A romance develops between a happily married middle-aged British politician and an adventurous young aviatrix.
Story of an unhappy wife of oil rigger who labors in a Central American oil field. The bored Susan falls in love with Walt's good friend Ken but keeps her husband in the dark about her feelings... until he's plunged into darkness for real when he loses his eyesight. Susan finds her attentions then wandering yet another man, Davis, and Ken urges her to return to Walt.
Dennis, owner of a rubber plantation in Cochinchina, is involved with Vantine, who left Saigon to evade the police. When his new surveyor arrives along with his refined wife Dennis is quickly infatuated by her.
Dirt-poor mountain girl Trigger Hicks is a loner. Her faith-healing is mistaken for witchcraft by the community. She falls for an engineer building a dam, who protects her.
A former government agent in France, who has failed at an assignment and been disavowed, is deported back to the USA, where he can only find work at a low-rent detective agency. He soon gets involved with a woman with ties to a crooked gambling club owner, who is a client of his agency.
A young girl leaves her Nigerian village to attend a ballet school in England. Fascinated by Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, she dreams of performing as lead ballerina Princess Odette, but the girls in her close-minded ballet school mock her ideas of a 'black swan'.
Sharecropper's son Marvin tries to help his community overcome poverty and ignorance.
Apple Annie is an aging New York City fruit seller whose daughter Louise has been raised in a Spanish convent since she was an infant. As she grows up, Louise is led to believe that her mother is a society matron called Mrs. E. Worthington Manville. Annie worries that her lie is in danger of being uncovered when she learns that Louise is sailing to New York with her new fiancé and his nobleman father.
The story of corrupt, power-hungry, manipulative Grigori Rasputin's influence on members of the Russian Imperial family and others, and what resulted.
A New York gossip columnist feuds with a singer and enjoys the power of the press.
Renowned for his excess, King Henry VIII goes through a series of wives during his rule. With Anne Boleyn, his second betrothed, executed on charges of treason, Henry weds maid Jane Seymour, but that wedded bliss also ends in tragedy. Not one to be single for long, the tyrannical king chooses German-born Anne of Cleves, but their union lasts only months before an annulment is granted, and so Henry's reign of spousal terror continues.
When the government opens up the Oklahoma territory for settlement, restless Yancey Cravat claims a plot of the free land for himself and moves his family there from Wichita. A newspaperman, lawyer, and just about everything else, Cravat soon becomes a leading citizen of the boom town of Osage. Once the town is established, however, he begins to feel confined once again, and heads for the Cherokee Strip, leaving his family behind. During this and other absences, his wife Sabra must learn to take care of herself and soon becomes prominent in her own right.
Although Vivian Revere is seemingly the most successful of a trio of reunited schoolmates, she throws it away by descending into a life of debauchery and drugs.
Taxi dancer Charity continues to have faith in the human race despite apparently endless disappointments at its hands, and hope that she will finally meet the nice young man to romance her away from her sleazy life. Maybe, just maybe, handsome Oscar will be the one to do it.
Marquis Sévéro, a rich, lazy Parisian, wants to divorce his wife so that he can marry his own goddaughter Denise. But Denise herself loves André Berval, an engineer employed by the marquis. Filled with jealousy, the marquis sends André to the Antilles, to prospect some land he has just acquired. He promises André that he can marry Denise if he is successful in the tropics, but he then writes to Alvarez, his manager at the site, asking him to prevent André from ever returning to France. The brutal Alvarez forms an instant hatred for André when the engineer breaks up Alvarez's attempt to rape Papitou, a beautiful native girl. Papitou becomes devoted to André, and protects him against Alvarez's schemes. But she faces a crisis herself when she learns that André plans to marry Denise.
Mogador, Morocco. Late 1920s. A complex romance develops between a womanizing Legionnaire and a disillusioned Parisian cabaret singer.
The adventures of a cocky con man and his beautiful accomplice.
Searching for headlines at any cost, an unscrupulous newspaper owner forces his editor to print a serial based on a past murder, tormenting a woman involved.
Jury foreman Edward Weldon's questioning leads to the death sentence for Ethel Saxon. His daughter Stella claims to have killed her lover, the gangster Garboni, just as Saxon was to sit in the electric chair.
Old sailor Chris Christofferson eagerly awaits the arrival of his grown daughter Anna, whom he sent at five years old to live with relatives in Minnesota. He has not seen her since, but believes her to be a decent and respectably employed young woman. When Anna arrives, however, it is clear that she has lived a hard life in the dregs of society, and that much of spirit has been extinguished. She falls in love with a young sailor rescued at sea by her father, but dreads to reveal to him the truth of her past. Both father and young man are deluded about her background, yet Anna cannot quite bring herself to allow them to remain deluded.