Detective Dan Madigan (Richard Widmark) runs roughshod over the police rule book--and over anyone who gets in his way during an intensive 72-hour police manhunt for a hit man. His superior officer, Commissioner Anthony Russell (Henry Fonda), lives by--and for--the book as he copes with the workday problems of police administrative work. These two men's lives come together when the psychotic is cornered in a Manhattan tenement by a police raiding squad led by Madigan and Russell--a confrontation that only one of the two men will survive.