It is many thousand years in the future. Vampires once ruled the night but have seen their numbers reduced by fearless bounty hunters.

Cornell-educated Taro Seki returns to Japan just as the war party gains control. He hopes to work for American engineer O'Hara, and falls for his secretary Tama, but he is drafted. War service in China finally hardens Taro to atrocities, and he returns to Japan a changed man. His father, now a cabinet minister, feels remorse at what war has done to his son and country, but too late to save Taro's foreign friends.

The midnight murder of a rancher and his wife leaves circumstantial evidence pointing the finger of guilt toward a married couple, George Braden and his wife Ellen, who live and work on the ranch. George confesses to the killings in order to free his wife from hours of grilling by the police. Despite the best efforts of his defense attorney, Doug Madison , George gets the death penalty. Sunsequent events and his sympathy for Ellen convince Doug that George is innocent but he must find the real murderer to prove it.

The story begins in 1929 with Sugai (Sugai Ichiro) losing his job in the stock- market crash. He works his way up, over the course of the narrative, from mirror-cleaner in a barber shop, to cleaning product salesman, to mechanic (he studies at night), to inventor, to company president. At this second-to-last stage, when his boss offers him money for his patent, he declines, saying that he did it for the good of the country and for his wife’s memory. He receives enough money for her gravestone but eventually is given a factory to run, and eventually a whole company.

A businesslike syndicate runs all the gambling joints in town; least profitable is honest Mike Lee's. Under pressure to allow cheating, Mike "walks out," leaving tough-minded daughter Lady Lee to earn a living the only way she knows. She soon becomes a success gambling among the rich, but, falling out with the syndicate, she considers the marriage proposal of blueblood Garry Madison. Can such a match work despite snobbery and old associations?

A mental hospital somewhere in Tuscany during the thirties. Far away from fascism, this closed world is rules over by Dr. Bonaccorsi, a passionate benevolent psychiatrist whose dream is to isolate the germ of madness. He is also a very active ladies'man and makes three women benefit from his sexual itch: Francesca the hospital manager's wife, Bianca, his devoted nurse and Carla, a nymphomaniac doctor's wife.

Three professional killers break into the house of an airport employee to shoot the plane on which an Asian Prime Minister is due to leave America.

Miriam Hopkins plays Louise Starr, who gets divorced from her husband and returns to the home she left on a farm where she reunites with her grandfather. He introduces her to Guy Crane with whom she falls in love; however, he is married.

Alexander Graham Bell falls in love with deaf girl Mabel Hubbard while teaching the deaf and trying to invent means for telegraphing the human voice. She urges him to put off thoughts of marriage until his experiments are complete. He invents the telephone, marries and becomes rich and famous, though his happiness is threatened when a rival company sets out to ruin him.

Small-town eccentric Throckmorton Gildersleeve (of radio fame) has a few problems: Judge Hooker continually questions his guardianship of niece Margie and nephew Leroy; the judge's predatory sister Amelia has matrimony in mind. When a misunderstanding gives Amelia the idea she's all but engaged, the kids form a wild scheme to get Gildersleeve out of trouble; slapstick results.