Back home in Texas following the Civil War, former Confederate officer Chad Morgan (Alan Ladd) leads a cattle drive to Missouri, assuring fellow ranchers that their stock will bring $10 a head at auction. Instead, ruthless cattle baron Brog (Anthony Caruso) has scared off all competition and offers much less.

A police captain's emotions get in the way when his daughter is kidnapped.

Grace is a troubled young lady with some serious daddy issues. She was adopted as a young girl and raised up in a family of traveling faith healers. After the patriarch of that little group passes away Grace's world is thrown into turmoil. The eldest brother turns his back on the family business in favor of medical school despite being engaged to Grace and she is left alone with the shady younger son who puts Grace in a skimpy leotard and incorporates some circus style showmanship to draw in the rubes.

Ornithologist Abner Peacock sells off his modest-selling birdwatching periodical to a charlatan who turns it into a girlie mag, making it a massive financial success. After Peacock and the magazine are taken to court on obscenity charges, he unwillingly becomes a reluctant hero and ends up a swinging libertine.

A crooked police detective masterminds a robbery then fights to keep the stolen money.

Sammy Hogarth, a vaudeville comedian who now has his own TV show, is a ruthless egomaniac who demands instant obedience from his staff and heaps abuse on those in lesser positions than his. His most vituperative behavior, however, is reserved for his weak-willed brother, Lester, whom Sammy has hired as his assistant but whom he really uses as his whipping boy.

The retelling of June 6, 1944, from the perspectives of the Germans, US, British, Canadians, and the Free French. Marshall Erwin Rommel, touring the defenses being established as part of the Reich's Atlantic Wall, notes to his officers that when the Allied invasion comes they must be stopped on the beach. "For the Allies as well as the Germans, it will be the longest day"

Mary Peppertree, a switchboard operator in the White House, is being courted by three men; Philip Manning, an attorney; Navy Lieutenant Tom Farrington, naval-aide to the President; and David Paxton, whose father owns an island in the Pacific. When the U.S. Navy negotiates for the purchase of the island for a base, David agrees to sell on two conditions - that Philip be made a judge in a court at least 1500 miles from Washigton, and that Lieutenant Farrington be given sea duty