The daily life of ordinary people of Shanghai apartment building: an unemployed person who tries not to lose face by concealing the loss of his job, a singer without an audience, a driver, a teacher, but also the owner of the building and his prodigal son.
In London, August 1914, Austrian star Elsa Duranyi (Gertrude Michael) and English matinee idol Alan Barclay (Herbert Marshall) are in love and plan an immediate marriage.
Carrie Snyder is a prostitute, who is forced out of the fictional southern town of Crebillon, after forming a friendship with a young boy named Paul, whose dying mother is unable to protest against her son visiting such a woman.
Joyce Reid, a wealthy young debutante, stows away on a cargo ship to China, carrying as passengers her dashing aviator sweetheart, Dan Bailey and and her munitions-producing father, E.
A newly hired police chief vows to clean up a notoriously corrupt police department. When he is murdered, investigators find that there is no shortage of suspects, most of them being fellow cops.