Clyde King, a toy store employee whose hobbies include making wooden toys and stalking women, is coveted by the female owner of one of the biggest toy companies in the world. She is enchanted by King's hand-carved toys, and she delegates the recruitment of the toy-maker to her second-in-command, Lyle "Skippy" Burns. However, King will not join her company as she reminds him of his mother. She becomes the subject of bizarre fantasies in which "Mother," the toy company owner as imagined by King, brow-beats and humiliates him. Discovering King's predeliction for leaving the toy store to stalk women, Skippy first tries to entice Clyde into signing an employemnt contract by supplying him with women, even going as far to dress himself up in drag as a prostitute. But every time he sets King up with a woman, the encounter ends disastrously, so Skippy finally decides to kill him.

Meg is a young wide-eyed girl who is endures many calamities in her search for a husband in modern-day New York. After losing her suitcase at Penn Station, being kicked out by her roommate, and changing bosses because her boss made a pass at her, she finds herself looking for work at a Manhattan motivational research agency run by punctilious Miles Doughton and his playboy brother, Evan.

Two men are released from the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma in 1898. One, The Dutchman, is out to get both gold and revenge from certain people in a small mining town who had him imprisoned unjustly. The other, McBain, is just trying to go straight, but that is easier said than done once The Dutchman involves him in his gold theft scheme. Based on the 1949 novel The Asphalt Jungle by W. R. Burnett, the story is given an 1898 setting. It is the second film adaptation of the novel following 1950's noir classic The Asphalt Jungle.