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:
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“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)
“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)