James O'Malley (Pat O'Brien) is an overzealous, unforgiving officer who abides by the letter of the law and hands out citations for petty infractions. He pulls over John Phillips (Humphrey Bogart) for a noisy muffler, delaying him long enough to cause him to be late for arriving at his new job that would help him to take care of his wife (Frieda Inescort) and crippled daughter, Barbara (Sybil Jason). After losing the job for being late, Phillips becomes desperate and attempts to pawn his war medals and a revolver.
Kyoji is a cook living in Macau. He works for a Thai restaurant in Hong Kong and has been having an affair with Seiko, the wife of his boss, Wiwat, who orders Kyoji to poison her. After the deed is done, Kyoji is ordered to leave Hong Kong.
Jim Branch, a newspaper editor, falls for wealthy socialite Sharon Norwood, after having fired her as a reporter, all the while trying to solve a murder mystery, involving her childhood friend Tommy Bannister. Once Jim discovers that Sharon is involved with all the participants in the murder, she becomes even more attractive to him.
Renowned psychiatrist and criminologist Dr. Robert Ordway, the "Crime Doctor", is called on an emergency to a party at his next door neighbor, where a man, Walter Foster, suffers from a diabetic seizure and has collapsed on the floor. Robert administers insulin to the man, using the man's own case, but a short while after the injection is made the man dies.
Inspector Chubb dictates a warrant for arrest for murder, then catches a train to Brighton with his wife, their young son Charlie, and teenage daughter Cathy, who chats up a young crime reporter, Ronnie Hall, when she and Charlie go to the buffet car. On Brighton Pier, ex-convict Nick Lane, who has recently started working on the pier with a dance band, flirts with Rita Hammond, talking of their assignation the night before and arranging to meet her at the dance that night. Nick surprises Rita by greeting her husband Joe Hammond as an old friend.
Three crooks break into a shop, planning to gain access to the bank next door. The shopkeeper has remained in the rear of the store after a drunken argument with his wife, and the men take him hostage. A passer-by, a bank employee, hears him shout, knocks on the front door, tries to help, but he too is captured.
At Spencer Airlines in England, American pilot Richard "Van" Van Ness tries to stop his friend Nick Talbot from taking off in a storm. Nick threatens to tell their boss, Boyd Spencer, that Van suffers from blackouts. Next morning, Van's fears come true when debris from Nick's aircraft washes ashore.
Rival newspaper reporters Pat Morgan and Ted Rand find themselves unravelling the mystery behind the death of a millionaire philanthropist who fell from his penthouse balcony. When it is discovered that the plunge was not an accident, the building's residents come under suspicion. Soon, the body count begins to mount as three more murders occur by strangulation.
Brothers Mark (Jeff Richards) and Dean Christopher (Richard Chamberlain) and show up in a mid-'50s four door Citroën Traction Avant in early era San Juan, Puerto Rico. They arrive to solve the mystery of the circumstances of their father's drowning death in the Caribbean. They run up against a gang of unruly pirates who seem to know more than they reveal.
Willis Trent wants to rob the safety deposit box of a crooked Los Angeles businessman, Paul De Camp. He has lawyer Earl Farraday smooth-talk the guy's girlfriend, the two-timing Flo Randall, into revealing the bank box's number. Now they need a locksmith.
Mike Selby, an American author living in England gets involved with the wife of a jewel fence, who persuades Mike to rob her husband, whilst at the same time giving him a fake alibi. But soon after the robbery when the jewel fence winds up dead, Mike begins to get blackmailed.
The film opens in a documentary style with narration and the introduction of two government officials associated with the prison system, as themselves, talking across a desk in an office setting. The story is then presented as being based on events in the lives of many prisoners. Kitty is involved with a gang planning a bank robbery when she meets and helps down-and-out Joe in a diner.
The story begins with a focus on the Plain Clothes Men, an elite division of the New York police force. These detectives blend into the city in plain clothes, allowing them to infiltrate the underworld and make arrests with surgical precision. They are hated by criminals, especially for their clandestine meetings, where suspects are interrogated and analyzed in rotating shifts.
A successful gang of jewel thieves are operating out a London nightclub, using doubles to take their places in the nightspot while they are out committing crimes. The police commissioner calls in American detective Nick Mason to infiltrate the gang.
Frank Dayton leads a group of crooks in a caper to steal $2,500,000 from an Air Force base. Dayton is the tough-guy military leader who recruits Mike, ex-Nazi Max sadistic killer Barney Barry, and failed French artist Claude in the scheme.
Stephen Torcelli lives with his partner Danny Russo in New York City. When Stephen's parents call to announce a surprise visit for his father's birthday, Stephen and Danny scramble to conceal their double lives. The Torcellis already know that Stephen and Danny are gay; they don't know that they're enforcers for the Patrizzi crime family.
Learning of her mother's serious illness, Isabel (Geneviève Bujold) returns to her family's farm on the Gaspé Peninsula. Her mother dies before she can get there, and when her aged uncle Matthew (Gerard Parkes) asks her to stay on and help him with the farm, she reluctantly agrees. She finds herself haunted by memories of early years (domestic violence, incest and the mysterious deaths of her grandfather, who died in a freak accident, and her father and brother, who both drowned at sea) in a house full of eerie sights and sounds.
DEA agent Kevin White has followed the movements of drug-dealing ex-KGB kingpin Nikolai Radchenko (Vladimir Skomarovsky) from Moscow to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles, where Kevin crosses paths with his older brother Jack, a maverick LAPD cop who attempts to become involved in the operation, placing both brothers' lives at risk from a group of dangerous Soviet martial arts experts.
A gang of teenage greasers terrorize a small community by stealing cars and stripping them for parts, then selling the parts to a crooked junkyard owner. The police and an insurance company investigator set out to break up the gang.
Taking place in Quebec City, the film tells the story of a lawyer and a patron of the arts, Albert Frédéric, who, earlier in life, caused a murder and made it look like an accident for financial gain. Later in life, a dying woman tells a reporter the tale of how she thinks the accident was actually murder. The young American reporter, Mary Roberts, begins investigating the case, unaware that the charming lawyer may be behind it all.
A gang of jewel thieves use an exiled member of German royalty as an unwitting part of their scheme to rob a major New York jewellery company. Fortunately he is tipped off by one of the store's workers and he is able to turn the tables on the gang.
While holidaying in Spain, Philip Graham by chance runs into an old wartime RAF colleague Tony Roscoe, now a society photographer. The pair spend some time reminiscing, before Tony is urgently called back to England on business. Tony is required to fly home, so Philip offers to drive Tony's car back from Spain at the end of his holiday.
A group of women with traumatic pasts who have been wronged by various men or groups are taken under the protection of a slightly older woman , herself once beaten to a miscarriage. She trains these once mistreated women as professional killers, using their looks to get close to targets, and sends them out on missions of vengeance against the people who wronged them. Their latest mission includes the killing of a 6-year-old girl, and one of the women tries to find a way to avoid it.
