American foreign correspondent Jeff Seabrook's prolonged absences are frustrating his former musician wife Julia so much she has resumed her performing career and is planning a divorce. Jeff hasn't told her he is on his way home. Julia hasn't told him she is leaving him and is already being deeply wooed by both by orchestra manager David Torrance and music critic Philip Barrows.
Pip-Emma Binns is a New York tomboy with 11 uncles, who wear uniforms and teach her the professional tricks of their trades. Pip-Emma is invited—as a charity case—to a summer camp for wealthy girls. The snobby "Purple Order of Penguins" resent Pip-Emma's brash behavior, plain-spoken opinions, and streetwise skills learned from her uncles, and she is bullied by the other girls.
Afrikaner Kate runs a Cape Town animal shelter, is involved with a married man, and is oblivious to the romantic attentions of Morne, a local veterinarian. The shelter's East Indian receptionist Sharifa is desperately struggling to have a child with her husband. Meanwhile, Congolese handyman Jean Claude finds himself torn between his growing love for a black South African single mother and his dreams of emigrating to Canada.
Simon Eskanazy is a thirty-year-old gay musician. Born into a Jewish family, he took great pains to accept his homosexuality, and to get his family (including his mother and his uncle, Salomon) to do the same. The latter, Uncle Salomon is a wealthy banker who offered him a deal: he'll give him 10 million francs and will bequeath his mansion to Simon only if Simon agrees to marry a woman.
Matthew Putnam is summoned back to his small hometown of Rockridge by his aged, bedridden aunt Nettie after seven years of enjoying himself in Europe, where he had been sent to study. She is tired and wants him to take charge of Putnam Dairies, the family business and the town's major employer. Every mother with a marriageable daughter is excited by the return of the wealthy young man, including Mathilda Sherman.
Kemi, a young florist working at her parents' flower shop in Lagos, dreams of marrying her long-term boyfriend, Umar, a lawyer, who has promised to propose once he gets a promotion. Kemi eagerly anticipates the proposal, spending her time planning the perfect wedding. When Umar finally gets his promotion, Kemi expects a proposal but is devastated when Umar breaks up with her instead, saying he needs space to focus on his career.
A young progressive thinking woman becomes superintendent at a French girl's reformatory dominated by the harsh previous head. A young girl is blackmailed by her acquaintance over her love for the superintendent's fiancé, but is released to join him in the end, when all is revealed.
A young couple, Karen Sayers and Alex McDonald (Adrienne La Russa and Alan McRae), are fed up with the disorganized grime of student ghetto living and decide they are ready for their own apartment. When denied financial assistance by their parents, they devise an ingenious plan for revenge: Karen will seduce Alex's father Roy McDonald (John Gavin) and Alex will do the same with Karen's mother Celia Sayers (Patricia Gage). Karen lands a job as Roy's private secretary; she is an instant hit with her boss and soon enough, the two land in a downtown hotel room.
Arizona Sky is a romantic story of two high school buddies who reconnect with desire in their hearts. As the film opens, the teenagers Kyle and Jake are getting together for what appears to be a regular ritual of sleeping under the desert stars. The passions of first love are evident in these two young men.
Two groups of people live in the same village, the Aloes and the Veras. There is a harsh rivalry between them that endures even with the children, and each side is marked by their own trademark color. When the children of the town leaders, Aloewin and Veraline, fall in love, they must find a way to bring the two communities together despite the animosity.
Ted Hutchens is a code expert working in intelligence at the American Embassy in London. On a night out to the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden he meets a young woman named Anna, and the pair fall immediately in love. The problem is that Anna is the daughter of the ambassador in London of a country which is not named but it is implied that it is part of the Warsaw Pact.
Johnny is a high-powered executive who is definitely not looking to fall in love but a business conference takes her to wine country she meets a handsome widower Andrew who invites Johnny to meet his family after she loses her job. In helping his parents' winery she begins to fall in love with him and his family but when she gets offered another job she has to choose between her career or Andrew.
Sierra Young is a rising actress in Hollywood, making $10 million per picture. She's also a spoiled celebrity, who is partying all night, complaining on movie sets and unable to perform well. After a tantrum, in which she gets two black eyes, the director has her sent to a rehab clinic in a remote Utah town.
In 1945, after Helen Brandt (Laraine Day) and her mother (Ann Harding) move from Ellsworth Falls to New York City, Helen finds a job as a perfume clerk at a department store while Mrs. Brandt works for the war relief effort. Jerry (Bill Williams), a boy just home from serving in France, likes Helen, but she only thinks of him as a "pal".
The film is set at the onset and first months of the Second World War, between March 1939 and June 1940, in a small fishing port in Cornwall, whose inhabitants have an historic, but largely benign, rivalry with their counterparts from a port over the Channel in Brittany in northern France, whose fishing boats fish the same grounds - in this case looking for crabs. Legally the French may not fish within a three-mile limit of the British coast, and vice versa, and breaches of this rule are the cause of frequent spats between the two countries. In this instance, hot-headed Cornish harbour-master Nat Pomeroy confronts Lanec Florrie, an…
Nora Shelley is a tax expert for the accounting company which is led by Paul Martin. She thinks she can find a suitable husband by inspecting their clients' tax documents. Martin finds out and tries to dissuade her from this approach, later enlisting the help of his friend Steve Adams, who tries to woo Shelley.
Grace Herbert is a woman in her 40s who has made her living from seducing wealthy men and suing them for breach of promise. At the end of her finances, she and her maid, Josie head to Miami where Grace hopes to find another rich man. When that plan falls through, she stumbles upon Ellen Daley, a young woman who is looking for a job as a secretary.
A rich, rebellious boy spends the summer with his father who he has considered long dead and his mistress while waiting for the annulment of his father and his mother's marriage. During his stay with his father during the summer, he meets a poor girl who is his childhood friend and is a scholar of whom her family is depending on; however, she is holding in a secret with regards to the true state of her scholarship. The two meet and comfort each other amidst their problems and they fall for each other as time goes on and as they get to know each other.
Soon after the end of World War II, a young Englishwoman, Amy Atkins, returns to the London flat where she and her best friend, Tillie, once used to live. Tillie died just before she was to leave for America to look for the man she married during the war. Her children, twins Joyce and Johnny Jr., are in the care of housekeeper Mrs.
Betty Holloway, a receptionist at a major television station, hopes to secure a break for her singer boyfriend Ted Mason and enlists the aid of singer Frankie Laine. Mason's career is boosted when a team of television writers discover that he is the childhood sweetheart of Gloria Pelly, the daughter of an important sponsor.