Ephraim Cabot is an old man of amazing vitality who loves his New England farm with a greedy passion...

A U.S. sub commander, obsessed with sinking a certain Japanese ship, butts heads with his first officer and crew.

Can a girl from Little Rock find happiness with a mature French planter she got to know one enchanted evening away from the military hospital where she is a nurse? Or should she just wash that man out of her hair? Bloody Mary is the philosopher of the island and it's hard to believe she could be the mother of Liat who has captured the heart of Lt. Joseph Cable USMC. While waiting for action in the war in the South Pacific, sailors and nurses put on a musical comedy show. The war gets closer and the saga of Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque becomes serious drama.

Aspiring actress Lora Meredith meets Annie Johnson a homeless black woman at Coney Island and soon they share a tiny apartment. Each woman has an intolerable daughter, though Annie's little girl Sarah Jane, is by far the worse. Neurotic and obnoxious, Sarah Jane doesn't like being black; since she's light-skinned (her father was practically white), she spends the rest of the film passing as white, much to her mother's heartache and shame. Lora, meanwhile, virtually ignores her own daughter in a single-minded quest for stardom.

Captain Tom Reynolds and his band of skilled O.S.S. operatives are in WWII Burma to train the Kachin natives in modern warfare. But jungle combat, particularly against a Japanese army as familiar with the terrain as the Kachin, is more grueling than Reynolds had reckoned. Some respite is found in the arms of beautiful Carla, but after Chinese rebels cross the border to loot and murder American soldiers, Reynolds abandons all notions of "military protocol" and seeks requital.

A submarine newly commissioned is damaged in the opening days of WW II. A captain, looking for a command insists he can get it to a dockyard and captain it. Going slowly to this site, they find a stranded group of Army nurses and must take them aboard. How bad can it get? Trying to get a primer coat on the sub, they have to mix white and red in order to have enough. When forced to flee the dock during an air attack, they find themselves with the world's only Pink submarine, still with 5 women in the tight quarters of a submarine.

In New York, the interior decorator Jan Morrow and the wolf composer Brad Allen share a party line, but Brad keeps it busy most of the time flirting with his girlfriends. They do not know each other but Jan hates Brads since she needs the telephone for her business and can not use it. Coincidently Jan's wealthy client Jonathan Forbes that woos her is the best friend of Brad and he comments with him that he feels an unrequited love for Jan, who is a gorgeous woman. When Brad meets Jan by chance in a restaurant, he poses as a naive tourist from Texas named Rex Stetson and seduces her. But Jonathan hires a private eye to find who Rex Stetson is.

Two detectives seek a stripper's killer in the Japanese quarter of Los Angeles, but a love triangle threatens their friendship.

British hunter Thorndike vacationing in Bavaria has Hitler in his gunsight. He is captured, beaten, left for dead, and escapes back to London where he is hounded by German agents and aided by a young woman.