Some time after the war, Aimsley's comfortable exile in Tahiti is rudely interrupted by the arrival of his old adversary, now director of a hotel chain looking to expand into the burgeoning South Seas market.

[6] Monthly Film Bulletin said "With a TV reputation for slick, hard-hitting and technically adventurous productions behind him, it might have been expected that William Kotcheff would have brought some of these qualities to his first commercial feature.

Unhappily, the film bears all the hallmarks of the standard Rank production; if there was any freshness of approach in Kotcheff's original conception, it has now been successfully ironed away.

Essentially an actor's vehicle (resembling, at times, a South Sea island version of Tunes of Glory [1960]), the story needs much firmer and subtler handling than it receives here; veering uneasily between military satire and character drama, it scarcely convinces on either level.

Nobody can smarm like Mason and he breezes through the picture, as a cultured crook who sees Mills's arrival on Tahiti to negotiate a hotel del as the chance to pay him back for his being cashiered at the end of the war.