It starts with Japanese commander Walter Randall interrogating three British prisoners of war, demanding information on their regiments and dispositions. Two refuse to answer and have their hands chopped off. We don't see what happens to the third. Then, fifteen years later, one-handed men are being killed or committing suicide. Scotland Yard gets involved, hunting down a man called 'Roberts'.
It's a nasty movie about nasty people doing nasty things to each other, with some hints of psychology in the story, but mostly just sadism for the audience. The police are baffled, then get a break and then close in on their desperate quarry. It's hardly the sort of thing you'd have expected Henry Cass to be directing at this stage of his career, judging by what he had been working on a decade earlier.
Cass was born in 1903, and by th time he was 20, he was not only acting at the Old Vic, he appeared in one of Lee Deforest's sound films. By 1934, he was directing at the Old Vic, and he made his debut as a movie director in 1937. He peaked as a director in the early 1950s with LAST HOLIDAY, a bitter view of how to get ahead by not caring, starring Alec Guinness with a script by J.B. Priestley. Three more fine comedies came out over the next two years, then a break, and when he came back it was all programmers and second features. He directed his last movie in 1968 and died in 1989.