On the Fourth of July holiday in 1906, the Miller family prepares to celebrate in their New England home. Young Richard, 16, is a thoughtful and poetic youth in love with a neighbor girl, Muriel. When Richard's messages of poetry to Muriel upset her prudish father, Muriel is forbidden to see him and forced to write a letter saying she wishes no more to do with him. Richard, devastated, sets out to learn the evil ways of the world and put his broken heart behind him.

A rich widow shocks her snobbish WASP family when she decides to marry her Jewish, divorced, doctor. His family is equally shocked.

A man falls in love with a married co-worker and wants her to divorce her husband, but she refuses because she has a ten-year-old son.

A group of American Army nurses are captured by the Japanese in April 1942 and spend three years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Bataan. Lt Margaret Ann Jessup, the head army nurse, survives the camp and testifies against the Japanese in front of the United States Congressional subcommittee years later as a colonel.

At his wedding Claude Sams has an argument with his son about his life-style; in anger Paul leaves. Together with a friend he sets out for Vegas to search a job. While changing a tire on the highway, he's killed by a passing truck. The police believes it's been an accident, but Claude doesn't accept this and frantically searches for a yellow truck and it's crazy driver at all truck stations.