the end, when a whole wedge of undigested plot exposition suddenly catches up with the action.