Nick Stratton is attempting to find his own way in the world after returning home to San Francisco following a stint in the Army. His father Pete is a self-made millionaire and important in the Greek immigrant community. Pete loves his son, but he tries to buy his love and dominate his life like he does his employees and business associates. Nick struggles to assert his own identity, but family pressure and his love for his father are very strong. Pete wants Nick to marry a nice Greek girl, the daughter of a business associate. Nick and Guilietta Cameron, however, have already fallen deeply in love, though she is strangely reluctant to continue seeing Nick. He takes her as his date to his parents' wedding anniversary. Pete tells him in no uncertain terms that Guilietta is a prostitute, whose services Pete and many of his friends, who are present at the party, have purchased. Nick tries to give Guilietta up, but they are madly in love. Everywhere, they go they keep meeting her former clients. Guilietta does everything she can to drive him away, telling him he is just another "John" who now bores her, but she is lying to try to spare him pain. She is devastated when she succeeds. When she sees him in a bar where she has gone with a former client, she deliberately flirts outrageously with every man in the place. Nick gets into a fight dragging men off her and is arrested. In anguish, Giulietta steals a simple, white dress hanging from a clothesline, hanging her boa scarf in its place. She goes home, puts on the dress and jumps over the balcony to her death in the sea far below. Nick enters the apartment and looks for Giulietta. He hears a commotion and spots a body face down in the water. Shocked Fisherman pull Giulietta from the water and lay her on the beach. Nick runs through the crowd and embraces her briefly, but the police pull him off as a blanket is laid over her face. Seeing Pete, a distraught Nick tells Pete that Giulietta should have known he would go back for her.
Upon its release, Bosley Crowther gave the film a scathing review: "Here is a film that its producer — not the censor, not anybody else; just its producer — should have taken out and burned." According to MGM records the film recorded a loss of $1,462,000.
