Plot
Steve Taggart is a Los Angeles sports writer who becomes obsessed with gambling. He volunteers to do a series of articles for the newspaper on a compulsive gambler he calls "Mr. Green," who is, in fact, himself.
Taggart gets deeper and deeper into debt, compounding his problems with associated loan sharks, including the dangerous Dutchman.
The complications spill over into Taggart's personal life, as when he brings his daughter to the racetrack and is physically assaulted by a bookie to whom he owes money. Taggart's newspaper editor (John Saxon) loves the series he's been running and has been advancing the writer considerable money, still unaware that Taggart is actually the risk-addicted Mr. Green.
Taggart goes to Gamblers Anonymous to try to get straight, also becoming acquainted with Las Vegas high-roller Charley Peru to try to get even and also get the Dutchman off his back.
To celebrate kicking his gambling habit, Taggart goes right back to the dice tables, where his solution to getting out of debt turns out to be continuing to gamble until he can win all the money he needs.
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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)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
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something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“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)