Plot
The story is set in 18th Century Spain. A beggar is imprisoned by a cruel marques after making inappropriate comments at the nobleman's wedding. The beggar is forgotten but manages to survive another fifteen years. His only human contact is with the jailer and his beautiful mute daughter (Yvonne Romain). The aging, decrepit Marques makes advances on the jailer's daughter when she is cleaning his room. When she refuses him, the Marques has her thrown into the dungeon with the beggar. The beggar, driven mad by his long confinement, rapes her and then dies.
The girl is released the next day and sent back up to "entertain" the Marques. Instead she kills the old man and flees. She is found in the forest by the kindly gentleman-scholar Don Alfredo Corledo (Clifford Evans) who lives alone with his housekeeper, Teresa (Hira Talfrey). The warm and motherly Teresa soon nurses the girl back to health, but she dies after giving birth to a baby on Christmas Day (a fact that Teresa considers "unlucky." since the child was born out of wedlock)
Alfredo and Teresa raise the young boy, whom they name Leon. Leon is cursed both by the evil circumstances of his birth and by being born on Christmas Day. An early hunting incident gives him a taste for blood which he must struggle to overcome. A number of goats are found dead, but a herder's dog is blamed.
Leon grows into a young man (Oliver Reed) and leaves home to seek work at the Gomez vineyard. Don Fernando Gomez (Ewen Solon) sets Leon to work in the wine cellar with Jose Amadayo (Martin Matthews) with whom he quickly forms a friendship. Leon soon falls in love with Fernando's daughter, Cristina (Catherine Feller), but grows depressed at the seeming impossibility of marrying her, and lets Jose take him to a nearby brothel, where he transforms and kills a woman and Jose, then returning to Alfredo's house. Too late, he learns that Cristina's loving presence prevents his transformation, and he is about to run away with her when he is arrested and jailed on suspicion of murder. He begs to be executed before he changes again, but the mayor refuses to believe him. His wolf nature rising to the surface, he breaks out of his cell, killing a prisoner and the guard. Shocked and disgusted by his appearance, the local people summon his scholarly step-father, who has obtained a silver bullet made from a crucifix blessed by an archbishop. Though torn with grief, Alfredo shoots Leon dead and covers his body with a cloak.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
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And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“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)