Late one winter night, Charles Bickford as Hard Swede rows up to a public dock in a small dinghy, noticing a young woman who walks to the pier’s edge. When a new night watchman (an uncredited Emory Parnell) spots her and fears she may jump, Swede steps in to calm things down. The sailor then recites her story, and the film slides into a long flashback that unfolds the main drama.
Joe Adams, Cary Grant, is a gambler and a smooth-talking grifter who is trying to dodge trouble from two directions. First, he and his treacherous partner, Paul Stewart as Zepp, have just received draft notices to join the army as the United States gears up for World War II. Second, one of Joe’s underlings, Juan Varro as Joe Bascopolus, has just died, his military status listed as 4F, meaning he is unfit to serve. The men gamble for control of their gambling ship and for Bascopolus’s identity, and Zepp cheats, yet Joe wins the stake. Even so, Zepp still fails his own physical examination.
Beyond the immediate risk of the draft, money is tight and threatens to ground their operation. Joe turns to the head of the local War Relief organization, Captain Veronica Steadman, Gladys Cooper, and convinces her to let him run a “charity” casino, on the pretense of raising funds to outfit a relief ship. He promises the project will benefit those in need, even as his own cravings for money grow stronger. The scheme also brings him into contact with Dorothy Bryant, a fashionable and spirited woman whom he soon charms. Dorothy is introduced to Joe by force of circumstance, and she tells her snobbish grandfather with a spark of mischief that “Joe’s the first man I’ve ever met I’m afraid of. It’s exciting.” As she confides in him, she also testifies to the dangerous allure Joe has.
The intrigue deepens at the charity ball itself. Joe’s crew uses false bottoms in the cashboxes to skim most of the money, casting a shadow over the whole event. For a moment, Joe wrestles with a moral choice and tells his right-hand man, the Crunk, that the loot should go to war relief. But Zepp overhears and tightens his grip, forcing Joe at gunpoint to finish collecting the cash. Dorothy, witnessing the scene, mistakenly concludes that Joe is willingly taking part in the theft. To protect her, Joe knocks her unconscious, and the two men continue their loot-and-ship ploy. In the ensuing struggle, Joe fights Zepp and kills him, though not without taking a gunshot wound himself. He escapes, leaving behind a trail of blood, and he soon sends the stolen funds back to Dorothy through his trusted ally Swede. He then loads his ship with the charity’s supplies, aiming to deliver the relief goods where they’re needed most.
Dorothy learns the grim truth soon after: the man she believed Joe to be is dead—the body she sees in the photo is not him. The name on the ship that Bascopolus once worked on is mentioned, and Dorothy hurries to the dock in time to see the ship slip away toward Europe. She begs Joe to take her with him, but he insists she deserves a better life and withdraws, hiding his own heartbreak. The ship ultimately meets a grim fate at sea when it is torpedoed and sinks on the return voyage, and Dorothy later visits the pier each night, clinging to the memory of those distant hopes.
The flashback returns to the present, and Swede had hoped Dorothy would be waiting. When Joe arrives at the other end of the pier, he suggests they go out on the town to celebrate their last night in port instead of returning to the ship. A watchful guard tries to decide who should move the dinghy, and a coin flip becomes the arbiter of fate. Joe loses the flip, and as he walks toward the end of the dock, Dorothy rushes into his arms. He is visibly surprised, but he returns the embrace, even as Swede scrutinizes the coin—the coin that has a head on both sides, revealing that the fateful flip was never about luck, but about a deeper, carefully laid plan that may have already written their ending.
