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Middlemarch centres on the lives of residents of Middlemarch, a fictitious Midlands town, from 1829 onwards – the years up to the 1832 Reform Act. The narrative is variably considered to consist of three or four plots with unequal emphasis: the life of Dorothea Brooke, the career of Tertius Lydgate, the courtship of Mary Garth by Fred Vincy, and the disgrace of Nicholas Bulstrode. The two main plots are those of Dorothea and Lydgate. Each plot occurs concurrently, although Bulstrode's is centred on the later chapters. Dorothea Brooke is a 19-year-old orphan, living with her younger sister, Celia, as a ward of her uncle, Mr Brooke. Dorothea is an especially pious young woman, whose hobby involves the renovation of buildings belonging to the tenant farmers, although her uncle discourages her. Dorothea is courted by Sir James Chettam, a young man close to her own age, but she remains oblivious to him. She is attracted instead to the Rev. Edward Casaubon, who is 45. Dorothea accepts Casaubon's offer of marriage, despite her sister's misgivings. Chettam meanwhile is encouraged to turn his attention to Celia, who has developed an interest in him. Fred and Rosamond Vincy are the eldest children of Middlemarch's town mayor. Having never finished university, Fred is widely seen as a failure and a layabout, but allows himself to coast because he is the presumed heir of his childless uncle Mr Featherstone, a rich, though unpleasant man. Featherstone keeps as a companion a niece of his by marriage, Mary Garth, and although she is considered plain, Fred is in love with her and wants to marry her. Dorothea and Casaubon experience the first tensions in their marriage on their honeymoon in Rome, when Dorothea finds that her husband has no interest in involving her in his intellectual pursuits and no real intention of having his copious notes published, which was her chief reason for marrying him. She meets Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's much younger cousin, whom he supports financially. Ladislaw begins to feel attracted to Dorothea. She remains oblivious, but the two become friendly. Fred becomes deeply in debt and finds himself unable to repay what he owes. Having asked Mr Garth, Mary's father, to co-sign the debt, he now tells Garth he must forfeit it. As a result, Mrs Garth's savings from four years of income, held in reserve for the education of her youngest son, are wiped out, as are Mary's savings. As a result, Mr Garth warns Mary against ever marrying Fred. Fred comes down with an illness, of which he is cured by Dr Tertius Lydgate, a newly arrived doctor in Middlemarch. Lydgate has new ideas about medicine and sanitation and believes doctors should prescribe, but not themselves dispense medicines. This draws ire and criticism of many in the town. He allies himself with Bulstrode, a wealthy, church-going landowner and developer, who wants to build a hospital and clinic that follow Lydgate's philosophy, despite the misgivings of Lydgate's friend, Farebrother, about Bulstrode's integrity. Lydgate also becomes acquainted with Rosamond Vincy, whose beauty and education go together with shallowness and self-absorption. Seeking to make a good match, she decides to marry Lydgate, who comes from a wealthy family, and uses Fred's sickness as an opportunity to get close to the doctor. Lydgate initially views their relationship as pure flirtation and backs away from Rosamond after discovering that the town considers them practically engaged. However, on seeing her a final time, he breaks his resolution and the two become engaged. Casaubon arrives back from Rome about the same time, only to suffer a heart attack. Lydgate, brought in to attend him, tells Dorothea it is difficult to pronounce on the nature of Casaubon's illness and chances of recovery: that he may indeed live about 15 years if he takes it easy and ceases his studies, but it is equally possible the disease may develop rapidly, in which case death will be sudden. Meanwhile as Fred recovers, Mr Featherstone falls ill. He reveals on his deathbedthat he has made two wills and tries to get Mary to help him destroy one. Unwilling to be involved in the business, she refuses, and Featherstone dies with both wills still intact. Featherstone's plan had been for £10,000 to go to Fred Vincy, but his estate and fortune instead go to an illegitimate son of his, Joshua Rigg. Casaubon, in poor health, tries to make Dorothea promise, if he should die, to "avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire." He dies before she can reply, and she later learns of a provision in his will that, if she marries Ladislaw, she will lose her inheritance. The peculiar nature of Casaubon's will leads to general suspicion that Ladislaw and Dorothea are lovers, creating awkwardness between the two. Ladislaw is secretly in love with Dorothea but keeps this to himself, having no desire to involve her in scandal or to cause her to be disinherited. Meanwhile she realises she has romantic feelings for him, but must suppress them. He remains in Middlemarch, working as a newspaper editor for Mr Brooke, who is mounting a campaign to run for Parliament on a Reform platform. Lydgate's efforts to please Rosamond soon leave him deeply in debt and he is forced to seek help from Bulstrode. He is partly sustained in this by a friendship with Camden Farebrother. Meanwhile, Fred Vincy's humiliation at being responsible for Caleb Garth's financial setbacks shocks him into reassessing his life. He resolves to train as a land agent under the forgiving Caleb. He asks Farebrother to plead his case to Mary Garth, not realizing that Farebrother is also in love with her. Farebrother does so, thereby sacrificing his own desires for the sake of Mary, whom he realises truly loves Fred and is just waiting for him to find his place in the world. John Raffles, a mysterious man who knows of Bulstrode's shady past, appears in Middlemarch, intending to blackmail