In 1920s Chicago, Italian immigrant and notorious thug, Antonio "Tony" Camonte, shoots his way to the top of the mobs while trying to protect his sister from the criminal life.
"Happy" MacDonald and his unfaithful wife own a Prohibition era night club. On this eventful night, he is threatened by bootleggers, and the club's star dancer falls in love with a young socialite who drinks to forget a personal tragedy, among other incidents.
New York, 1929, a war rages between two rival gangsters, Fat Sam and Dandy Dan. Dan is in possession of a new and deadly weapon, the dreaded "splurge gun". As the custard pies fly, Bugsy Malone, an all-round nice guy, falls for Blousey Brown, a singer at Fat Sam's speakeasy. His designs on her are disrupted by the seductive songstress Tallulah who wants Bugsy for herself.
John Smith is a mysterious stranger who is drawn into a vicious war between two Prohibition-era gangs. In a dangerous game, he switches allegiances from one to another, offering his services to the highest bidder. As the death toll mounts, Smith takes the law into his own hands in a deadly race to stay alive.
Ann Martin will inherit six-million dollars if she marries a man her two spinster-aunts approve of, but, so far, her aunts haven't approved of any man she knows. Ann tries to get a bashful hotel clerk to marry her in name only, and then get a divorce, but he refuses to because he is in love with her. Her cousin then brings in another clerk and Ann now has two men on her hands. Ann now wants to marry the first clerk, having discovered she also loves him, but the aunts object. She then hires two gigolos to charm her aunts into a compromising situation.
In this Depression-era tale, Calef is traveling from Michigan to California and stops in Spooner, Missouri, where Lute hires him for odd jobs. Calef gets involved with Lute's niece, Hannah. But she is married to Sidney, a wife-beating drunk who hopes to inherit his uncle-in-law's money. Sidney and an eccentric preacher plot against Calef, who finds it difficult to conceal his mysterious past and his growing affection for Sidney's wife.
Having paid for the education and legal training of his younger brother, Bruce, with the idea that he would become a lawyer and join his business, Frederick Garth, a racketeer posing as an honest businessman, is dismayed when he learns that Bruce has become a G-Man instead.
Johnny Rooney is a fast-stepping young politician and Molly Taylor is an even faster-stepping showgirl in "George White's Scandals" in a tale of New York City's theatrical and political life during prohibition and the jazz-age.
Bob Clemens is a cameraman for newsreels. Assigned to shoot the Swiss ice skater Karen Vadja, he arrives too late, so decides to film a woman skating on a different New York rink and pass her off as Karen. The scheme backfires when promoter Larry Herman takes a look at Bob's film and decides to make the skater a star. Unfortunately, it's actually amateur (and illegal immigrant) Marie Bergin in the newsreel footage, not the great figure skater from Switzerland. Chaos ensues as Bob tries to straighten everybody out.
A gallerist risks her family and flourishing career when she enters into an affair with a talented painter and slowly loses control of her life.
In an Albanian town known for drug production and trafficking an elite group of cops set out to end the war waged against the local police.
A Korean War vet returns to his job as a railroad engineer and becomes involved in a sordid affair with a co-worker's wife and murder.
A Chinese-American surgeon faces a moral dilemma after operating on the mob boss in charge of vice and protection rackets in her city's Chinatown.
As a family struggles to survive in rural isolation during the Great Depression, their daughter's secret affair begins a journey into the unknown.
Young Al Capone catches the eye of Johnny Torrio, a criminal visiting New York from Chicago. Torrio invites Capone to move to Illinois to help run his Prohibition-era alcohol sales operation. Capone rises through the ranks of Torrio's gang and eventually takes over. On top, he works to consolidate his power by eliminating his enemies, fixing elections to his advantage and getting rich. In his spare time, Capone courts the principled Iris Crawford.
In prohibition-era Chicago, the corrupt sheriff and Guy Gisborne, a south-side racketeer, knock off the boss Big Jim. Everyone falls in line behind Guy except Robbo, who controls the north side. Although he's out-gunned, Robbo wants to keep his own territory. A pool-playing dude from Indiana and the director of a boys' orphanage join forces with Robbo; and, when he gives some money to the orphanage, he becomes the toast of the town as a hood like Robin Hood. Meanwhile, Guy schemes to get rid of Robbo, and Big Jim's heretofore unknown daughter Marian appears and goes from man to man trying to find an ally in her quest to run the whole show. Can Robbo hold things together?
A gangster is drafted into the Army and, soon realizing how wrong his life of crime has been, agrees to help the FBI break up a black market ring by pretending to have been kicked out of service and to have resumed his old life of crime.
Hattie Leonard sets out to break a criminal gang controlling the dry cleaning business.
Bootleggers on the lam Frankie and Noll split up to evade capture by the police. Frankie is caught and jailed, but Noll manages to escape and open a posh New York City nightclub. 14 years later, Frankie is released from the clink and visits Noll with the intention of collecting his half of the nightclub's profits. But Noll, who has no intention of being so equitable, uses his ex-girlfriend Kay to divert Frankie from his intended goal.
Dorothy Parker remembers the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table, a circle of friends whose barbed wit, like hers, was fueled by alcohol and flirted with despair.