the plot finds a Brooklyn detective summoned to a Caribbean island to solve the disappearance of eight geologists who had visited an alligator-infested swamp.

The lead role was rewritten especially for Dunn after his successful film comeback in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), also produced by 20th Century Fox.

To attract attention, Smith fires his pistol; the pair are found and taken to a village run by Captain Van den Bark, who welcomes them and sends them off with his aide who has orders to kill them.

Smith then sets up an elaborate ruse with a doctor at the hospital, having Van den Bark's body placed on a bed in clear sight of the garden.

[1] However, studio executives had the role rewritten for James Dunn after seeing the latter's comeback performance in the 1945 film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

[1] In addition, the script was peppered with references to Brooklyn landmarks and expressions – such as Dunn's character calling himself "a flatfoot from Flatbush"[4] – to reinforce the connection.

[1] The Harrisburg Telegraph singled out James Dunn as "the top performer in the cast in his part as the easy-going, wise-guy detective who has his employers wondering how he ever acquired a reputation as a master sleuth".

[7] The Brooklyn Daily Eagle credited Robert Webb's direction for maintaining the suspense, while noting that the film "has very little novelty, … but it is a walloping good murder story".

[4] The Philadelphia Inquirer roundly condemned the acting, directing, and screenwriting, categorizing the film as an "amateurish mish-mash about quicksands, killers and buried pirate gold on an unidentified island down in the Caribbean".

This review contends that Dunn, who had just made a brilliant comeback in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, "surely deserved something better", but credits him for taking the film's deficiencies "in stride like the veteran he is".