Real estate developer Jake Berman hires private investigator and war veteran Jake Gittes for some run-of-the-mill matrimonial work. After Berman shoots his wife's lover, who happens to be his business partner, Gittes is drawn into a web of conspiracy and deceit involving the oil reserves beneath Los Angeles. While investigating, Gittes hears a voice from his past that causes him to revisit a traumatic case in Chinatown.

On Election Day, 1968, irresponsible hairdresser and ladies' man George Roundy is too busy cutting hair and dealing with his girlfriends and mistress Felicia Karpf, whose husband Lester is having an affair with his ex-girlfriend Jackie.

After his wife leaves him, a disillusioned director dives into the drug scene, trying anything his friend suggests.

In the sixteenth century, Francis Barnard travels to Spain to clarify the strange circumstances of his sister's death after she had married the son of a cruel Spanish Inquisitor.

A scheming widow hatches a bold plan to acquire her late husband's inheritance, unaware that she is being targeted by an ax murderer who lurks in the family's estate.

Rowdy Yates is accused of murder, and has to alert the Army to a bandit assault.

Two Navy men are ordered to bring a young offender to prison, but decide to show him one last good time along the way.

A young man steals a car and ends up involved in a pedestrian fatality. The only witness is a girl he has just met. He threatens her life if she talks, so when she refuses to tell what she knows, she is sent to reform school.

A young sailor falls in love with a mysterious woman performing as a mermaid on the local pier. As they become entwined, he comes to suspect the woman might be a real mermaid who lures men to a watery death during the full moon. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2007.

An innocent nightclub singer becomes mixed up in illegal drug dealings shortly after witnessing her husband's death and the murder of a couple of narcotics agents.