Plot
David Burke (Ed Begley) is a former policeman who was ruined when he refused to cooperate with state crime investigators. He has asked hard-bitten, racist, ex-con Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) to help him rob an upstate bank, promising him $50,000 if the robbery is successful. Burke also recruits Johnny Ingram (Belafonte), a nightclub entertainer who doesn’t want the job but who is addicted to gambling and is in debt.
Slater, who is supported by his girlfriend, Lorry (Shelley Winters), finds out Ingram is black and refuses the job. Later, he realizes that he needs the money, and joins Ingram and Burke in the enterprise.
Tensions between Ingram and Slater increase as they near completion of the crime. Burke is seen by a police officer leaving the scene of the raid, and is mortally wounded in the ensuing shootout with local police, so he commits suicide by shooting himself. Slater is cavalier about the death of Burke, which incenses Ingram. Ingram and Slater escape and run into a nearby fuel storage depot. They chase after each other on the top of the fuel tanks. They exchange gunfire and ignite the fuel tanks and cause an large explosion. Afterwards, their corpses are indistinguishable.
Read more about this topic: Odds Against Tomorrow
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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)
“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)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)