Plot
Peacetime sailor John J. Baggs is unable to get paid or receive new orders because somehow the U.S. Navy has lost his file. He is able to come and go from the base until curfew.
One night in a bar, he spots an attractive woman hustling guys at a pool table. He challenges her himself and develops an interest in the woman, Maggie, who turns out to be a prostitute living in a tenement with a young black son, Doug.
Baggs begins spending time with Maggie at the apartment, where Doug is often left to fend for himself. His attempts at creating a normal life for her succeed for a while, but Maggie cannot change the way she is. Doug, suspicious and cynical at first, bonds with Baggs, who devotes his free time to the kid and even gets his teeth fixed. But both know that soon Baggs will be reassigned and gone for good.
The Navy's mix-up continues to baffle Baggs until one day a veteran sailor named Forshay not only finds the file, but volunteers to change places with Baggs and ship out under a false name. Baggs and Doug may not have Maggie around any more, but they've got each other.
Read more about this topic: Cinderella Liberty
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)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)