him. In his youth, the church-going Bulstrode engaged in questionable financial dealings; his fortune is founded on his marriage to a wealthy, much older widow. The widow's daughter, who should have inherited her mother's fortune, has run away, and Bulstrode locates her but fails to disclose this to the widow, so that he, rather than her daughter, will inherit the fortune. The widow's daughter has a son, who turns out to be Ladislaw. On grasping their connection, Bulstrode is consumed with guilt and offers Ladislaw a large sum of money, which Ladislaw refuses as being tainted. Bulstrode's terror of public exposure as a hypocrite leads him to hasten the death of the mortally sick Raffles, while lending a large sum to Lydgate, whom Bulstrode had previously refused to bail out of debt. However, the story of Bulstrode's misdeeds has already spread. Bulstrode's disgrace engulfs Lydgate, as knowledge of the loan spreads, and he is assumed to be complicit with Bulstrode. Only Dorothea and Farebrother retain any faith in him, but Lydgate and Rosamond are still encouraged to leave Middlemarch by the general opprobrium. Disgraced and reviled, Bulstrode's one consolation is that his wife stands by him as he too faces exile. When Mr Brooke's election campaign collapses, Ladislaw decides to leave the town and visits Dorothea to say his farewell. But Dorothea has fallen in love with one whom she had seen hitherto only as her husband's unfortunate relative. She renounces Casaubon's fortune and shocks her family by announcing that she will marry Ladislaw. At the same time, Fred, having been successful in his new career, marries Mary. The "Finale" details the ultimate fortunes of the main characters. Fred and Mary marry and live contentedly with their three sons. Lydgate operates a successful practice outside Middlemarch and attains a good income, but never finds fulfilment and dies at the age of 50, leaving Rosamond and four children. After he dies, Rosamond marries a wealthy physician. Ladislaw engages in public reform, and Dorothea is content as a wife and mother to their two children. Their son eventually inherits Arthur Brooke's estate. 

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In the summer of 1946, Alec Ramsey is travelling by steamer off the coast of North Africa, where he sees a wild black stallion being forced into a makeshift stable and heavily restrained by ropes leading to his halter. Captivated by the horse, Alec later sneaks to the horse to feed him some sugar cubes, but he is caught by the horse's supposed owner, who tells him in Arabic to stay away from Shetan and shoves the boy away. Later in his bunk, Alec's father shows Alec his winnings from a card game and gives him a pocket knife and a small statue of Bucephalus, and tells the story of how Alexander the Great became Bucephalus' master. Later that night, Alec is thrown out of his bunk; the ship has caught fire and begun to sink. In the chaos, Alec grabs his knife and makes his way to the black stallion and manages to free him. The stallion then jumps into the sea. Alec himself is thrown overboard by the waves. In the water, he swims toward the stallion and managed to grab hold of the ropes of the stallion's restraints just as the ship explodes, rendering him unconscious. Alec wakes on the shore of a deserted island and starts to explore. He finds the stallion caught in his restraints with the ropes stuck between the rocks. With his knife, Alec manages to free the stallion once again and the stallion runs away. For a time, the two keep their distance. Alec discovers means to survive by catching fish and seaweed. As Alec suddenly faces a cobra eye to eye, the Black comes to the rescue and kills the snake, only to run off again. By now, Alec decides to try to get closer to the horse and offer him some seaweed. The hungry stallion finds himself unable to resist, but visibly struggles with his distrust for humans. Eventually, the hunger wins and he takes Alec's offer; their bond has been sealed and the two are now inseparable. Alec even manages to ride the unbroken horse, after many times falling off the horse. One day, a fishing ship arrives, rescuing both Alec and the stallion. Back home in America, Alec is given a hero's welcome. The Black has a temporary home in Alec's back yard, but a garbage man not knowing that there is a wild horse in the back yard is chased by the Black, who races off down the street after being spooked by a passing car. Alec chases after him through every part of town, but loses track of him. The next day, Alec meets Snoe (and Napoleon) who tell him where the Black is. Alec finds the stallion in the barn of Henry Dailey, a retired racehorse jockey, who apparently spent all night catching the Black. Alec arranges for the Black to stay at the barn. When Alec wonders how fast the Black is, Alec and Henry decide to train the Black for the racetrack, while Henry teaches Alec how to be a jockey. The Black surprises Henry with his speed. Henry immediately starts plotting a plan to get the Black into the match race between the country's current two champions. To do that, he sets up a secret demonstration at night where the press can witness his speed, keeping the identity of Alec and the Black secret. The news spreads about the mystery horse and the Black is entered into the race. The race is the most anticipated horseracing event of the year. Before the two champions and the Black enter the starting gate, the Black gets into a fight with one of his opponents, wounding his leg. Alec does not see the wound until he is in the gate. As he dismounts, the bell rings and the horses take off. Alec desperately tries to stay on his horse and trying to stop him. He falls behind, but the Black won't stop. When Alec regains his balance, the Black is well on his way to catch up with his opponents. Alec now encourages the Black to run as fast as he can, remembering the wild rides on the island, as they catch up. The Black eventually wins by two lengths. 

