Plot
In what is being billed as "The Race of the Ages," the new forty-million-dollar “radio powered” ocean liner S.S. Gigantic (“America’s Challenge for Crossing Record”) is about to race its rival, the slightly smaller S.S. Colossal across the Atlantic from New York’s Pier 97 to Cherbourg in two-and-a-half days. Gigantic owner T. Frothingill “T.F.” Bellows (W.C. Fields) intends to send his nearly identical younger brother S.B. (also Fields) to sail aboard the Colossal, hoping he will cause trouble and sabotage the rival ship, enabling the Gigantic and his own Bellows Line to win.
However S.B., who is held back due to a golf game, ends up flying over the ocean to meet the Colossal en route and mistakenly lands aboard the deck of the Gigantic instead, much to the consternation of Captain Stafford (Russell Hicks). Matters are made worse for the Gigantic when S.B.’s outrageously unlucky daughter Martha (Martha Raye) is brought onboard, being rescued after surviving the shipwreck of the yacht, Hesperus V.
Popular OBC radio emcee Buzz Fielding (Bob Hope), who has just been released from “alimony jail” and is broadcasting live from the Gigantic, is trying to juggle his three ex-wives Cleo (Shirley Ross), Grace (Grace Bradley), and Joan (Lorna Gray); his lukewarm girlfriend Dorothy Wyndham (Dorothy Lamour); and his inept microphone assistant Mike (Ben Blue). Buzz does his best throughout the voyage to announce the progress of the race and introduce a series of musical acts for the pleasure of the passengers and OBC’s radio audience.
Meanwhile Dorothy is romanced by First Officer (and inventor of the Gigantic’s enormous radio power plant) Robert Hayes (Leif Erickson), just as Buzz and Joan get sentimental about their broken marriage.
Read more about this topic: The Big Broadcast Of 1938
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)
“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)
“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)