An aspiring country singer, whose money is disappearing faster than his career opportunities, enters a "Tough Man" amateur boxing contest to earn some cash to pay his bills. Amazingly enough, he wins it, and is picked to go onto the national finals. He's torn between his first love, music, and the glitz, glamor and money of the "Tough Man" world.

This Universal programmer was based on a Collier's Magazine story by journalist Quentin Reynolds. This story in turn was ostensibly based on a true incident, in which a gangster "returned from the dead" to save an innocent young man from the electric chair. The nurse of the film's title is Katharine McDonald, who falls in love with her prizefighter-patient Lee Burke as he recovers from a beating received in a fixed prizefight. Katharine must fend off the advances of criminal attorney John Dodge, another patient who also loves her and becomes jealous of Lee. But when Lee is framed for the murder of his disgruntled manager, Slice, by a henchman of the fight-fix leader, Joe Largo, Dodge takes on his defense and works with Katherine to discover the real killer. Convicted and sentenced to death, Burke is about to walk the "last mile", as Katharine encourages mortally wounded Largo to a deathbed confession.

Rocky IV is dually symbolic - it embodies both the victory of the American boxer over the Soviet one and the victory of neo-liberalism over a dwindling socialism. Today, Rocky is held up as a model by some and is a subject of derision for others. An emblem of the 1980s, its culture and its heroes, the film will be the subject of an entertaining analysis of popular culture.