Two-Dollar Bettor
1951 film by Edward L. Cahn
Two-Dollar Bettor is a 1951 American film directed by Edward L. Cahn and starring Steve Brodie, Marie Windsor and John Litel.
Plot
John Hewitt, a widower with two teenage daughters, places a two-dollar bet on a horse at the track and wins. Convinced that betting on horse racing means easy money, he becomes addicted and soon depletes his life savings and embezzles $14,000 in company funds to pay his bookie, whose attractive representative Mary Slate collects debts and appears to like John.
With an audit of the comptroller's office looming, John becomes desperate to replace the money and steals $2,000 more. He bets it on a 7:1 long shot and travels to New Orleans to watch the race. His horse appears to win, and John is overjoyed, but it is later disqualified for a violation and he returns home dejected.
Mary offers John a way out of his situation, but she is a con woman working with her husband Rick. Posing as Mary's brother, Rick convinces John to embezzle $20,000 more to place on a fixed race in New Orleans. However, the horse is a scratch and when John tries to find Mary and Rick to recover his money, he learns that Mary quit her job and Rick left his hotel. John realizes that he has been swindled and removes a gun from his desk.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Two-Dollar Bettor” is 1951 film by Edward L. Cahn. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Two-Dollar, Bettor and film, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7858660. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Two-Dollar Bettor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.