Tailor Vipperup in Ebberöd has problems with liquidity: customers are bad at paying for his services while his own creditors are all the more intrusive. His consolation in life consists of his daughter Ellen and the faithful companion Tadeus. However, the repulsive trader Klemmensen, the town's richest man and most ruthless usurer, casts more and more lustful glances at Ellen.

The Squadron leader throws big a party where one of his colleagues is going to demonstrate a new type of explosive substance.

The prologue shows a Swedish home, where a family discusses what "a handful of rice" can mean. The action then moves to Thailand and shows the life of a Thai couple, Pó Chai and Mé Ying, and their lives of joy and hardship in the jungle growing rice.

A woman flees to avoid rumors of promiscuity, but is trailed by a reporter who wants to expose her dark past.

At a restaurant, the coats of flea expert Professor Loris and Lieutenant Juncker are mixee up. Thus Juncker finds the professor's notes for the next day, and makes a bet with his cronies that he should be able to carry out the professor's daily program without being exposed.

A young unemployed man, Bergmark, gets a job at a labor camp in the country, where he reconnects with the Social Democratic farmer Persson's daughter Barbro. They fall in love with each other. Through Persson's reasoning with his neighbor Ringdahl, he becomes a convinced social democrat, not least since he heard a political program speech by Per Albin Hansson.

Mr. Miller is the CEO of a big soap company whose son Henry like to spend his father's money but isn't interesting in working. Henry's laziness makes Mr. Miller upset and stressed out, so he assigns his young secretary (who the son also is in love with) to figure out a way to make Henry work and she will get 10,000 crowns ($1000). But things doesn't really to turn out the way Mr. Miller imagined.

Famous chef Carl-Ulrik Johansson (Erik 'Bullen' Berglund) comes home to Sweden after twenty years abroad and finds out he never finished his compulsory military service. Consequently he is forced to join the army as a conscript. He has many fights with his sergeant Göran Persson (Thor Modéen).

A gardener's son has fallen in love with the daughter of one of the workers at the nursery, and the two are married. The gardener then kicks his progeny off the property and begins to act despicably toward his son's wife.