Plot
Con artist Latigo Smith is on board a train traveling across frontier-era Colorado, with his would-be fiancée, a rich and powerful woman named Goldie. Looking for a way to escape this situation, he manages to slip off the train at a jerkwater stop, and finds himself in Purgatory, a small town wherein two rival companies of miners, led by Taylor Barton and Colonel Ames, are in a frantic round-the-clock race to find "the motherlode" of gold buried somewhere under the town.
After consulting the town doctor about getting an embarrassing Goldie-related tattoo removed, Latigo succumbs to a gambling compulsion and loses all his money at roulette. After hearing a rumor that an infamous gunslinger named "Swifty" Morgan is expected in town, Latigo concocts a scam, using the amiable ne'er-do-well Jug May to impersonate the man. In the process of this, the new arrival attracts the attention of Patience "The Sidewinder" Barton, the hot-tempered daughter of Taylor, who wants nothing more than to escape the town and become a woman of refinement in New York City (Miss Hunter's College on the Hudson River, New York, for young ladies of good families). When Latigo and the fake Swifty side with the Bartons, Ames sends a telegram to the real gunslinger, informing him of the impostor.
Swifty soon arrives in town. Latigo has replaced Jug for the climactic gunfight and sits atop a jackass-load of dynamite, attempting to bluff the gunfighter. The show-down ends with one of the massive mining blasts that regularly rock the town. Swifty is startled and accidentally shoots himself in the foot, and the panicked jackass, with Latigo aboard, blows up in the saloon. This blast uncovers the mother lode for the Bartons, and also burns off Latigo's troublesome tattoo.
Latigo's gambling compulsion finally pays off when, financially backed by the Bartons, he wins big at roulette (he played the number "23 black" in all three bets that he made in the movie), betting $10,000 on the final outcome. Now almost as rich as Patience, he marries her. According to a monologue delivered by Jug from the back of a train at the end of the movie, Morgan is still trying to get his boot off, Patience doesn't get to go to the school in New York that she had mentioned in the movie, but sends her seven daughters to that school, and Jug goes on to "become a big star in Italian westerns."
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“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)