Construction worker, Chuck Hassan, has a heart attack and is no longer able to work and support his family. After losing their home and savings, his wife, Concetta, looks for work and decides to join the Army, to take advantage of the security and benefits. She advances quickly and eventually becomes a helicopter pilot.

Life imitates art when two Manhattanites — pompous teacher Willie and quiet photographer Phil — become friends after a thought-provoking screening of "Jules et Jim," Truffaut's classic film about a decades-long ménage à trois. Soon, the men meet Jeanette, a sexually liberated southern transplant who promptly falls for both of them. Frustrated passions curdle into jealousy as Jeanette entertains love affairs with each in the ensuing years.

Offbeat fashion student Betsy Hopper and her straight-laced investment-banker fiancé Jake Lovell just want an intimate little wedding reception, but Betsy's father Eddie, a Long Island construction contractor, feels so threatened by Jake's rich WASP parents that he blows the ceremony up into a bank-breaking showpiece, sending his wife Lola into a financial panic.

Theodore Hickman, a hardware salesman, makes by-yearly visits to Harry Hope's 1910-era waterfront bar for his periodical drinking binges. But on this visit he has decided to try to save the bar's patrons from their "lying pipe dreams."