Plot
The film follows Jack Hopkins (played by Michael Craig), an aircraft designer with a passion for traction engines. His boss (played by Cecil Parker) is eager to sell a new supersonic jet plane that Jack has designed to American millionaire Paul Fisher (Alan Hale, Jr.). The first encounter between Fisher and Jack goes badly, and tensions only heighten after Fisher's daughter Kathy (Anne Helm) damages Jack's prize traction engine "The Iron Maiden", rendering it impossible to drive solo. Jack is desperate to enter the annual Woburn Abbey steam rally with the machine, but his fireman is injured and unable to participate. When all seems lost the millionaire himself is won over by Jack's plight and joins him in driving the engine; the two soon become firm friends.
After an eventful journey Fisher and Jack reach Woburn Abbey and enter the rally, only for Fisher to injure his back at the last minute. When all seems lost his daughter, the skeptical Kathy, appears and joins Jack in the engine. The two pilot the Iron Maiden from last place to first, winning the rally; at the finish line Jack and Kathy embrace and kiss, while the Iron Maiden boils over and explodes. The engine is memorialized though when Jack's new jet is named after it.
Carry On stalwarts Jim Dale and Joan Sims have minor roles in the film. The veteran actor Sam Kydd also appeared in the film with his then six-year old son Jonathan Kydd.
A Handley Page Victor subsonic bomber features prominently in the film as the prototype of Jack Hopkins's supersonic jetliner. A number of sequences show the plane in close-up, taxiing, taking off, climbing, flying past and landing with parachute deployed.
Read more about this topic: The Iron Maiden
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“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)
“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)