Plot
Manhattan press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) has been unable to get his clients mentioned in J.J. Hunsecker's (Burt Lancaster) influential, nationally syndicated newspaper column of late because of Falco's failure to make good on a promise to break up the romance between Hunsecker's younger sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and musician Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), an up-and-coming jazz guitarist.
Falco is losing money and clients. Given one last chance by the bullying, intimidating Hunsecker, he schemes to plant a false rumor in a rival column that Dallas is a dope-smoking Communist, then encourages Hunsecker to rescue Dallas's reputation, certain that the headstrong boyfriend will reject Hunsecker's favor and end up looking bad to Susan.
The plan works, in a way -- Dallas can't resist insulting Hunsecker's methods, and, forced to choose between them, the timid Susan breaks up with Dallas in order to protect him from her brother. Hunsecker, however, is enraged by Dallas's insults to him after a brief confrontation. He decides to ruin the boy after all (against Falco's advice) and wants to have marijuana planted on the musician, then have him arrested and roughed up by corrupt police Lt. Harry Kello (Emile Meyer).
It is such a dirty trick that even Falco wants no part of it, at least until Hunsecker promises to take a long vacation from his powerful column and turn it over to Falco in his absence. At a nightclub, Falco slips the marijuana cigarettes into a pocket of a coat belonging to Dallas, who is accosted by Kello outside the club.
Falco is summoned to Hunsecker's penthouse apartment, only to find Susan there by herself and about to attempt suicide. He grabs her just as her brother walks in, but Hunsecker, encouraged by Susan's silence, accuses Falco of trying to assault Susan.
In a climactic confrontation, Falco reveals to Susan that it was her brother who ordered him to destroy Dallas's reputation and their relationship. Hunsecker makes a call to Kello to come after Falco, who tries to flee but is caught in Times Square by the brutal cop.
Back in the penthouse, Susan, her bags packed, admits to her brother that she attempted to commit suicide, considering death preferable to living with JJ. She walks out on him, saying that she will go to Dallas and tells Hunsecker that she pities, rather than hates him.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“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)
“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)