Plot
A local thief, Cosimo, is arrested for the attempted theft of a car. After he is sentenced and put in prison, he begins immediately on his escape by telling his partners that he has a plan for a heist but that he needs their help to be freed. In order to assure his release, they find an acquaintance named Peppe with a clean criminal record to take blame for the theft in the hopes that the police will release Cosimo. They instead have both of them jailed. While Peppe is in jail, Cosimo tells him the plans for the heist of a safe in a pawnshop. After revealing the plans, Peppe reveals that he got off merely with probation, leaving him free to pursue the heist without him, much to the chagrin of Cosimo.
The heist entails the following: as the pawnshop is adjacent to a vacant apartment, they must first break into a small courtyard, climb onto the roof of another small apartment, and break in through a window of the vacant home. To accomplish this, they enlist the help of another local thief that is an expert on safes who tells them of a plan (similar to that of the film Rififi, released a few years prior in 1955) to silence the alarm of the safe that they may break into it safely. While everything is planned, they discover that the vacant apartment has just become occupied by two spinsters and their young, attractive maid. Peppe learns from the young maid, with whom he flirts, that the two women never leave their apartment except on Thursday night. After arranging a date with the girl on this particular day, the group is distressed to learn that she has quit her job and the women may in fact be there on Thursday night.
Meanwhile, a number of misfortunes are incurred by the group: Cosimo, who had since been released from jail, dies in a botched robbery; Mario, another of the group, bails on the plan in favor of a legitimate life for the sake of a beautiful girl, while another of the group is partially crippled after being attacked by the man whose camera he stole earlier for the purpose of daytime reconnaissance of the pawnshop. Despite this, they proceed with the plan anyway after learning that the women will not be in the apartment. Notwithstanding a number of bumbling entries, they gain entry into the apartment. After first boring a hole through a water pipe, they are forced to staunch the flow of water while remaining quiet after a night porter enters the apartment to make a call. After these obstacles, they bore another hole, this time knocking out a portion of the wall, revealing another room in the same apartment as the flat was remodeled since the arrival of the new tenants while the men acted on the basis of the previous rooms' arrangement. After they realize their plan was miscalculated, they leave the apartment dejected - albeit as free men. Peppe then decides to find legitimate work, much to the surprise of an elderly member of the group. The film ends with a newspaper article recounting a robbery by unknown persons of an apartment for food (which the men had eaten after their plan had crumbled.)
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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)
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“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)