A police sergeant in California, still grieving over the loss of his wife years before, follows his untrustworthy son-in-law to a woman's apartment and rightly suspects the two of having an affair; not wanting his incredibly naïve daughter to be hurt, the cop takes matters into his own hands--with tragic results. TV-made melodrama with a good set-up diffused by meandering, awkward results. There's nobody here to sympathize with: not the tortured sergeant (Lloyd Bridges, getting upstaged by his thick crop of hair), nor his randy in-law, the apathetic tramp, the clinging daughter...not even the detective's partner on the police force (who seemingly can't wait to bring his friend down!). There's a clever bit involving a thumb-print on a drinking glass, and Broderick Crawford does excellent work as a drunkard wrongly implicated in a crime. However, the remainder of the second-string cast is lackluster (though Bridges does try hard), and Paul Wendkos' direction is balky.

This film is a low budget drama which is chiefly remarkable for containing one of Broderick Crawford's finest performances, as a befuddled drunk who has murdered his best friend but doesn't remember doing so, and an intense and convincing performance by Lloyd Bridges (father of Jeff and Beau). Bridges plays Police Sergeant Ed Stagg who is obsessively devoted to protecting his grown daughter, whom he raised alone after her mother ran off. He discovers that his daughter's husband is having an affair, and he orders him to stop it. Things get out of hand and someone ends up dead by accident, but dead is dead, and a cover-up is necessary. So we get involved in a whodunnit where the who is concealed, and will this all unravel? Bridges is rather terrifying in his obsessive love for the dreamy and over-protected daughter, and the extremes to which he will go. He reveals terrible things about his own childhood as the story progresses. It is an engrossing film.

Finding his son-in-law Steve Butler, Frank Converse, cheating on his daughter Tina, Sallie Shockly, brought the worst out of LAPD Sgt. Ed Stagg, Llyod Bridges. Following his son-in-law at the beach strolling with his secret love Louise Campball, Anne Helm, and later camping outside of Louises apartment in the city Sgt. Stagg give her a call telling her not to have anything to do with him or else.Back home Steve is everything that Tina could want a loving husband caring and sensitive to her needs with the only exception to a perfect marriage is of him being late most nights when he's together with Louise. Sgt. Stagg for his part has a dark and secret past that goes back to when he was a teenager by having an abusive father who constantly beat him and his mother. One night when Ed was 15 he tried to stop his father for beating his mom ending up clubbing him to death with a hammer. Shocked at what he did and even more upset that his mom, who he thought he was helping, threw a fit at him which caused Ed to run away from home. Ed's mom never reported what he did to the police and his father death was ruled an unsolved murder. Even his married life was a disaster for Ed Stagg with his wife leaving him and his, at the time, ten year daughter Tina. It was after that that Sgt. Stagg took it upon himself to see that Tina would never go through what he did as a son and husband. When his threats to Louise didn't have any effect to have her split up with Steve Sgt. Stagg showed up at her apartment, just after Steve left. Sgt. Stagg trying to get her to break up with Steve knocked Louise against the wall that ended up killing her. In a state of shock Sgt. Stagg realizing what he did tries to hide all the evidence that would connect him with Louises death but unknowingly leaves a glass that he used to revive the dying Louise on the coffee table in full view of the police who later came to investigate her death. Sgt. Stagg is so well thought off by his fellow colleagues at the LAPD that his friend Sgt. Marcus, Murray Hamilton,who's on the Louise Campball case assumed that he accidentally touched the glass leaving his fingerprints on it not realizing that it in fact was Sgt. Stagg who killed her. It was bad enough that Sgt. Stagg killed Louise and covered it up but he later goes one step down the road to destruction when in an effort to tie up all the loose ends together on Louises death he tries to frame a poor homeless derelict Willard Edson, Broderick Crawford, who had confessed to killing his friend in a drunken rage to also confess to killing Louise. Llyod Bidges as the tortured soul Sgt. Ed Stagg is at his best with an in-dept performance of a man truly at the end of his rope with his life falling apart because of his misguided actions to save his daughter marriage. Holding back his true feelings about Steve and what he did to break up his affair with Louise drives poor Sgt. Stagg to the brink of insanity and suicide.Frank Converse as the cheating husband Steve Butler showed that he was indeed a decent man and good husband when he tried to brake up with Louise, not knowing that she was dead. When he found out that Willard Edson, who Steve knew was innocent, was arrested for her death Steve went out of his way to save him from a trip to the gas chamber. Steve was more then ready to do that even if his secret life, with Louise, is uncovered to Tina by doing it. Then there's Murray Hamilton as Sgt. Marcus who's the big surprise in the movie as the troubled and hard nosed cop and best friend of Sgt.Stagg. Sgt. Marcus is forced to accept the fact that his best friend and fellow LAPD officer is no better then the criminals that he deals with every day and night on the mean streets of L.A.

A critically important component of virtually all successful cinema is suspense, a perception of uncertainty within the viewer as to what may ensue from the events occurring upon the screen, whichever genre, present even when we know an outcome (Apollo 13) if the work is done well; all of which is meant to point to a total absence of suspense in this weakly directed feature, which dully plods from scene to scene until its flat ending. Lloyd Bridges, cast as police sergeant Ed Stagg, has discovered that the husband (Frank Converse) of his daughter Tina (Sallie Shockley) is dallying with a local chippy and during Stagg's attempts to end the adultery, he accidentally commits a murder, upon which he forges a plan to place responsibility for the crime upon a local inebriate, tangentially providing a question of the title: was Scott's "What a tangled web we weave..." (Marmion) the intended source, inaptly transposed into "tattered"? (an amendment that would be of a piece within this poorly crafted affair). The film is steeped in cliché, hampered by a witless score, and the acting from the three mentioned leads is often embarrassingly bad, notably in the case of Bridges, which might be attributed to the hackneyed script if it were not that Anne Helm as the doxy and Murray Hamilton as Stagg's partner manage to make something of their material, while Broderick Crawford rises above his during his few scenes.