T. E. Lawrence is a young maladjusted lieutenant in the British Army in North Africa during World War One. Unhappy with his current assignment coloring maps, he is ecstatic when he is offered a job as an observer in what is now Arabia. At this point, the story of his life becomes the stuff that legends are made of.

A young American woman traveling in Italy with her mother is slender, blonde, beautiful and there is something charmingly naive about her. Fabrizio Naccarelli seems to always know where the mother and daughter will sightsee next. Signor Naccarelli is just as concerned about where this will lead as Mrs. Johnson is. Then she starts thinking that perhaps her daughter can be a wife of a wealthy young man in a society where all she has to do is look beautiful. What happens if Signor Naccarelli finds out who his prospective daughter-in-law really is?

Mr Hobbs longs for a vacation alone with his wife, away from his long commute into work and his disfunctional family. His wife longs for a family get-together. Of course the wife wins and off to the beach with the family they go.

Karl from Germany and Marcelo from France emigrated to Argentina and became brothers-in-law. Whatever happens later they will always preserve a strong family feeling. Karl soon returned to Germany to serve in the army. Marcelo and his children Julio and Chichi became Argentinean citizens but later returned to Paris. Karl became a general with a son (Heinrich) in the SS. During WWII he got a high job within the occupation administration in France. Heinrich would come and go. Julio was a playboy. Chichi joined the resistance and was eventually tortured to death by Gestapo. Julio has a relation to a woman whose husband is a POW, and who will after release become a district leader within the resistance movement. Julio eventually feels that it is his duty to fight the Nazis. With a firm reputation as a superficial playboy, he can attend the nightclub favoured by German officers and gather much important information. Finally he and another partisan (posing as his chauffeur) accept a highly important suicidal task involving a courtesy call to Heinrich.

When he completes his military service Walter Gulick returns to his birthplace, Cream Valley, New York. He was orphaned as an infant and grew up elsewhere but always wanted to return to where he was from. He hopes to be a mechanic but soon after his arrival finds himself working as a sparring partner at a boxing camp. Having lost all of his money in a crap game, Walter is happy to take any kind of work but a devastating right hook sends him down a different path. Willy Grogan thinks he has a winner in Walter who, after helping a lady out, is dubbed Kid Galahad. Willy is a likable man but gambles too much and may have been a witness to a mobster’s conversation that would best be forgotten. As Walter gains more success, and falls in love with Willy’s sister Rose, Willy Grogan finds himself coming under pressure from mobsters to make Walter takes a dive at his next big fight.

As an inmate at Leavenworth prison, Robert Stroud has a series of confrontations with the guards and with the other convicts. When Stroud kills a guard, he is sentenced to be executed, and only his mother’s impassioned intervention gets his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, which he must serve in solitary confinement. As he serves out his sentence in boredom and despair, one day he finds a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard. Stroud soon takes a deep interest in caring for birds, which gives him a new purpose in life, but which also brings new conflicts with prison authorities.

In order to free his best friend Bondi, Jack Burns lets himself be imprisoned only to find out that Bondi does not want to escape. Thus Burns breaks out on his own and is afterwards being chased by sheriff Johnson with helicopters and jeeps.

In the rural American south during the depths of the Depression, two children watch as their principled father takes a stand against intolerance.

Essentially true story of how Spartan king Leonidas led an extremely small army of Greek Soldiers (300 of them his personal body guards from Sparta) to hold off an invading Persian army more than 20 times as large. The actual heroism of those who stood (and ultimately died) with Leonidas helped shape the course of Western Civilization, allowing the Greek city states time to organize an army which repelled the Persians. Set in 480 BC.

Humbert Humbert, a divorced British professor of French literature, travels to small-town America for a teaching position. He allows himself to be swept into a relationship with Charlotte Haze, his widowed and sexually famished landlady, whom he marries in order that he might pursue the woman’s 14-year-old flirtatious daughter, Lolita, with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love, but whose affections shall be thwarted by a devious trickster named Clare Quilty.