A physician enacts revenge on the woman he loves after she marries another by treating her exhaustion with maddening drugs. The film depicts her descent into madness in a red-tinted trip to hell itself.

In 1856, slave Eliza plans to marry George with the consent of the Shelbys, her masters, but George's owner prevents the wedding. A few years later, Eliza flees with her son, Harry, after learning the Shelbys plan to hand them over to a crooked creditor to prevent foreclosure. George also escapes and goes on the run while Eliza and Harry are captured and brought back home. Mother and son are separated as George tries to find them both.

Two sailors (William Haines and Cliff Edwards) are leaving the US Navy after 10 years. In their spare time, one of them (Haines) invents a carburetor that should increase the speed that powered boats will run, but all they succeed in doing is sinking the Admiral's barge. After discharge, broke and out of work, they find work with a boat builder who wants the fastest race boat in the world. They design the boat, carburetor and the engine but lack of money and the foreclosure of the business hinders their efforts to prove the new design.

Wealthy racing driver Tom Hayden loses his inheritance and his fiancé due to a wacky mishap on his wedding day.

In order to secure a lucrative contract, a businessman hires a woman to pose as his wife at a business dinner when his own wife can't make it. Unfortunately, the woman he hires is the wife of an insanely jealous prizefighter.

This film sticks very closely to the Edna Ferber novel, rather than the musical based on the novel. There are only two major changes from Ferber's book : *Julie in this version is a white woman, not a racially mixed one; therefore she and her husband are not unlawfully married. * Ravenal returns at the end, instead of dying as in the novel