Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman & a straightforward man with a strong sense of decency & of honour. For Eddie it's a privilege to take in his wife's cousins straight off the boat from Italy. But as his niece begins to fall for one of them it's clear that it's not just as Eddie claims that he's too strange too sissy too careless for her but that something bigger deeper is wrong & wrong inside Eddie in a way he can't face. Something which threatens the happiness of their whole family.