Plot
The Earl and Countess of Rhyall (Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr) are facing financial troubles and are therefore forced to permit guided tours of their stately home.
A suave, somewhat obnoxious American oil tycoon, Charles Delacro (Robert Mitchum), barges into the lady of the manor's private quarters, either deliberately or by mistake. He introduces himself, explaining the family name was originally "Delacroix" but his grandfather tired of Americans pronouncing the "X" in the name.
Delacro's attentions to the Countess turn her head. Rather than behave jealously, the Earl invites the American to come visit, along with an equally grating ex-girlfriend of Lord Rhyall's, the American heiress Hattie Durant (Jean Simmons).
A love triangle (or quadrangle) soon develops, kicking off a tale of love, jealousy and other strong emotions that eventually leads the gentlemen to a duel with pistols.
Read more about this topic: The Grass Is Greener
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)
“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)
“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)