Plot
Mary Dwight Stauber (Bette Davis), a nightclub hostess who works for the notorious gangster Johnny Vanning (Eduardo Ciannelli) briefly meets and befriends a young man (Damian O'Flynn) who confides in her that he does not have the money to repay the gambling debt he has accrued during the night. He feels that it's a game, but Mary warns him that he is in real danger. She is shocked, but not surprised to learn soon after that he has been murdered, by Vanning's henchman Charlie Delaney (Ben Welden).
Questioned by prosecutor David Graham (Humphrey Bogart), Mary and the other women refuse to implicate Vanning. They fear his retribution, and while privately detesting him are powerless to free themselves from his influence. Mary's younger sister Betty (Jane Bryan) comes to visit, and unaware of the dangerous situation she has entered, behaves recklessly against the advice of her older sister. When she is killed, Mary agrees to testify against the gangster. Beaten by his thugs, scarred and disfigured, she becomes the "marked woman" of the film's title, but rather than silencing her, it strengthens her resolve to testify. Aware that they can only be free of the gangster if they find the strength to stand against him, the other women agree to testify also.
Read more about this topic: Marked Woman
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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)
“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)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)