Some of his themes and cues were reused in later MGM productions such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958 film), Designing Woman and North by Northwest.

[3][4] Police Lieutenant Collier Bonnabel of the homicide department explains to camera that he only knows one way to solve a case: by applying pressure to all of the suspects, playing on their strengths and weaknesses, until one of them snaps under the tension.

In flashback, the bespectacled Quimby, night manager of the 24-hour Coast-to-Coast drugstore in Culver City, California, is married to Claire, who is unfaithful to him.

After saving and making sacrifices, he's able to afford a nice house in the suburbs, but she's utterly unimpressed, refusing even to look inside the home.

Deeply humiliated, Quimby takes Freddie's idea and constructs a new identity as cosmetics salesman Paul Sothern.

He buys contact lenses and flashier clothes, and he rents an apartment in Westwood, Los Angeles.

On a later night, he hitchhikes to Deager's place, grabs a barbecue spit and fork and then walks through the open patio door.

Quimby grabs the weapon and holds it to Deager's neck, explaining that he came to kill him, but suddenly realizes that Claire isn't worth it.

Bonnabel maneuvers Mary to Quimby's workplace to identify him, but she refuses to do so, and she states that her faith in Sothern is unshaken.

[1] Walter Addiego, film critic at the San Francisco Examiner, wrote: "They aren't making 'em anymore like this 1949 melodrama by John Berry, and that's too bad...What sticks with you about the film is what a classic, prize-winning sap the Basehart character is, how pathetic and ill-considered are his dreams of domestic bliss, and how easily he's able to shift into a new and quite different identity.