John Hanson (Conrad Nagel) is a bank teller and invests in stocks. He and his best friend (another bank teller) Phil Wilson (Robert Ames) live at a boarding house run by his Swedish fiance's aunt, Mrs. Larson (Bodil Rosing). While Phil lives to chase girls, John spends all his free time studying for the bar exam. He wants to be a successful lawyer and build a dream home and future for his fiance, Helga Larson (Betty Compson).

Landing on a small island not far from Havana, Cuba, Lt. Cmdr. Ben Staves joins a Navy scientific project engaged in finding an effective shark repellent to help save the lives of WWII military personnel stranded in shark-infested waters. His zeal for completing the project as fast as possible is explained by his having lost a large percentage of his crew to sharks when his ship was sunk by the Japanese. Against the advice of the others on the project, Staves demands that the new repellent be tested on a live subject surrounded by hungry sharks and will allow no one but himself to be the test subject!

Joel McCrea as John Neville, a supposedly impoverished American in Paris trying to etch out a living as an artist. He meets up with a striking beauty named Valerie, played by Constance Bennett, and hires her as his model. The pair then moves from just dabbling with watercolors and into falling in love. But soon a series of misunderstandings about Valerie's recent past, the return of her former sugar daddy boyfriend (Lew Cody)–not to mention John's true blue-blood roots–threaten to undermine their future together.

Lassiter discovers the judge (Barrat) who cheated his neice of her inheritance leads a gang of badguys posing as vigilantes.

Jim Conway, who works on a South American rubber plantation, leaves to meet a girl from the United States whom he is to marry. But he receives a telegram from her telling him she has married someone else. He goes to a waterfront café where he meets a singer, Joan Madison, and tells her his troubles. He asks her to marry him and return to the plantation with him using the name of the girl he was to marry. This strikes her as a great idea as she is a wanted fugitive.

The stage stars Wheeler and Woolsey play two soldiers who go absent without leave in Paris, during World War I.

Gunfighter Lorn Warfield returns home after an absence of three years. Lorn finds his ranch in ruin.His neighbor, Owen Forbes, informs Lorn that his ranch was raided by the Apaches who kidnapped his wife and two children.Lorn decides to find the Apache camp and recuperate his wife and daughters. His neighbor, Owen, also joins Lorn in his quest. The two men don't get along because Owen courted Lorn's wife in Lorn's absence. Angie consented to Owen's courtship only because she believed her husband Lorn to be dead.Despite the tension between Lorn and Owen the two men are determined to find Angie and her daughters. Things get really hard when Lorn and Owen run into Mexican bandits, army deserters and Apaches.

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.

The story is told in flashback. Backers want a gambler to marry a rich girl for her dowry. When he double-crosses them he's murdered and the murderer blackmails the girl. Then he is murdered.

A tuneful taxi driver secretly works to achieve his dream of becoming a radio singer in this musical comedy. One day he gives a radio station secretary a lift. She prattles on about a sponsor's new contest. The sponsor, a prominent cheese company, is looking for a singing gondolier to participate in their newest campaign. Later the secretary and the head cheese go to Venice to look for the real McCoy, unaware that the determined cabbie is already there waiting for them. Sure enough, they are fooled and he is hired. Things go really well until he feels compelled to tell the truth during a major broadcast.

In the dead of a Moscow winter, three bodies are found in Gorky Park. Police Inspector Renko (William Hurt) is unable to identify the corpses, since even their fingerprints have removed. For reasons unknown to him, Renko's investigation is somehow being stymied by his higher-ups. Ferreting out information on his own, Renko makes the acquaintance of Soviet dissident Irina (Joanna Pacula), a friend of one of the victims, and Lee Marvin as Armand Hammer-style American businessman. As in Martin Cruz Smith's novel, the identity of the killer is not as well hidden as the reasons behind the killing. "Glasnost" had not yet taken effect in 1983, thus Gorky Park was filmed in Finland rather than Russia.

Keiko (Kayo Matsuo) and her friend try to find her missing brother after he disappeared on a trip to visit his girlfriend Yuko (Yukiko Kobayashi). They don't get very far as Yuko's mother claims the brother ran away after finding out Yuko had been killed in a car wreck the week before his visit. But Keiko finds signs that she might be being lied to.