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Gene Autry (Gene Autry) returns to his hometown of Torpedo as guest of honor at the Frontier Days Celebration, where he meets his childhood enemies, the Wildhack brothers—Mark (Barton MacLane), Jasper (Joe Sawyer), and Bud (Horace McMahon)—who are now local gangsters. The Wildhacks own a saloon next door to the school, and when their shooting and brawling endangers the safety of the children, Gene protests and threatens to expose them during his next radio broadcast. The Wildhacks stop the broadcast and beat Gene up. Realizing that Hollywood life has softened him to the extent that he can't hold his own against three assailants, Gene decides to remain in Torpedo and get into shape again. He is encouraged by his friend Cornelius J. "Corney" Courtney (Jimmy Durante) and Pop Laramie (George "Gabby" Hayes). Refusing to return to Hollywood, Gene now broadcasts his radio shows from Torpedo. Julie Sheldon (Ann Miller), a debutante with theatrical aspirations, sees Gene in his natural setting and begins to take an interest in the cowboy she formerly scorned. Meanwhile, Gene rounds up the Wildhacks and fights them single-handed, forcing them to sing on his broadcast. When the brothers become determined to get revenge, Gene runs for sheriff so he will be in position to clean up the Wildhack political machine for good, and also make use of the "Vote for Autry" song. During the battles that ensue, one of Gene's friends is killed. Gene discovers evidence that identifies the Wildhacks as the killers.Magers 2007, pp. 174–175. 

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A struggling boxing manager (Moe) is having lunch with three of his fighters who are threatening to quit in anger over not being paid. Upon hearing the song "Pop Goes the Weasel" being played by a violinist (Larry), the timid waiter attending to the group (Curly) goes into a violent fugue state and knocks out all three fighters and the restaurant owner. Moe recruits Curly as a boxer and persuades Larry to play the tune at ringside so Curly can easily defeat his opponents and win prize money. Fighting under the name "K.O. Stradivarius," Curly quickly becomes the top contender for the heavyweight championship. As Curly trains on a rural road under Moe's supervision, they notice a young lady whose car is stuck in a ditch. Moe tries to help her, urging Curly not to get involved ("Boxing and women don't mix," he says), but eventually asks Larry to play "Weasel" so Curly will have the strength to free the car. Curly rides away with the lady; on the night of the title bout, Moe finds them together in a dressing room and hits Curly, telling him to avoid women and go to the arena. Seconds into the first round, reigning champion Killer Kilduff (Al Hill) knocks Curly out of the ring and onto Larry, breaking his violin. Larry frantically rushes through the streets in search of anything that will play "Weasel" as Kilduff mercilessly pummels Curly. He finds a radio broadcasting the tune and hurries back to the arena with it. The music revitalizes Curly, but it ends just as he is about to land a knockout punch and the fight turns in Kilduff's favor again. An infuriated Moe smashes the radio over Larry's head and sends him out to find something else they can use. Larry commandeers a politician's campaign truck that is playing the tune, drives back to the arena, and crashes in through a side wall. Curly revives again and easily knocks Kilduff out to win the championship, then accidentally knocks out Moe and Larry as the music keeps playing. 

