Bill Cannon (Dan Duryea) loses everything to alcohol: his job, his family, his self-respect. Soon after his wife and daughter leave him, he receives word his little girl has been injured in a car accident outside Chicago. His wife will call later with news, but Bill’s short the $53 he needs to keep his phone from being disconnected. Filled with anguish, he heads out onto the Los Angeles streets to find some way to come up with the cash. As his character encounters expected cruelty and unexpected kindness, Duryea takes what might have been mere melodrama and turns it into a perceptive examination of one shattered soul. The other fine star of this race-against-the-clock programmer is an unglamorous, lunch-bucket L.A. rarely captured on film.

A government agent investigates the use of illegal amphetamines among long-haul truck drivers.

The CIA sends playboy Mike Trent to Alaska with agent Vee Langley, posing as his "nurse," to investigate flying saucer sightings. At first, installed in a hunting lodge, the two play in the wilderness. But then they sight a saucer. Investigating, our heroes clash with an inept gang of Soviet spies, also after the saucer secret.

A homely middle-aged man falls hard for a much younger woman leading to disaster.

An alien from planet Davanna, whose population has developed a terminal blood disease caused by nuclear radiation, is sent to Earth to acquire fresh human blood for his people.

The Office of Scientific Investigations tracks down the source of increased magnetism and radioactivity in Los Angeles, and discovers that a man-made isotope is consuming available energy from nearby mass every few hours, doubling its size in the process. Although microscopic, it will soon become big enough to destroy Earth; and how to stop it is yet to be determined. The film's Deltatron special effects footage is taken from the 1934 German sci-fi film GOLD.

In a racially mixed American town, a five-year-old black girl falls unnoticed into a hidden, forgotten well on her way to school. Having nothing better to go on, the police follow up a report that the child was seen with a white stranger, and rumors run wild. Before hapless, innocent Claude Packard is even found, popular hysteria has him tried and convicted. But is he guilty?

1954 film by Lewis Allen

1963 film by Stanley Kramer