Plot
CBS cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) gets injured when football player Luther "Boom Boom" Jackson (Ron Rich) runs into him while he is covering a Browns game at Cleveland Stadium. Hinkle's injuries are minor, but his conniving lawyer brother-in-law "Whiplash Willie" Gingrich (Walter Matthau) convinces him to pretend that his legs have been paralyzed. This way, they can receive a huge indemnity from the insurance company. Hinkle reluctantly goes along with the scheme because he's still in love with his ex-wife, Sandy, and it might win her back. The insurance company suspects that the paralysis is a fake one, and so a cat-and-mouse game begins between its investigator, Chester Purkey, and the shyster Gingrich. Jackson takes very good care of Hinkle, who begins having second thoughts as he witnesses guilt taking its toll on Jackson. As he also sees that Sandy is back by his side strictly out of greed, Hinkle decides to reveal the truth, thereby ruining Gingrich's get-rich plans.
Read more about this topic: The Fortune Cookie
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—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)