***SPOILERS*** Dean Clark as armature painter and professional boxer Michael Gordon aka Mike Angelo does a pretty good imitation of the actor that he very obviously styled himself after, and was in a number of films together with, the great John Garfield in the 1948 film noir boxing movie "Whiplash". The movie "Whiplash" is very much like Garfield's "Body & Soul" that was released just a year earlier in 1947.
Mike gets himself involved with Laurie Durant, Alexis Smith, after she buys one of his paintings that his friend bar owner Sam, S.Z Skall, sold her for $75.00 without his permission. Mike in fact felt that Lourie was suckered into buying his painting but soon discovered from Laurie that he in fact had talent as a painter, which he felt he didn't, which in turn had him fall heads over heels in love with her. It was later when Laurie disappeared from sight that Mike tracked her down all the way from California to New York City and found out that she's a nightclub singer and married to big time mobster and former middleweight boxing contender Rex Durant, Zachary Scott.
Durant had lost the use of his legs in a car smash up now wants Mike who proved to him in what a hard puncher he is, by Mike knocking out the fighter he manages Duke Carney played by ex-professional boxer Freddie Steel, to win the middleweight boxing title that his accident preventing Durant from winning in the ring. At first reluctant to enter the ring Mike dubbed as Mike Angelo "The Battling Artist" by the local sports writers works his way to the top by knocking out a string of worthy opponents to get a title shot at middleweight crown held by the present middleweight champion Duke Carney! The very person who Mike knocked cold at the start of the movie! During all this Mike finds out that not only is Laurie married to mobster Rex Durant but that Durant had something over her in the circumstances that lead to him losing his legs. It was Laurie's doctor brother Arnold Vincent, Jeffery Lynn, who at Laurie's insistence operated on Rex and ended up blotching the operation!
***SPOILERS*** Exciting and power packed fight sequence, at the start and end of the movie, with Mike who was suffering from a serious brain concussion slugging it out with Carney in the ring with a drunk and barley conscious Dr. Arnold Vincent trying to prevent or stop the fight before Mike, with a solid punch to the head by Carney, ends up dead from a brain hemorrhage!
It's at the very end of the film that both Rex Durant and his #1 henchman the brutal Mr. Costello, Douglas Kennedy, get exactly what's coming to them not from Mike but from Dr.Arnold Vincent whom they left for dead when he tried to save Mike's life. In what has to be the most shocking scene in the movie Rex Durant ends up together with his wheelchair smashed to pieces when he loses control of it after the person pushing it, Mr. Costello, gets shot from behind by a dying Arnold Vincent! That wheelchair scene was far better then the one that's always talked about from the film "Kiss of Death" that made actor Richard Whitmark literally a star overnight!
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