Sergeant Grimshaw wants to retire in the flush of success by winning the Star Squad prize with his very last platoon of newly called-up National Servicemen. But what a motley bunch they turn out to be, and it's up to Grimshaw to put the no-hopers through their paces.

Kerwin Matthews, playing a dissolute drifter down on his luck, is stranded in a cheap bar in France where he falls for Annette, the pretty daughter of the proprietor, played by Nadia Gray. Nadia Gray gradually shifts the young man's attentions to herself, rather than her daughter, and together Matthews and Gray concoct a plot to help Gray's estranged husband, now a homicidal maniac confined in an institution after a grisly series of killings dubbed "The Acetylene Murders" by the press, out of the mental institution so he can escape from the country.

A little Roman Catholic boy and a little Jewish girl become fast friends despite the prejudice that surrounds them.