Through elaborate tradecraft, Fields, as ordered by his case officer, photographs secret documents, using a Minox camera, and passes these through a network of couriers to New York City, and thereafter overseas to an enemy country.

Receiving a signal from his case officer on the hotel's hall phone, he proceeds to the Empire State Building, meeting his contact, Miss Philips, on the 86th-floor observation deck.

The fine photography of cinematographer Sam Leavitt, whose cameras have captured the lights of actual, and familiar, locations in Washington and New York, contributes strongly to the tensions of the hunt.

The busy hum of a city is a cacophonous note, a strident-sounding telephone bell plays an important part and, overall, there’s the topnotch musical score by Herschel Burke Gilbert, sometimes used almost too insistently to build a melodramatic mood and in other spots softly emphasizing and making clear the dumb action of the players.

He wrote, "Russell Rouse (The Oscar) directs and co-writes this unique but tedious spy/Red Scare thriller set in New York City ... What we get is a tense mood piece through the excellent dark visuals delivered by cinematographer Sam Leavitt.

It shows a lonely and alienated unsympathetic man on-the-run, who is trapped in a shadowy world of chaos but is not fleshed out in his character so we never become concerned with his plight as a human interest story.