Acting
A self-made businessman rekindles a romance with a former flame while their two teenage children begin a romance of their own with drastic consequences for both couples.
After her family's mansion is burned down by Yankee soldiers for hiding the rebel leader Captain Sam Starr Belle Shirley vows to take revenge. Breaking Starr out of prison, she joins his small guerrilla group for a series of raids on banks and railroads, carpetbaggers and enemy troops. Belle's bravado during the attacks earns her a reputation among the locals as well as the love of Starr himself. The pair get married, but their relationship starts to break down when Sam Starr lets a couple of psychotic rebels into the gang, leaving Belle to wonder if he really cares about the Southern cause.
Youthful Father Chuck O'Malley led a colorful life of sports, song, and romance before joining the Roman Catholic clergy. After being appointed to a run-down New York parish, O'Malley's worldly knowledge helps him connect with a gang of boys looking for direction, eventually winning over the aging, conventional Parish priest.
Writer Harry Street reflects on his life as he lies dying from an infection while on safari in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.
A dark personal secret drives a young woman to use every man she encounters.
Shirley Ross plays an innocent young girl convicted for complicity in a crime committed by her boy friend (Lloyd Nolan). The male crook is sentence to six months on a prison farm populated by both men and women (segregated, of course). Ross is also incarcerated, suffering the cruelties of the sadistic male and female guards (including J. Carroll Naish and future "Ma Kettle" Marjorie Main!)
Amber St Clair, orphaned during the English Civil War and raised by a family of farmers, aspires to be a lady of high society; when a group of cavaliers ride into town, she sneaks away with them to London to achieve her dreams.
Based on the story of the famous Mormon leader, it follows Brigham Young and his challenge to transport his people across the Rocky mountains to settle in Salt Lake City. The plot focuses on two fictitious characters, Jonathan Kent and Zina Webb and the hardships they have to face along the way.
Shortly before the curtain goes up the first time at the latest performance of Earl Carroll's Vanities, someone is attempting to injure the leading lady Ann Ware, who wants to marry leading man Eric Lander. Stage manager Jack Ellery calls in his friend, policeman Bill Murdock, to help him investigate. Bill thinks Jack is offering to let him see the show from an unusual viewpoint after he forgot to get him tickets for the performance, but then they find the corpse of a murdered woman and Bill immediately suspects Eric of the crime.
When transplanted Texan Bob Seton arrives in Lawrence, Kansas he finds much to like about the place, especially Mary McCloud, daughter of the local banker. Politics is in the air however. It's just prior to the civil war and there is already a sharp division in the Territory as to whether it will remain slave-free. When he gets the opportunity to run for marshal, Seton finds himself running against the respected local schoolteacher, William Cantrell. Not is what it seems however. While acting as the upstanding citizen in public, Cantrell is dangerously ambitious and is prepared to do anything to make his mark, and his fortune, on the Territory. When he loses the race for marshal, he forms a group of raiders who run guns into the territory and rob and terrorize settlers throughout the territory. Eventually donning Confederate uniforms, it is left to Seton and the good citizens of Lawrence to face Cantrell and his raiders in one final clash.
In Brooklyn circa 1900, the Nolans manage to enjoy life on pennies despite great poverty and Papa's alcoholism. We come to know these people well through big and little troubles: Aunt Sissy's scandalous succession of "husbands"; the removal of the one tree visible from their tenement; and young Francie's desire to transfer to a better school...if irresponsible Papa can get his act together.
A gunfighter, stranded in the desert, comes across the aftermath of a stage robbery, in which all the passengers were killed. He takes one of the horses to ride to town to report the massacre, but finds himself accused of it. He also finds himself accused of the murder of the local banker, and winds up hiding in the basement of a house where the local sheriff, who is very sick, lives with his daughter.
After healing the leg of the murderer John Wilkes Booth — responsible for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln — Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, considered part of the atrocious conspiracy, is sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to the sinister Shark Island Prison.
An American junior diplomat in London rents a house from, and falls in love with, a woman suspected of murder.
A US Navy submarine, the USS Corsair, is operating in the North Atlantic, hunting German merchant raiders that are preying on Allied shipping. Its new executive officer, Lt. Ward Stewart, has been transferred back into submarines after commanding his own PT boat. At the submarine base in New London, Connecticut, he asks his new captain, Lt. Cmdr. Dewey Connors, for a weekend leave to settle his affairs before taking up his new assignment. On a train bound for Washington D.C., Stewart accidentally encounters New London school teacher Jean Hewlett and her students. Despite her initial resistance to his efforts, he charms her and they fall in love.
Boston pharmacist Tom Craig comes to Sacramento, where he runs afoul of local political boss Britt Dawson, who exacts protection payment from the citizenry. Dawson frames Craig with poisoned medicine, but Craig redeems himself during a Gold Rush epidemic.
Truck driver Mike Lambert is a down-and-out mining engineer searching for a job. When his rig breaks down in a small town, he happens upon a venomous seductress. When her boyfriend robs a bank, they intend to frame Lambert.
Genial shopkeeper Philip has to endure the constant nagging of a shrewish wife while he secretly yearns for a pretty young stenographer. When the henpecking gets to be too much, Philip murders his wife and manages to make her death look like an accident. A ruthless blackmailer and a low-key detective both discover Philip's secret, and he has to decide which of them poses the more dangerous threat.
In 1940 England, aristocratic Prudence Cathaway alarms her snobbish parents by joining the WAF service branch. She soon meets and falls in love with the brooding Clive Briggs, despite his prejudice against the upper classes, and agrees to spend a week with him at a Dover hotel. When Clive's soldier friend, Monty, arrives to retrieve him, Prudence learns that Clive went AWOL after Dunkirk, and urges him to recall why England must fight the war.
Somewhere in Europe, in a city occupied by the Nazis, a gentle school teacher finds himself torn between collaboration and resistance, cowardice and courage.