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The film is a three-act story about Willie (John Lurie), who lives in Brooklyn, and his interactions with the two other main characters, his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) and friend Eddie (Richard Edson). In the first act, Willie, a surly small-time gambler and hustler of Hungarian origin, receives a phone call from his Aunt Lotte in Cleveland informing him that his expected visit by his cousin Eva, who is coming from Hungary to live with Lotte, will have to be extended to ten days because Lotte is unexpectedly in the hospital. Willie at first makes it clear that he does not want Eva there. He even orders Eva to speak English for the ten-day period, not Hungarian, as Willie strongly identifies as "American." But Willie soon begins to enjoy her company. He becomes protective, discouraging her from going out alone, or beyond a certain street. At one point, Eva takes the initiative to clean the apartment which is fairly dirty, finds his vacuum cleaner, plugs it in and starts vacuuming. Playfully, Willie tries to persuade her that the phrase "choking the alligator" is an American metaphor for vacuuming the floor. Eva is wise to this immediately. They both smile wryly. Yet, Willie refuses to take Eva on his trips to the race track with Eddie, Willie's good-natured but dull gambling buddy and hustling accomplice. Eddie tries to persuade Willie to bring Eva along, to no avail. Willie and Eva watch football in the afternoon and late-night sci-fi movies. His esteem for her increases when Eva comes back from an excursion with a few canned food items, a TV dinner "especially" for Willie, and to Willie's astonishment, a carton of cigarettes, all obtained without money. Willie smiles and shakes her hand, telling her "I think you're alright, kid." Eva, smart, pretty, and low-key, likes to play her favorite song, Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You" which Willie dislikes. He buys her a dress, which she dislikes. At this point it becomes evident that Willie has developed an attraction to Eva. After ten days Eva leaves, and Willie is clearly upset to see her go. Eddie, on his way to visit Willie, sees her discard the dress on the street, but does not tell Willie this. The second act starts a year later and opens with Willie and Eddie winning a large amount of money by cheating at a game of poker. Willie asks Eddie about borrowing his brother-in- law's car, telling him "I just wanna get out'a here, see sump'in different, ya know?". In truth, Willie wants to go to Cleveland to see Eva. It is the middle of winter. They arrive in Cleveland and after stopping at Lotte's house, they go to surprise Eva at her job at a local fast food restaurant, where she is excited and pleased to see them. However, soon after arriving in Cleveland they are just as bored as they were in New York. They play cards with Lotte to pass the time. They end up tagging along with Eva and her would-be boyfriend to the movies. They go to the pier on the frozen snow-covered lakefront to take in the view. Pressed by Eddie, Willie eventually decides to go back to New York. When they say their goodbyes, Eva jokingly suggests that if they win big at the race track, they should "kidnap" her. Willie responds they would take her someplace warm, because "this place is awful." The final act begins with Willie suggesting to Eddie, on the road back to New York, to go to Florida instead. Willie then suggests they turn around and pick up Eva and bring her along, which they do, to Lotte's obvious consternation. The three of them get to Florida and get a room at a motel. The next morning the men leave Eva asleep in the room. Eva, having awakened to find herself alone and with no food or cash, wanders outside in the windy bleak overcast afternoon to the beach, which appears not much more appealing than the windy bleak snowy Lake Erie scene in Cleveland from which they fled. When they come back, Eva's annoyance turns to dismay when the distraught pair reveal they have lost most of their money on dog races. They go for a walk on the beach to figure out what to do. Willie is clearly annoyed with Eddie, as the dog races were his idea. Willie and Eddie decide to go out and bet the last of their money on horse races. Willie still refuses to let Eva come along, so she goes out on the beach for a walk. Wearing a flamboyant wide-brimmed straw hat she has just gotten from a gift shop, a drug dealer mistakes her for a courier he has been waiting for. He gives her an envelope containing a large sum of money while berating her and her presumed boss. She goes back to the motel, leaves some of the money for Willie and Eddie, and writes them a note explaining that she is going to the airport. Willie and Eddie, having won big at the horse races and gone through the better part of a bottle of whisky, return to the motel to find Eva gone. Willie reads her note and they go to the airport to stop her. Eva discusses with an airline ticket agent her options for flying to Europe, ending with a mention that there is a plane leaving in 44 minutes for her home city of Budapest. She appears indecisive. When Willie and Eddie get to the airport, Willie, believing Eva has boarded the flight to Budapest, conceives a plan: buy a ticket to Budapest, get on the plane, and convince Eva to stay in the United States. The second to last shot shows Eddie outside watching the plane flying overhead, lamenting that Willie was apparently not able to get off the plane and that now both Willie and Eva are headed to Budapest. The final shot, however, shows Eva back at the motel, returning to an empty room, looking tired and perplexed, toying with the straw hat. 

