When a fire starts in the hold of the S.S. Paradise, the newly appointed Captain Barrett is hit on the head by some flying debris and when he comes to his manner and actions make his crew believe he has lost his nerve. Back on shore an official inquiry is launched into his actions. Edmond O'Brien plays hot shot lawyer Dave Carson who takes the case but comes up against a brick wall with Captain Barrett (Robert McQueeney) who just can't remember much about what happened. Slowly Carson starts to get a picture of an incompetent crew and a dogged conspiracy within the ranks of officers.I don't know whether my admiration for Edmond O'Brien's acting ability made me see this movie through rose coloured glasses but I didn't find it as "hard going" as the other reviewers. Sure some of the sets looked cheap but the superior acting of the cast (Mona Freeman as Robyn has a couple of scenes as a wife now fed up with her husband's grandstanding and low life clients) more than makes up for it.Witness after witness notes that Barrett, who was socializing at the ship's dinner just before the disaster, was groggy and unfocused and put it down to drunkeness. There also seems to be a cover up going on involving illegal immigrants posing as able bodied seamen who signed on at Port au Prince. After a sensational day in court involving murder and exposure, Carson wonders if Barrett is guilty after all - definitely of incompetence of judging the new crew.The courtroom sequence builds to a gripping climax and reveals the culprit to be Barrett's only supporter. Yes, there does seem to be similarities with Perry Mason (who in 1958 was giving TV viewers a glimpse of law and order and court room tactics) but O'Brien's very low key style helped to make the ending very suspenseful.

Courtroom dramas are tough to shoot with a big budget. Constrained, as they are, by location and focus, it is hard for them to be visually interesting. Given the obviously low budget of this movie, longtime B cinematographer Benjamin Kline can't do much here, although director Fred Sears and the script try to help out with fast editing, tight framing and long point-of-view shots --notice how when Edmond O'Brien is examining witnesses, there are frequently shots from the perspective of the District Attorney. The blocking is obvious and the scenes statics. Notice, for example, the early scene in which local children -- and reporters -- are hectoring the defendant's children.Given these technical issues, this movie starts under a handicap and despite O'Brien in the lead, never overcomes it. The movie looks like it is modeled on Perry Mason, including courtroom confessions, which may be fairly dramatic but is not the sort of thing that happens in the real world. All these issues make this movie substantially below par.

This was just a terrible turkey of a movie. Terrible low or no budget scenery, worse script. In order to pad this out to 81 minutes the script threw in some silly sub-plot of marital discord between Edmond O'Brien and his wife. She wanted to leave him because he had a record of one hundred and fourteen acquittals and his clients were all scum. The sets destroyed every possible illusion that this might be real; the inside of the bridge of the ship looked like a big room with two ship's wheels. In the first scene, six sailors walk in with a flag draped coffin and sit it up on sawhorses in front of the ship's wheels. The Captain died in some foreign port and now they are sitting his coffin up on the bridge? No explanation can make any sense out of this. Except for a couple of scenes in anonymous rooms and one action sequence, the entire rest of the movie is set in a courtroom, a courtroom run by rules made up by screen writers. This is a horrible waste of time, not even bad enough to be good.

Naval man finds evidence stacked against him and his family support severely tested. Lawyer Edmond O'Brien does a nice star turn as a defense attorney who not only defends his client against the charges but fights personal injustice as well. Ah, if only we could find lawyers like him in real life.