The Fugitive

Richard Kimble rides into Tucson, Arizona under the name James Lincoln. He checks into a hotel and finds a job as a bartender at the Branding Iron. He meets Monica Welles (Vera Miles), the piano player who escaped from her stalking jealous husband (Ed Welles) played by Brian Keith.

While working as a handyman in a backwater community in Missouri, Kimble has a few run-ins with a young girl named Jenny Ammory who is a pathological liar who speaks to a rag doll she calls 'Nyet' which she keeps at a nearby pond. Jenny uses Kimble as an excuse when she's late for school when she claims that a man attacked her. When Kimble shows up making a routine delivery of supplies to the school, Jenny identifies him as the man who attacked her. As Jenny's teacher, Emily Norton, speaks to Kimble about Jenny's compulsive lying, Jenny runs home and tells her mother she saw her teacher and the local handyman making out in the barn. Kimble gets roughed up by his co-workers while Emily gets fired and both are advised to leave town. Kimble goes to a school hearing on Emily and tries to clear her by catching Jenny in a lie. But his plan backfires when the skeptic townspeople believe Jenny and decide to form a lynching party to track Kimble down.

In West Virginia, Kimble arrives at a local coal-mining town where he is roughed up by the redneck locals, and then chased by a sheriff's posse. Hiding in the mountains, Kimble meets Cassie, a young woman living in a remote cabin with her grandmother. Cassie tells Kimble she get him to safety because she knows the area, when she is really wanting to keep him around for her own selfish reasons. Meanwhile, Gerard flies to West Virginia after learning from the sheriff that Kimble has been spotted in the area and teams up with the posse to try to find Kimble.

Kimble, working as an apprentice sailmaker in Santa Barbara, California, falls in love with Karen, the daughter of his stern but compassionate boss Lars Christian. But earns scorn from Karen's jealous and overprotective brother Eric. When Lars suffers a heart attack his last wish on his deathbed is to implore Kimble to stay with Karen. Meanwhile, Gerard flies to nearby Los Angeles when he hears about the arrest of a one-armed man for armed robbery and lets the story hit the newspapers, hoping it will flush out Kimble.

After finding that the one-armed man is not the same man he saw fleeing his house the night of Helen's murder, Kimble flees from Los Angeles, barely escaping Gerard's dragnet. Tired of running, Kimble hopes to lie low in Santa Barbara and finally confides his secret to Karen. But Gerard tracks Kimble to Santa Barbara from a single clue that Kimble leaves behind at the L.A. County Jail: a match with the word "SAILS" printed on it. When Kimble discovers that Gerard has arrived in town looking for him, with the assistance of Eric, Kimble and Karen flee by sailboat and hope to end the running by faking his and Karen's death in a sailboat accident during a storm at sea.

Kimble finds work as a cut man for boxer Joe Smith. Joe confides in Kimble that he wanted to be a doctor, but he chose boxing because he felt that being a black man would be an obstacle in the world of medicine. When Kimble discovers that Joe is suffering from memory loss, both he and Joe's wife, Laura, fear that Joe might have brain damage from his boxing. Meanwhile, a police detective, named Henry Stone, goes undercover as a sports writer to investigate Joe's manager, Lou, for possible mob ties. But when a disgruntled boxing worker tips off Stone that someone might be wanting Joe to throw his next fight, the detective investigates Kimble.

A forest fire prevents access to a local hospital. Kimble, now a farm laborer, decides to risk blowing his cover when he elects to help deliver a woman's baby at the labor camp. When the news of Kimble's charitable act is reported to the press, Gerard gets wind of it and believes that Kimball is the unnamed doctor.

While working as a gas station attendant in New Mexico, Kimble is taken hostage, along with customer Joanne, by two holdup men, named Miles and Vinnie. Once on the road, Kimble pretends that he is a criminal and is heading towards Los Angels for a "big job". At the same time, he lets Joanne know that he's on her side, but she's suspicious to his true motives. Arriving in L.A., Kimble decides to set up Miles and Vinnie to be arrested. But Miles, not trusting Kimble enough, wants him to kill Joanne to prove himself.

On a small freighter, Kimble is traveling to Alaska when an FBI agent, named Paul Vale, arrives and begins questioning him and all the passengers in a search for a Korean War criminal and traitor. Vale becomes most suspicious of Kimble, as well as passenger George Banning and his wife Adrienne who are embezzlers fleeing the States. When Vale is found murdered the next day, Captain Carraway interrogates all the suspects and when the captain discovers that Kimble's references are fake, Kimble becomes the chief suspect.

After getting into a car accident in a rural Kentucky town, Kimble is put in jail by the redneck sheriff who hates outsiders. But Kimble manages to escape with his cellmate Davey "Fatso" Lambert. Hiding out at the Lambert ranch, Kimble sees that Davey's father and his brother, Frank, treat the slow-witted Davey badly, blaming him for a barn fire years earlier. Kimble tries to prove Davey's innocence as Gerard flies out to Kentucky after learning of Kimble's arrest and forms a posse to track him down.