Plot
Billy Behan is a poor 15-year-old kid in the 1930s Bronx. After the wealthy gangster Dutch Schultz takes him under his wing, Billy adopts the name of a neighborhood street and begins to work for the organization.
Billy is taught the ropes by Dutch's business associate Otto Berman and given menial chores. Dutch, meanwhile, is busy trying to beat a rap in court and also determine whether his partner Bo Weinberg has been betraying him. Even though he likes Bo, it is Billy who eventually helps prove that Bo lied about his whereabouts.
Dutch and his thugs take Bo captive and prepare to send him to a watery grave. Dutch proceeds to claim the attentions of beautiful Drew Preston, a married young socialite Bo has been seeing who clearly has a weakness for powerful, dangerous men.
Facing a court case in an upstate New York rural community, Dutch brings along his "protege" Billy and the sophisticated lady Drew to put up a front of respectability, ingratiating himself to the locals with good manners and money. While his boss Dutch stands trial, Billy's job is to keep an eye on Drew, a free spirit who likes having Billy's eye on her as she bathes nude in the woods.
Billy falls for her and admires his new boss, at least until witnessing first-hand exactly how ruthless a criminal Dutch really is. Unable to intervene on Bo's behalf, the best Billy can do in the end is try to save Drew's life and his own.
Read more about this topic: Billy Bathgate (film)
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)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)