Plot
Bo Gillis is a guitar-playing good old boy from a Southern state who is a candidate for governor there. He ends up elected after his opponent's wife is revealed to have a dark secret, a fact that Bo's campaign mastermind, Sylvester Marin, makes sure becomes known to all.
Shortly before the election, Bo goes to a nightclub where he is introduced to Ada Dallas, a working girl. They share a similar upbringing and Bo feels an immediate bond. They elope, much to the chagrin of the candidate's speechwriter, Steve, and the cynical Sylvester, who wants the marriage annulled.
The Gillises resist and begin life as the state's first couple. Soon the governor finds that he is little more than a stooge, blindly signing whatever document Sylvester puts before him. His childhood friend Ronnie is dismissed as lieutenant governor for speaking out. Sylvester requests help from Ada in controlling her husband, but the state's ambitious First Lady demands something quite outrageous in return — to be named the new lieutenant governor.
Bo is furious. He wanted Ada to be his refuge from dirty politics, not a part of it. He continues to oppose Sylvester's methods, which leads to a bomb being placed in the governor's car. In the hospital, Bo tells Ada that he believes her to be a conspirator in his attack.
Ada is sworn in as acting governor. Quickly, though, she goes to work against Sylvester, promoting her husband's ideas for honest government. On the day of a decisive vote at the state Capitol building, as Bo views from the gallery, Sylvester and his henchman Yancey try to sabotage Ada's plans by revealing evidence of her past as a prostitute. Bo speaks up on his wife's behalf. Sylvester is ruined, and Bo and Ada walk away from the Capitol side by side.
Read more about this topic: Ada (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)