Plot
McMurphy (Bleir) comes to Denver, Colorado to see Polly Pry (Nessin) about the Packer case. As Pry leaves for her scheduled meeting with McMurphy, she is stalked and shot at by a gunman. The bullets hit her skirts and lessen the blows inflicted on her publishers behind her.
McMurphy and Pry meet in a tavern to discuss the Packer story over whiskey. She begins with the five prospectors who will become victims meeting up for the first time at a boardinghouse, where the landlady (Ruth Seder) tells them that Alfred Packer is the best guide in the area.
The men find Packer in a small prison, and pay his bail so that he can be their guide. They join together with the larger group, but are soon split up, and they get suckered into the hospitality of a trapper (Morgan) and his sidekick, Weasel (Farrar), who intend to rape George Noon (Dratfield).
Packer and the men escape, but get hopelessly lost in Ute territory. When Packer is scouting ahead, he returns to find that Shannon Wilson Bell (Haines), a Mormon missionary, has killed and begun to eat the other prospectors. Packer and Bell fight; Bell falls, landing on a knife, and is killed.
After several months, Packer comes out of the mountains into the nearest town and makes his report to General Adams (Don Donovan). Later, while at Dolan's Bar, his story having been investigated, he is captured and brought to trial. The remainder of the film depicts his trial. Judge Gerry (Sam Kirbens) reads his sentence as per the court records, though omitting the two consecutive repeats of "dead." As Packer walks through the courthouse door, a blue glow emanates from behind it, the image freezes, and, in voiceover and overlain title cards, Pry briefly summarizes what happened to Packer after the trial.
Read more about this topic: The Legend Of Alfred Packer
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)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“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)