Plot
Conflicted, light-skinned Sergeant Waters (Adolph Caesar) ruthlessly heaps abuse upon his men. He calls them names, but he especially relishes torturing the jovial and highly talented C.J. Memphis (Larry Riley). Sergent Waters especially cannot stand the light-hearted behavior from the fellow black men in the platoon.
When Waters is killed, there are plenty of suspects for Captain Davenport (Howard E. Rollins, Jr.) to investigate. Some soldiers also believe that Sergeant Waters was killed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Art Evans plays Private Wilkie, a nervous man too acquiescent for his own good. David Alan Grier plays C.J.'s closest friend, bonded by their Mississippi roots. Denzel Washington, in one of his earliest motion picture roles, portrays the deeply embittered Pfc. Peterson.
Read more about this topic: A Soldier's Story
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)