Working girl Margie Evans has decided there are two kinds of opportunities for a slum kid during the Depression: Those you make and those you take. Determined to help her family out of its financial bind, she is ready to do both after she shows up at the penthouse pool bash of a wealthy playboy.
Ivy Stevens is a cafe entertainer in love with a shifty salesman who deserts her. In attempting to commit suicide, she is saved by Carl, a Salvation Army officer. Encouraged by Carl, Ivy joins the Salvation Army. When her old flame re-enters her life, Ivy finds she is still attracted and begins another affair with him.
A romance between a struggling composer and an American singer.
When World War I comes to an end, three pilots find themselves on hard times. They wind up in Hollywood, where they work as stunt fliers for a sadistic director.
A high-spirited, short-tempered, young woman hates her father and loves to rebel against him. She marries a man whom her father hates but her marriage fails and she learns the errors of her ways.
A lady gas station attendant gets mixed up with escaped murderers.
In World War I London, Myra is an American out-of-work chorus girl making ends meet by picking up men on Waterloo Bridge. During a Zeppelin air raid she meets Roy, a naive young American who enlisted in the Canadian army. After they fall for each other, Roy tricks Myra into visiting his family, who live in a country estate outside London, his mother having remarried to a retired British Major. Myra is reluctant to continue the relationship with Roy, he not aware of her past.
An immensely successful criminal lawyer is blindsided when he learns that his new case involves his ex-wife, who left him.
A young girl gets involved with a crowd that smokes marijuana, drinks and has sex. She winds up an alcoholic, pregnant drug addict and is forced to get an abortion.
A gossip columnist helps a Broadway ingenue who's beholden to a penthouse gangster.
In order to save her family from financial collapse, a young woman named Sofka marries 12-year-old son of a wealthy merchant. Grown up in different times and milieu, her husband shows no understanding for such move of hers.
Laurent van Horn is the leader of a band of Dutch refugees on a ship seeking freedom in the Carolinas, when the ship is wrecked on the coast of Cartagene, governed by Don Juan Alvardo, a Spanish ruler. Alvarado has Laurent thrown in prison, but the latter escapes, and five-years later is a pirate leader. He poses as the navigator on a ship in which Contessa Francesca, daughter of a Mexican noble, is traveling on her way to marry Alvarado, whom she has never seen. Laurent's pirates capture the ship and Francesca, in order to save another ship, gives her hand-in-marriage to Laurent, who sails her to the pirate hideout. This irks his jealous pirate comrades Anne Bonney and Captain Benjamin Black. They overpower Laurent and send Francesca to Alvarado, and then Mario du Billar, a trusted right-hand man, makes a deal to deliver Laurent to Alvarado.
Millionaire's son Duke wants to be a champion boxer but takes time out to enroll in college when he sees co-ed Susie. The students wonder about his having a chauffeur and house full of servants. Susie likes him but, to get rid of her, his manager tells her Duke already has a New York chorus girl. As the students listen to a radio broadcast of his victorious fight from San Francisco, she learns that the student Duke is the boxer Duke and that there is no chorus girl.
Three friends drive from Holland to Morocco to deliver a taxi to a family friend, but the trip turns out more complicated than expected.
Jenny is carrying the child of a young man who dies in the San Francisco earthquake (1906). After giving birth, she decides to place her child in the custody of a wealthy married couple. Years later, thanks to the protection of a corrupt politician, she becomes the main "madame" of San Francisco, in addition to participating in various illegal activities.
While on trial for her life, a young woman recalls her tough upbringing and her involvement with the men who brought her to this current state of affairs.
When a young South Seas sailor falls overboard, the beautiful daughter of a Polynesian king dives in and saves his life. Thus begins the romance of Johnny and Luana. Though Luana is promised to another man, Johnny whisks her away, and for a brief time the lovers live very happily together. But, when a local volcano threatens their lives, Luana knows that she must sacrifice herself to the volcanic gods in order to save her island.
A English aristocrat causes a scandal when she divorces her husband and runs off with a young American.
An in-depth look at the lives and struggles of a fishing community living by the River Titas in Bangladesh after the Partition of India in 1947.
A communist soldier is sent to a remote region of China in order to collect folk songs. Staying with a peasant family (a widower with two small children), he discovers a community whose way of life is completely alien to him, but he gradually wins their trust…