Apolitical and sick of killing after fighting in World War I, he is drawn into the struggle between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British Black and Tans.

When Liam O'Sullivan, a top IRA leader, is wounded escaping from prison, O'Shea agrees to accompany the unit to the rendezvous point to treat him.

When the soldiers check the people in the nearby pub (where the IRA men are waiting), Terence O'Brien tries to hide a pistol he brought (against Noonan's explicit orders).

In a contemporary review, The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote:With Shake Hands with the Devil, Michael Anderson gave himself the opportunity fo achieve something really ambitious.

He had independence (Troy Films is his own company); he had a theme which could be forcefully developed both at the level of character study and, with its obvious contempory parallels, political comment; he had the Irish setting and a distinguished and capable cast.

What he has in fact done is to treat the subject as melodrama, with some intermittently exciting interludes (Lenihan's escape from the operating theatre, Lady FitzHugh's capture), but a continual debasing of his theme's dramatic currency.

The Black and Tan savagery becomes a Jackboot caricature; the rebels' lighthouse hideout an excuse for some pretty romantic sea-scapes; the conflict between Kerry's ideals and his involvement in violence is handled in the style of the Western theme of the reluctant gunfighter; and Lenihan's repressions and tensions are indicated mainly insofar as they yield material for a fanciful beach scene in which he spurns Kitty O'Brady, the village prostitute.

The style of the film is staccato, flashyand over-emphatic, the camerawork all glistening night streets and heavy shadows, and the playing uneven.

James Cagney is spruce, hard-hitting but a little gangsterish, Glynis Johns and Dana Wynter respectively too boisterous and too subdued, and Don Murray effective mainly because he is able to make the most of his natural sincerity.