After learning that her boyfriend, a GI in Korea, has found someone else, Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) impulsively agrees to meet womanizer Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) for dinner. Norah allows herself to get drunk and accept Prebble's invitation to his apartment. When he tries to force himself on her, she hits him with a poker. Unfortunately, Prebble is found dead the next morning, and Norah, not even remembering how she got home, thinks that she killed him. Meanwhile, newspaperman Casey Mayo (Richard Conte), looking for an angle, invites the "Blue Gardenia Murderess" to turn herself in to him. The high point of the film is the interplay between the vulnerable Baxter and Burr at his smarmiest.