Bill Cannon (Dan Duryea) loses everything to alcohol: his job, his family, his self-respect. Soon after his wife and daughter leave him, he receives word his little girl has been injured in a car accident outside Chicago. His wife will call later with news, but Bill’s short the $53 he needs to keep his phone from being disconnected. Filled with anguish, he heads out onto the Los Angeles streets to find some way to come up with the cash. As his character encounters expected cruelty and unexpected kindness, Duryea takes what might have been mere melodrama and turns it into a perceptive examination of one shattered soul. The other fine star of this race-against-the-clock programmer is an unglamorous, lunch-bucket L.A. rarely captured on film.

Dracula travels to the American West, intent on making a beautiful ranch owner his next victim. Her fiance, outlaw Billy the Kid, finds out about it and rushes to save her.

Blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (working under the pseudonym “Sally Stubblefield”) tells a rough-edged tale of life inside a 1950s women’s reformatory. Set in the Martha Washington School for Girls—an institute for wayward teenagers and unwed mothers—THE GREEN-EYED BLONDE tackles a range of topical social issues as the inmates band together to help out one of their own when she refuses to give up her child.

Research chemist Barnaby Fulton works on a fountain of youth pill for a chemical company. One of the labs chimps gets loose in the laboratory and mixes chemicals, but then pours the mix into the water cooler. When trying one of his own samples, washed down with water from the cooler, Fulton begins to act just like a twenty-year-old and believes his potion is working. Soon his wife and boss are also behaving like children.

In the late 1890s, the ambitious, innocent Carrie arrives in Chicago’s South Side and stays with her nagging, dullish married sister. She then runs for help to traveling salesman Charles Drouet. She soon becomes his mistress, but falls in love with married restaurant manager George Hurstwood.

Blake Washburn blames manufacturer MacFarland for his defeat in the race for re-election to the state legislature. He takes over his uncle's newspaper to take on big business as an enemy of the people. Miss Martin works in the "Herald" newspaper office. When tragedy strikes, Blake must re-examine his views.

Just before Christmas, department store clerk Steve Mason meets big spending customer Connie Ennis, who's actually a comparison shopper sent by another store. Steve lets her go, which gets him fired. They spend the afternoon together, which doesn't sit well with Connie's steady suitor, Carl, when he finds out, but delights her young son Timmy, who quickly takes to Steve.

Citizens of Fairview are outraged when they learn children from the "Patch", a squalid migrant camp on the outskirts of town, will soon be attending Fairview's school.

A cash-strapped electrical engineer with a criminal past vows to go straight when he marries his longtime girlfriend, but he has second thoughts when the mob offers big money for his wiretapping services.

Four sisters come of age in America in the aftermath of the Civil War.