***SPOILERS*** Casino manager Meyer Fine, Peter Falk, has developed over the years this phobia about dying. He's scared to death of it! especially if he doesn't die of natural causes! Fine has his loyal butler John, Paul Hartman, wait hand and foot on him pressing his clothes cooking his food and making sure he wakes up on time that he's about the only one that he trusts with talking about death and dying. And how it terrifies him in the fact that, like everyone else in the world, it would come knocking at his door one day and he'll have to answer its call! Well a number of incidents at Fine's casino starts to get him very conscious that he doesn't that long to live; And it has nothing to do with any heath problems on Fine's part!
With the mob chief "The Dutchman" that Fine works for feeling that he's more trouble then he's worth in getting the fuzz or police to investigate a number of deaths, one a suicide and another the victim of a mob rub out, connected to Fine and his casino it's then decided to put a hit on him as soon as possible. Knowing that his days if not hours are numbered Fine begs his loyal butler John to do the job or hit-job on him because he doesn't have the courage to do it himself!
***SPOILERS*** In the end John does what his boss and good friend, who took him off the streets and gave him a good paying job, Meyer Fine begged him to do. But where John slipped up was not in getting the job done but calling the cops and telling or confessing to them that he did it! Which turned an act of gratitude, with John for doing it getting arrested indited and later convicted, into one of first degree murder!
With the mob chief "The Dutchman" that Fine works for feeling that he's more trouble then he's worth in getting the fuzz or police to investigate a number of deaths, one a suicide and another the victim of a mob rub out, connected to Fine and his casino it's then decided to put a hit on him as soon as possible. Knowing that his days if not hours are numbered Fine begs his loyal butler John to do the job or hit-job on him because he doesn't have the courage to do it himself!
***SPOILERS*** In the end John does what his boss and good friend, who took him off the streets and gave him a good paying job, Meyer Fine begged him to do. But where John slipped up was not in getting the job done but calling the cops and telling or confessing to them that he did it! Which turned an act of gratitude, with John for doing it getting arrested indited and later convicted, into one of first degree murder!