During a typically disaster-filled day, Ben Harris, an angry and frustrated bachelor mailman living in a cluttered Greenwich Village basement, learns he has been paying rent to a woman who hasn't owned his building in 6 years. No longer able to endure the injustices of society, he decides to activate the ferocious tiger within himself by abducting a helpless female and dragging her back to his lair.

This pioneering film in the history of African-American cinema, released two years before "A Raisin In The Sun", is the coming-of-age story of a Black high-school student living in a middle-class white neighborhood in the late '50s.