Plot
The story is set in Dearborn, Michigan, during the 1950s, and revolves around sixteen-year-old Arthur Bartley (DeWilde) and his schoolmates, fifteen-year-old Janet Willard (Lynley) and Ernie (Berlinger). While widower's-daughter Janet laughs at Arthur and Ernie's forays into smoking, drinking, and playing cards, she's always been interested in Arthur, and as Arthur's parents try to shelter him from negative things in life (like the euthanasia of the family dog, done while he's at school), he turns to Janet for comfort.
The relationship between Janet and Arthur results in her becoming pregnant. Unable to ask their parents (who misinterpret their pleas as "ordinary" teenage curiosity about sex and adulthood) for help, they turn to Ernie, who'd boasted earlier about "helping a sailor who got his girl in trouble" by directing him to an abortionist – only to discover Ernie made it all up, based on secondhand stories. The three seek together to arrange an abortion and raise the funds, only to be discovered by their parents at the last moment. In the meantime, Arthur and Janet find out how much they do not yet know about life – and how much they truly care about each other.
Read more about this topic: Blue Denim
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)