Arlindo works delivering the clothes that his wife washes. During a working day, he finds a customer's cat, who offers a reward to whoever returns it. To deliver the animal, he ends up going through a lot of confusion.

Maos Sangrentas translates to Bloody Hands in English, and that's just what this gruesome Brazilian melodrama delivers. The story begins when a gang of dangerous convicts escape from a penal colony. With the police in hot pursuit, the escapees cut a gory swath through the countryside. As his comrades are killed off one by one, the leader of the group descends into gibbering madness. In contrast to this, a subplot develops involving the least dangerous of the escapees, who murdered his wife in a peak of self-righteous rage and is now seriously in doubt about the wisdom of his deed. Principal scenes reworked in 1962 to make the film The Violent and the Damned (q.v.).

A drama about double personality

When chain gang prisoners attack their guards, some of the hardened criminals escape Brazil's infamous Anchieta Prison amidst all the pick-ax carnage. The government dispatches a machine-gun squad to round up the fugitives, who have fled by foot and boat and now have begun to turn on each other.