Plot
Wealthy Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) is falsely accused of breaking up a marriage and sues the New York Evening Star newspaper for $5,000,000 for libel. Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy), the managing editor, turns in desperation to former reporter and suave ladies' man Bill Chandler (William Powell) for help. His scheme is to maneuver Connie into being alone with him when his wife shows up, so the suit will have to be dropped. Chandler is not married, so Warren volunteers his long-suffering fiancée, Gladys Benton (Jean Harlow), over her loud protests.
Bill arranges to return to America from England on the same ocean liner as Connie and her father J. B. (Walter Connolly). He pays some men to pose as reporters and harass Connie at the dock, so that he can "rescue" her and become acquainted. On the voyage, Connie initially treats him with contempt, assuming that he is just the latest in a long line of fortune hunters after her money, but Bill gradually overcomes her suspicions.
Complications arise when Connie and Bill actually fall in love. They get married, but Gladys decides that she prefers Bill to a marriage-averse newspaperman and interrupts their honeymoon to reclaim her husband. Bill reveals that he found out that Gladys' Mexican divorce wasn't valid, but then Gladys tops him. She got a second divorce, and she and Bill are actually man and wife. Fortunately, Connie and Bill manage to show Gladys that she really loves Warren.
Read more about this topic: Libeled Lady
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)
“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)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)