Plot
Carrie Snyder (Gladys George) is a prostitute, who is forced out of the fictional southern town of Crebillon, after forming a friendship with a young boy named Paul (Jackie Moran), whose dying mother (Janet Young) is unable to protest against her son visiting such a woman. After Carrie has left town Paul runs away from his abusive father (John Wray), and meets a girl named Lady (Charlene Wyatt) who has run away from a burning trainwreck, not wanting to go back to the people she was with. Carrie comes back for Paul and ends up taking Paul and Lady to New York with her. Carrie gets an apartment and starts a successful chain of laundry stores. Eventually they become very rich and Lady (Arline Judge) grows very attracted to Paul (John Howard). However Paul feels obligated to take care of a young woman named Lili (Isabel Jewell) whose brother's death he caused (the brother had been pushing Paul to try to get on the train, but when Paul pushed back, the train door closed with the brother on the outside with his coat stuck in the train door, causing him to get dragged along with the train and his legs to be run over). Lilli pretends to love Paul because he is rich, which Carrie is able to see, but which Paul does not. She devises a plan to make Lilli leave, if she will bribe some people to help get Lilli's true love out of jail, she will leave Paul. They go to break the man out of jail, but they are caught. Lilli is shot dead and Carrie gets sent to jail. An old lawyer friend (Harry Carey) vows to fight for her freedom, but Carrie decides to plead guilty, because she doesn't want Lady to know about her past (her life as a prostitute would be dragged out in court if her case went to trial) and also because she fears that this damage to her reputation would also be bad for the reputation of the children. The lawyer ends by remarking to Paul's employer (Dudley Digges) that, "valiant is the word for Carrie".
Read more about this topic: Valiant Is The Word For Carrie
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“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)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“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)