Plot
Reckless test pilot Jim Lane (Clark Gable) is forced to land on a Kansas farm in his aircraft, the "Drake Bullet", where he meets Ann Barton (Myrna Loy). They spend the day together and fall in love. Once Jim's best friend and mechanic, Gunner Morris (Spencer Tracy), arrives, Jim ignores Ann. To spur him, she gets engaged to her sweetheart. Jim leaves in the morning, but soon comes back for her. They quickly get married.
Jim loses his job at Drake, when he clashes with the owner (Lionel Barrymore), and takes a job with another outfit, flying a very experimental aircraft. Ann soon finds out how dangerous her husband's occupation is, but she promises Gunner that she will stick to her man. Jim wins the race, but Benson, the man Drake sends in Jim's place, dies, leaving a wife and three children behind.
One day, Gunner accompanies Jim on a test flight of a new bomber (an early Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress prototype). Something goes wrong; the bomber goes into a spin and sandbags (substituting for the weight of bombs) break loose, pinning Gunner. Unwilling to bail out without his buddy, Jim manages to crash land, and pulls a badly injured Gunner out of the wreckage right before it burst into flames; but it is too late for Gunner. When Jim realizes the toll his job has taken on his wife, he gives it up.
Read more about this topic: Test Pilot (film)
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)
“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)