The road-show troupe of a top Broadway show go cross-country while taking the audience along on the on-stage scenes as well as what happens and is happening back stage of the production. The spectacular dancing ensembles and colorful costumes and pulchritude on-stage offers a contrasting background to the drabness of the backstage, where joy, sorrow, tragedies, deception, and romance are intertwined.

The dim-witted son of a heroic fire chief tries to follow in his late father's footsteps, only to become the unknowing pawn of corrupt politicians.

Millicent Howard, whose appearance and persona bring her a life of luxury. A millionaire named Claverhouse asks her to marry, but she values love more than wealth, and she sacrifices everything for another man, who is less wealthy, Jerry Booth. A lost film.

A horse breeder's granddaughter falls in love with a gambler in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Conrad Nagel, representing the Hollywood movie community, and Jack Benny, representing the Broadway stage community, act as the interlocutors of a musical comedy revue. A plethora of chorus boys and girls are featured front and center in some of the song and dance numbers, and provide back-up to some other acts. But the revue primarily is a vehicle to highlight a cavalcade of Hollywood movie and Broadway stage stars. One early running gag has both Nagel and Benny playing straight man to Cliff Edwards, who just wants a nice introduction to his act. Edwards would return later to be featured along with the Brox Sisters in one of the highlights of the second act, a production number around the song "Singin' in Rain", complete with rain soaked stage. A reprise of the song with the entire cast acts as the revue's finale.

When Prohibition ends, a barber tries to get in the liquor business only to come up against mobsters.

Jeff wants to get married to Virginia, but Virginia won't marry until her older, hard-to-please sister Angelica gets married off first. Jeff pretends that a shy, never-married nobody he has just met is really a great lover, in order to get Angelica interested in him.

A beautiful singer and a battling priest try to reform a Barbary Coast saloon owner in the days before the great earthquake and subsequent fires in 1906.

Buster Keaton's final silent feature, as well as the final film in which MGM allowed him any creative control.