Writing
American screenwriter.
With a full Hollywood background and settings but more an expose of scandal-and-gossip magazines of the era, has-been actor John Blakeford agrees to write his memoirs for magazine-publisher Jordan Winston. When Blakeford's daughter, Patricia, ask him to desist for the sake of his ex-wife, Carlotta Blakeford, he attempts to break his contract with Winston.
An ex-convict, unable to get a good job because of his prison record, gets mixed up in a phony stock scam.
American Steve Kendall, a freighter's radio officer, discovers seaman Carlson sending an unauthorized message ashore as the ship approaches his war-poised homeland. Carlson is shot in cold blood when he jumps ship and Kendall, implicated in the espionage, swims ashore to avoid arrest. A woman he meets at the dock hides him in her apartment, where he learns Carlson was her brother, and they both work in a sabotage ring. Nedra is a singer at Tio's Cafe, and she approaches Tio for help when both the saboteurs and the secret police try to capture Steve.
A newspaper publisher's daughter is arrested for speeding. In order to avoid embarrassing her father, since his newspaper is in the midst of an anti-speeding campaign, she uses an assumed name. She is paroled into the custody of an assistant district attorney, who doesn't know who she really is.
A wealthy bachelor lies his way out of a speeding ticket by telling the cops he's on his way to visit his baby girl in hospital - ever helpful, they accompany him whereupon a little girl attaches herself to him, with hilarious results.
In Old Wyoming, a gang is plundering stagecoaches of shipped currency and a crusading newspaper editor is trying to get the local marshal replaced, because of his apparent failure to catch the gang, which seems to disappear into thin air after every robbery. The situation escalates when one of the stage drivers is mortally wounded; so the marshal sends for his friends, the Range Busters, to help him catch the criminals. Meanwhile, even the marshal's fiancee, the editor's daughter, turns against him in favor of an aggressive agitator for law and order - who secretly is leading the robber gang.
In order to show up a rival, a snobbish woman throws a party and hires an actor to pretend to be from British royalty who is an "old friend".
