Vinnie’s a bookie, happily married, running his operation for 30 years out of his bar in Brooklyn. Times change, the boys up the chain want a bigger profit, so Vinnie’s expendable He’s assigned a hotheaded kid, Tony, the nephew of a local mobster. Vinnie’s told to school the lad, use him for collections, and teach him some sense. What Vinnie doesn’t know is that once Tony learns the ropes, Vinnie will be out. Tensions mount when Tony goes around Vinnie’s paternalistic ways, takes a bet from an unemployed alcoholic, and demands that the loser’s wife pay the vig in trade. Is there any way out for Vinnie – with or without his good name?
The Horatio Alger parable gets the film noir treatment with the redoubtable Edmund O’Brien as a whip-smart telephone technician who moves up the ladder of a Syndicate gambling empire in Southern California until distracted by an inconveniently married Joanne Dru and his own greed. Ripped from the headlines of the 1950 Kevaufer Organized Crime Hearings, this fast-moving picture is laden with location sequences shot in Los Angeles, the Hoover Dam and Palm Springs including the famous Doll House watering hole on North Palm Canyon Drive!
A veteran bookie struggles to survive the impending legalization of sports gambling, increasingly unstable clients, family, co-workers, and a lifestyle that bounces him around every corner of Los Angeles, high and low.