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."
Read more about this topic: Support Your Local Gunfighter
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)
“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)
“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)