With her husband away to fight in World War II, a housewife must care for their two daughters alone.

A young woman traveling to Poland with her employer meets a count, and they fall in love as World War II begins.

A rope bridge over a gorge in the Peruvian Andes snaps, sending five people plunging to their deaths. A priest sets out to find out more about the life of each of the victims.

Illiterate peasant Juan Gallardo rises meteorically to fame and fortune in the bullfight arena only to sow the seeds of his own fall.

1938: A young man arrives in Hitler's Germany, frantically seeking information about his German mother, and finds she is pending execution at a concentration camp.

Salome, the daughter of Herodias, seduces her step-father/uncle Herod, governor of Judea, with a salacious dance. In return, he promises her the head of the prophet John the Baptist.

A courtesan and an idealistic young man fall in love, only for her to give up the relationship at his status-conscious father's request.

Jane Goring, a ruthlessly ambitious actress, forsakes her life as a wife and mother for the stage. Returning home from a performance one night, Jane is disgusted to find her husband Robert McNaughton victimized by a tubercular cough and so banishes him and her young daughter to a sanitarium in Colorado. Years pass, finding Jane still estranged from her family. On the opening night of her new play, Jane finds herself upstaged and outperformed by Gloria Cromwell, a rising young actress, who, unknown to Jane, is her abandoned daughter. Returning home, Jane is haunted by visions of her husband and child and begins to sob. Looking up from her pillow, she is startled to see her husband with Gloria.

Sigrid, A French dancer, diagnosed with a weak heart, is ordered by her doctor never to dance again. But when her dancing skills are needed by her lover's father to help quell a native uprising on the East Indian frontier, she determines to dance whatever the cost.

Mahlee and Blanche Sackville are half-sisters, Blanche the daughter of an Englishman and his wife, Mahlee of the Englishman and his Chinese mistress. Mahlee rejects her people and attempts to find a life for herself among the Europeans. But she finds the color line impossible to pass and returns to lead her Chinese people in rebellion.

The daughter of an Arab sheik falls in love with a French naval officer, thus breaking the strict rule of social law of her people, as well as her religion.

Joan is loved by a young man of the village and they are married. In a few weeks the husband, a soldier, is sent to the war-front along with his three brothers. Word is received that her husband has been killed in battle and Joan's first impulse is suicide by she is pregnant and her prospective motherhood makes her realize her new responsibility. The military authorities start a movement to get the young women of the country to marry departing soldiers, so that the empire may have another generation of fighting men. Word is received that the King is to pass through their village and Joan organizes the women in a general protest against the war. She leads them all, dressed in black, in a long procession to meet the Monarch. The soldiers threaten to shoot her unless she turns the women back, buy Joan comes face-to-face with the ruler and kills herself, as her message from the women that they refuse to make another generation victims of a ruthless militarism.