A hurricane swells outside, but that is nothing compared to the storm that rages inside the hotel at Key Largo. There, sadistic mobster Johnny Rocco holes up. He holds at gunpoint the hotel owner Nora Temple, her invalid father-in-law and ex-GI Frank McCloud. McCloud's the one man capable of standing up against the belligerent Rocco. But postwar world realities may have taken all the fight out of him.