Plot
Will Mossop (John Mills) is a gifted but unappreciated bootmaker employed by the tyrannical Henry Horatio Hobson (Charles Laughton) in his moderately upscale shop in 1880s Salford. Hard-drinking widower Hobson has three daughters. Maggie (Brenda De Banzie) and her younger sisters Alice (Daphne Anderson) and Vicky (Prunella Scales) have worked in their father's establishment without wages and are eager to be married and free of the shop. Alice has been seeing Albert Prosser (Richard Wattis), a young up-and-coming solicitor, while Vicky prefers Freddy Beenstock (Derek Blomfield), the son of a respectable corn merchant. Hobson does not object to losing Alice and Vicky, but Maggie is far too useful to part with. To his friends, he mocks Maggie as a spinster "a bit on the ripe side" at 30 years of age.
Her pride injured, Maggie bullies the browbeaten, unambitious Willie into an engagement. When Hobson objects to her choice of his own lowly employee as husband and refuses to start paying her, Maggie announces that she and Willie will set up in a shop of their own. For capital, they turn to a satisfied customer for a loan. With money in hand, they are married, and, between Maggie's business sense and Willie's shoemaking genius, the enterprise is successful. Within a year, they have not only paid off their business loan, but have also taken away nearly all of Hobson's clientele. Under Maggie's tutelage, the formerly illiterate Willie has become an educated, self-confident man of business, and he and Maggie have fallen in love.
When Hobson's drinking finally catches up with him, Dr. MacFarlane (John Laurie) sends for Maggie to care for the ailing, bedridden man. At her urging, Mossop offers to go into partnership with Hobson, on condition that Hobson take no further part in the business. After a tussle over the name to be used, Hobson reluctantly agrees.
Read more about this topic: Hobson's Choice (1954 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“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)