Just My Luck

Mama's boy Norman Hackett works as a backroom technician at Dormier, a London custom jeweler. He has his eye on a pendant in the shop window he'd like to purchase for the woman he loves from afar that he doesn't even know, she working as a window dresser in the shop across the street, the two who do however acknowledge each other with loving eyes from their respective work windows. His attraction to her is despite a friend named Phoebe seeing herself as his girl. Even though he knows buying it is a pipe dream, as, with he giving all his wages to his mother who provides him with a meager allowance covering only the necessities, it would take him over a century to save the money to buy it, he is nonetheless dismayed when it is purchased by someone else right under his nose: by the Hon. Richard Lumb of the registered bookmaker Lumb + Weaver for his loyal secretary Betty Daviot in the company doing well. In speaking to Miss Daviot, Norman learns all about the world of horse racing, most specifically the possibility of earning a theoretical windfall on the accumulator: betting on six races in one go, the winnings on race one to go into race two, and so on, and any loss meaning the end of the road and the loss of the investment. Norman sees the accumulator as the only way he could ever purchase a pendant for who he learns is named Anne. It however would put him at odds with his mother as gambling was the reason Norman's father long abandoned them. It then becomes one misadventure after another for Norman and those in his orbit as he tries to find the £1 to make the bet through Lumb + Weaver, and subsequently to do whatever to monitor and protect his investment. What he is unaware of is that Lumb and Weaver themselves have no intention of paying Norman out in the remote possibility of the accumulator coming through as it would ruin them.