Virginia, 1803. After the United States of America acquires the inmense Louisiana territory from France, a great expedition, led by William Lewis and Meriwether Clark, is sent to survey the new lands and go where no white man has gone before.
An ex-convict drifter and his flawed young partner are made sheriff and deputy of a Western town.
The dream is unusually vivid: Bank employee Vince Grayson finds himself murdering a man in a sinister octagonal-shaped room lined with mirrors while a mysterious woman breaks into a safe. It is so vivid that Vince suspects it may have really happened. To get the dream off his mind, he goes on a picnic with some relatives. When a thunderstorm forces his party into a nearby mansion, Vince discovers that the bizarre room does exist, and it means nothing but trouble.
Clarinetist Stan has a nightmare about killing a man in a mirrored room. But when he wakes up and finds blood marks on himself and a key from the dream, he suspects that it may have truly happened.
A con artist moves into a small town to spearhead a payroll robbery.
At Rio Galdez's remote Brazilian trading post live assorted outcast Americans and Europeans, including Jerry Russell, ex-engineer who became obsessed with the Jivaro headhunters' treasure, quit his job, and took up with the bottle and local girl Maroa. But he still gets letters from his nominal fiancée in California, and unexpectedly the shapely, glamorous Alice Parker arrives, expecting to marry a rich planter. Disillusioned, Alice is almost ready to fall into Rio's arms when news comes that Jerry is missing in Jivaro country.
The title character, played by John Payne, is a ship's captain whose embittered behavior after losing his lady love seemingly leads to tragedy. Accused of deliberately scuttling his ship during a typhoon, Captain China hopes to clear himself by signing on as a common seaman on a vessel captain by his former first mate Brendensen. There's no love lost between the two men, and their mutual animosity is intensified when both fall in love with beautiful passenger.
Francis Barclay, a former member of the British Admiralty, who was captured in the early 1700s, and sold into slavery, by Andrew McAllister, and forced into piracy, enlists the aid of Dick Lindsay, to help him invade MacAllister's fortified island. The latter falls in love with MacAllister's daughter,Christine.
A sailor gets his boat stolen from him after he's set up for a crime.
In 1805, the United States battles the pirates of Tripoli as the Marines fight to raise the American flag.
A man returns to his home -- a post Civil-War village -- and finds the law is in the hands of a few scrupulous people.
Two reporters search for a missing body in a wax museum.
Cole Armin comes to Albuquerque to work for his uncle, John Armin, a despotic and hard-hearted czar who operates an ore-hauling freight line, and whose goal is to eliminate a competing line run by Ted Wallace and his sister Celia. Cole tires of his uncle's heavy-handed tactics and switches over to the Wallace side. Lety Tyler, an agent hired by the uncle, also switches over by warning Cole and Ted of a trap set for them by the uncle and his henchman.
Joe Beck leaves Central America so that he can return to Texas and collect a large inheritance, but he picks a dangerous ship on which to travel.
A nurse is taking an amnesia victim, who was imprisoned by the Japanese during WW II, to the United States in a plane piloted by Richard Denning. The passengers include a Japanese colonel on his way to Manila to face war-crime charges, and a couple who were married on the day they were liberated from a Japanese prison camp. During the flight, the colonel breaks away from his guards, causes the plane to go out of control, and it crashes into the sea. The survivors get into a rubber boat and go through a minor-league version of "Lifeboat, with no Alfred Hitchcock sightings, until Air-Sea Rescue pilot Jim Willis rides to the rescue.
Down-on-his-luck Mike Cormack is hired to fly to a Caribbean island to retrieve a missing ruby. On the island, possibly involved with the ruby's disappearance, is his ex-girlfriend.
Tim takes a job as a lowly chipper because he has been afraid to go high ever since a bad fall in which he was injured and another workman was killed.
Promoter William Montague wants to buy the estate owned by the Daceys, Mrs. Dacey and her daughter Ena and son Todd, in order to build a resort hotel. When they turn him down, he produces a couple of distant relatives, Janice and Robert Clayton, and sets about to prove that the estate rightfully belongs to them. The identity of the rightful heirs is thought to be buried in a sunken ship off of the Jamaican shore and the search begins, led by a schooner skipper, Patrick Fairlie, who is in love with Ena.
American adventurer Jeff Williams is fleeing the communist advance in China when he becomes entangled with a young Chinese orphan, Wei Lin, and a beautiful Red Cross volunteer, who arranges for their harrowing escape to Hong Kong.
On faraway Mosaque, an American pilot finds that he is in a desperate struggle with a military officer intent on sabotaging a local fort.
