Director-writer Andrew L. Stone’ (“Julie”/”The Steel Trap”/”Confidence Girl”) film noir is an ill-conceived attempt at making a realistic thriller about a mad bomber extorting money in a terrorist plot. There are too many implausible occurrences for the narrative to handle and it all falls apart in the climactic hysterical underground subway chase scene, which yields to Hollywood melodrama. It was filmed in b/w on location in NYC.

James Mason plays Jim Molner, a meek family man who works as a television repairman in an electronics shop. He’s duped into building a small bomb filled with RDX by the diabolical bespectacled Paul Hoplin (Rod Steiger), a former Army demolition man, who says it’s for a lucrative Army contract (hard to believe any rational person being fooled by that come-on). Jim’s family, his nervous wife Joan (Inger Stevens) and precious preschool daughter Patty (Terry Ann Ross), are held hostage as they are coerced to participate in an extortion plot to get half a million dollars from the 20th Century Airlines. Gang leader Paul is the mastermind behind the scheme, whose other gang members are career criminal Vince (Jack Klugman), convicted rapist Steve (Neville Brand) and the bomb planter Eileen Kelly (Angie Dickinson).