Plot
The film begins with 21-year-old Toni Simmons trudging across the road at night to mail a letter. Toni then returns to her apartment and attempts to gas herself using a "second-hand" stove. Fortunately, her neighbor, Igor Sullivan, smells the gas and rescues her from imminent death using rescue breathing, which evolves into a French kiss after Toni regains consciousness.
The movie then explores the reasons for the suicide attempt. Toni's lover Julian, a dentist and philanderer, had previously avoided commitment by telling Toni he had a wife and two kids. Upon learning of Toni's suicide attempt, he decides to marry Toni, resulting in his need for a wife to divorce in order to sustain his earlier alibi. Julian asks Stephanie Dickinson, his longtime dental assistant, to pose as his wife. At first unwilling, she ultimately relents, since she has long nurtured a crush on her employer.
Upon meeting Miss Dickinson, Toni senses Miss Dickinson's feelings for Julian and asks Julian to help Miss Dickinson find another man, so that everyone would be happy. Julian's friend Harvey, one Señor Arturo Sánchez, and Igor, Toni's upstairs neighbor, all become implicated in Julian's scheme. Ultimately, Toni suspects Julian and leaves him for Igor, leaving Julian to finally fall in love with Miss Dickinson.
The prickly cactus Miss Dickinson keeps on her desk in the office gives the film its name. Like Miss Dickinson, the symbolic cactus thrives in the driest of settings. By film's end, however, both cactus and Miss Dickinson have "bloomed".
Read more about this topic: Cactus Flower (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)