J.B. Ball, a rich financier, gets fed up with his free-spending family. He takes his wife's just-bought (very expensive) sable coat and throws it out the window, it lands on poor hard-working girl Mary Smith. But it isn't so easy to just give away something so valuable, as he soon learns.

After a young woman is coerced into prostitution and her brother framed for murder by an organized crime syndicate, retribution in the form of an ape visits the mobsters.

Mary Lou manages to escape abduction by a prostitution ring. She tells the Chief of Detectives they were planning to take her to the Berrywood road house, a well-known den of iniquity. Jim Murray and beautician Belle Harris are using her beauty shop to recruit floozies for their road house circuit. Dona Lee, who works at the beauty salon, is falling in love with young reporter wanna-be Phillip, but Murray gets jealous and makes life rough for him. Meanwhile Dona begins to figure out the racket, but becomes threatened by Murray's unwanted advances.

El Malo, notorious Mexican bandit, forces the Mayor of Sierra Blanca, Seth Landport, to open the safe and turn over to him 2,000 pesos, which the bandit gives a promissory note for to the Mayor. Seth rushes to the cantina where Sheriff Rankin is drinking, and the sheriff posts a reward for the capture of El Malo. El Malo informs his men of the reward. The bandit and his sidekick, Pedro, visit the cantina where Pedro resumes a former acquaintance with Dolores, while El Malo has his attention directed to a tango being performed by Carmita. El Malo pushes her dancing partner aside and finishes the dance with Carmita. Since Seth's description of him is not accurate, El May visits the sheriff and promises to deliver the wanted bandit to the cantina the following night. THe following morning, El Malo and Pedro depart, and, halting their horses on a hill, view the stagecoach being held up by a trio of outlaws.

Jay Rountree, a young, rising businessman and a son of a wealthy manufacturer gets caught up in a web involving an escort service or 'party girls' and trapped into an unhappy marriage.

A girl with a shady past is picked by a playwright to be the star of his newest play.

Phony spiritualists were given a good going-over in the early talkie melodrama Darkened Rooms. Evelyn Brent stars as Ellen, a fraudulent medium working in cahoots with genuine clairvoyant Emory Jago (Neil Hamilton). The plotline is secondary; the film's main purpose was to emulate the methods of such professional "de-bunkers" as Mrs. Harry Houdini by exposing the various tricks of the spiritualist's trade.

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. After Carrie has left town Paul runs away from his abusive father, and meets a girl named Lady who has run away from a burning trainwreck, not wanting to go back to the people she was with. Carrie comes back for Paul and ends up taking Paul and Lady to New York with her.

Tom Destry, son of a legendary frontier peacekeeper, doesn’t believe in gunplay. Thus he becomes the object of widespread ridicule when he rides into the wide-open town of Bottleneck, the personal fiefdom of the crooked Kent.

Alice, the only relatively normal member of the eccentric Sycamore family, falls in love with Tony Kirby, but his wealthy banker father and snobbish mother strongly disapprove of the match. When the Kirbys are invited to dinner to become better acquainted with their future in-laws, things don't turn out the way Alice had hoped.