Plot
Widmark plays Skip McCoy, an insolent pickpocket who steals the wallet of Candy (Peters). Unbeknownst to Skip or Candy, the wallet contains a microfilm of top-secret government information. Candy was delivering an envelope as a final favor to her ex-boyfriend, Joey. But Candy didn't know the envelope's content, nor did she know that Joey was a Communist spy.
Joey's espionage had been under Federal investigation for months. Skip is soon the subject of a manhunt: wanted by police, federal agents, and by Candy and Joey. Candy attempts to seduce Skip, but he turns her down. But when Skip discovers the importance of the microfilm, he rejects the cops' appeals to patriotism and instead offers the microfilm to whoever can deliver $25,000. After Candy realizes that Skip had set her up, she changes sides in the scheme and confesses her love for Skip.
A Communist agent interrogates Moe (Ritter, nominated for an Academy Award). Skip's only real friend, she refuses to rat him out. The agent kills her in cold blood, and Skip vows revenge. The agent, Joey, then confronts Candy in her apartment. She has obtained 4 of the 5 film slides from Skip, but refuses to tell Joey where the last is, and he shoots her. The cops then arrive and try to arrest Joey, who escapes and chases after Skip. He runs into Skip on the subway where the two engage in a climatic battle that ends with Skip beating Joey to death.
Thanking him for his help, the police wipe Skip's record, and he finally leaves with a recovered Candy hoping to start a new life.
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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)
“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)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)