User:Stephenfisher2001/sandbox/MMMW plot

Plot
The film begins with "Smiler" Grogan, who was released from prison after attempting a robbery fifteen years earlier, losing control of his car and driving it off a cliff on a lonely highway California State Route 74. The five drivers investigate the crash, and they see him lying on the ground, critically injured. Grogan informs his last message that $350,000 ($3.2 million, today) is buried in Santa Rosita State Park under “a big W” as he slowly dies. The police arrive, but to get out of being held for questioning, all the motorists inform them Grogan was raving and didn't mention anything significant. The motorists continue their separate ways: Crump is on honeymoon with his wife Monica (Edie Adams), Dingy and Benjy are on holiday to Vegas, Pike has furniture to transport to Yuma, and Finch, his young wife Emmeline (Dorothy Provine), and his mean, overbearing mother-in-law Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman) were on vacation at Lake Mead, but eventually they all decide to stop and discuss Grogan's words. After the group fails to come up with a satisfactory way to split the money, they decide to race to find it. Unknowingly, Captain Culpeper, chief of detectives of the Santa Rosita Police Department, who had been working the Grogan case for years and hoped to solve it and retire, has everyone tracked.

They drove to a desert airport with a World War I airplane, but after