Plot
Jimmy Valentine is the alias of an infamous safe cracker who has just been sentenced to prison for four years for his crimes. He does not stay locked up for long, though, as he is released after ten months. When he is released, he packs his state of the art, custom robbery tools and commits several more robberies. Ben Price, the detective who put him away the first time is called to the case, but although he knows it is Jimmy, (because of the style the crimes were committed with.) he cannot find him. Jimmy has actually fled and he is currently in the small town of Elmore, Arkansas, with plans to rob the local bank there.
However, he finds himself love struck by the banker's beautiful daughter, Annabel Thomas, and begins to fall in love with her. In order to get such a beautiful girl, he decides to turn over a new leaf and give up his criminal career and take another alias, Ralph D. Spencer. "Ralph" opens a shoe making store and is very successful in doing so. He even begins to like his new life, and easily wins Annabel's heart, becoming engaged to her. He writes a letter to an old friend, and tells him to meet him in Little Rock, where he will give him his robbery tools he doesn't need anymore. On the day of the exchange, however, the banker shows the town his new safe, that cannot be broken into. Annabel's nieces are amazed at the sheer size of it, and begin to walk in and out of it.
Unfortunately, one accidentally shuts the door, locking the other inside. Everyone panics, as the banker has not set the combination yet, and Annabelle begs "Ralph" to do something. This is hard for Valentine, as Ben Price has also tracked him down, and watches to see his decision. As Jimmy has tried so hard to start over, he finds himself making a very difficult decision. However, he decides that there is only so much air in the safe, and if he does not take action, the terrified child may suffocate. Valentine pulls out his bag of tools and breaks the safe open in a matter of seconds, amazing the banker, and saving the child. (He ironically broke his own record in his haste.) Jimmy knows that since he has revealed his identity, he must leave. As he is leaving, he decides that he may as well go to prison and he surrenders to Ben. However, Ben, who knows that Valentine has truly changed, tells Jimmy he should go to Little Rock, and leaves, pretending that he never saw him.
Read more about this topic: Alias Jimmy Valentine
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)
“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)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)