Plot
The picture tells of Roy "Mad Dog" Earle (Jack Palance), an aging bank robber who intends to pull off one last heist before retiring.
Sprung from prison by crime boss Big Mac (Lon Chaney Jr.), Earle agrees to plan the robbery of a resort hotel. His partners include the hotheaded Babe (Lee Marvin), Red (Earl Holliman), and Louis Mendoza (Perry Lopez), as the "inside man." Along for the ride is Marie (Shelley Winters), a dance-hall girl whom Babe recently met.
Marie falls in love with Earle, but he is more interested in Velma (Lori Nelson), the club-footed daughter of a farmer (Ralph Moody) whom Earle had earlier befriended.
Intending to use his share of the loot to pay for Velma's needed operation, Earle goes through with the robbery, only to be thwarted by the ineptitude of his gang, the treachery of the late Big Mac's successors, and the fickle Velma.
With the still faithful Marie by his side, Earle makes a desperate escape into the High Sierras, but noir fate is against him.
Read more about this topic: I Died A Thousand Times
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“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)
“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)