Given a second chance after her arrest for prostitution, Mae decides to go straight. Mae is soon befriended by kindly cab driver Jimmy Doyle who gets her work at a diner, where she meets Gert, another former prostitute. Mae and Jimmy fall in love, marry and save to buy a small business. Gert then...
In the American oilfields, a fugitive from justice's destiny is intertwined with the fortunes and the misfortunes of a small oil company that hires him as a roughneck.
Gruff boxing manager "Square Shooting Murph" Murphy manages a naive boxer from Indiana, Homer Baston.Homer is willing to give up his boxing career searching for his parents, so Murphy hires two jailbirds to play his long lost parents to keep him in the ring.
An American soldier manages to endure his captivity in a Vietnamese POW camp by keeping alive the memories of life in his home town. When he is finally released from the camp, and is discharged from the military, he goes back to his town - but he can find no trace whatsoever of it.
A playwright has his career ruined when he is drunk on the first night. His wife dies having left him, and when his daughter triumphs in the revival of the play he dies contented.