Plot
When gymnastics school teacher Caroline (Glynis Johns) goes on holiday at her family's home in Cornwall, she meets her distant mermaid relative Miranda, who looks exactly like her. She agrees to let Miranda trade places with her, while she goes on a bicycling trip with a friend. Caroline feigns an accident which leaves her confined to a wheelchair for a few weeks and gets nurse Carey to attend to Miranda. This conceals the fact that Miranda has a fish tail instead of legs.
Caroline is engaged to Ronald Baker (Peter Martyn), but when he shows up, Miranda does not like him at all. She decides to make Caroline a better match. She flirts outrageously with two eligible bachelors, Jeff Saunders (Donald Sinden) and Colonel Barclay Sutton (Nicholas Phipps), right in front of Ronald. When she discovers that Ronald works in the government sanitation department (and approves of dumping garbage into the ocean), she dumps a tureen of cold soup on his head.
Meanwhile, Barbara Davenport (Anne Crawford), the colonel's fiance, takes an understandable dislike to Miranda. While out swimming, she discovers Miranda's secret and arranges for "Caroline" to sing at a charity concert, plotting to reveal her true nature. Caroline reads about the forthcoming concert during her holiday, guesses what Barbara intends, and rushes back to take Miranda's place, foiling Barbara's scheme.
Afterward, Jeff takes Caroline boating. When he tries to kiss her, she resists at first, then willingly gives in, while a somewhat sad Miranda watches.
Read more about this topic: Mad About Men
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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)
“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)
“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)