Monika from Stockholm falls in love with Harry, a young man on holiday. When she becomes pregnant they are forced into a marriage, which begins to fall apart soon after they take up residence in a cramped little flat.

Two jobless Americans convince a prospector to travel to the mountains of Mexico with them in search of gold. But the hostile wilderness, local bandits, and greed all get in the way of their journey.

A communist soldier is sent to a remote region of China in order to collect folk songs. Staying with a peasant family (a widower with two small children), he discovers a community whose way of life is completely alien to him, but he gradually wins their trust…

An elderly shop-keeper and his grand-daughter are threatened by the rich, mean-spirited dwarf Quilp, and decide to flee across England to escape him. They are pursued both by Quilp and by the shop-keeper's long-lost brother, who wants to find them for a different reason.

From the moment she glimpses her idol at the stage door, Eve Harrington is determined to take the reins of power away from the great actress Margo Channing. Eve maneuvers her way into Margo's Broadway role, becomes a sensation and even causes turmoil in the lives of Margo's director boyfriend, her playwright and his wife. Only the cynical drama critic sees through Eve, admiring her audacity and perfect pattern of deceit.

Newlyweds receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift—and the house can, supposedly, be built in "one week". A rejected suitor secretly re-numbers packing crates, and the husband struggles to assemble the house according to this new 'arrangement' of its parts.