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.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“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)
“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)