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Barchester Towers concerns the leading clergy of the cathedral city of Barchester. The much loved bishop having died, all expectations are that his son, Archdeacon Grantly, will succeed him. Owing to the passage of the power of patronage to a new Prime Minister, a newcomer, the far more Evangelical Bishop Proudie, gains the see. His wife, Mrs Proudie, exercises an undue influence over the new bishop, making herself as well as the bishop unpopular with most of the clergy of the diocese. Her interference to veto the reappointment of the universally popular Mr Septimus Harding (protagonist of Trollope's earlier novel, The Warden) as warden of Hiram's Hospital is not well received, even though she gives the position to a needy clergyman, Mr Quiverful, with 14 children to support. Even less popular than Mrs Proudie is the bishop's new chaplain, the hypocritical and sycophantic Mr Obadiah Slope, who decides it would be expedient to marry Harding's wealthy widowed daughter, Eleanor Bold. Slope hopes to win her favour by interfering in the controversy over the wardenship. The Bishop or rather Mr Slope under the orders of Mrs Proudie, also orders the return of the prebendary Dr Vesey Stanhope from Italy. Stanhope has been in Italy recovering from a sore throat for 12 years and has spent his time catching butterflies. With him to the Cathedral Close come his wife and their three adult children. The younger of Dr Stanhope's two daughters causes consternation in the Palace and threatens the plans of Mr Slope. Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni is a disabled serial flirt with a young daughter and a mysterious Italian husband, whom she has left. Mrs Proudie is appalled and considers her an unsafe influence on her daughters, servants and Mr Slope. Mr Slope is drawn like a moth to a flame and cannot keep away. Dr Stanhope's son Bertie is skilled at spending money but not at making it; his sisters think marriage to rich Eleanor Bold will help. Summoned by Archdeacon Grantly to assist in the war against the Proudies and Mr Slope is the brilliant Reverend Francis Arabin. Mr Arabin is a considerable scholar, Fellow of Lazarus College at Oxford, who nearly followed his mentor John Henry Newman into the Roman Catholic Church. A misunderstanding occurs between Eleanor and her father, brother-in-law, sister and Mr Arabin, who think that she intends to marry Mr Slope, much to their disgust. Mr Arabin is attracted to Eleanor but the efforts of Grantly and his wife to stop her marrying Slope, interfere with any relationship that might develop. At the Ullathorne garden party held by the Thornes, matters come to a head. Mr Slope proposes to Mrs Bold and is slapped for his presumption; Bertie goes through the motions of a proposal to Eleanor and is refused with good grace and the Signora has a chat with Mr Arabin. Mr Slope's double-dealings are now revealed and he is dismissed by Mrs Proudie and the Signora. The Signora drops a delicate word in several ears and with the removal of their misunderstanding Mr Arabin and Eleanor become engaged. The old Dean of the Cathedral having died, Mr Slope campaigns to become Dean but Mr Harding is offered the preferment, with a beautiful house in the Close and fifteen acres of garden. Mr Harding considers himself unsuitable and with the help of the archdeacon, arranges that Mr Arabin be made Dean. With the Stanhopes' return to Italy, life in the Cathedral Close returns to normal and Mr Harding continues his life of gentleness and music. 

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As described in a film magazine review, Jeff Hillington (Fairbanks), son of railroad magnate Collis J. Hillington (Bytell), tires of the East and longs for the wild and woolly West. He has his apartment and office fixed up in his understanding of the accepted Western style, which he has gleaned from dime novels. A delegation from Bitter Creek comes to New York City seeking financial backing for the construction of a spur line, and go to Collis to explain their proposition. Collis sends Jeff to investigate. The citizens of Bitter Creek, Arizona, realizing that a favorable report from Jeff is necessary, decide to live up to Jeff's idea of a Western town. They set up a program with a wild reception for Jeff, a barroom dance, and a train holdup. Steve Shelby (De Grasse), a grafting Indian agent, knowing that he is about to be caught by the government, decides to do "one more trick" and enters into the plan to rob the train, turning it into a real scheme. Events turn earnest and Shelby kidnaps Nell Larabee (Percy), with whom Jeff has fallen in love. The entire crowd has been trapped in the dance hall, which is surrounded by Indians, and Jeff's revolver loaded with blanks. When the situation is finally explained to Jeff, by superhuman efforts (and typical Fairbanks surprises) he rounds up the Indians, rescues the girl, completely foils the scheme of Steve, and becomes the hero of the hour, getting to marry Nell. 

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In the early 1930s, Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift) arrives in Garthville, Tennessee, upstream from a new hydroelectric dam of the Tennessee Valley Authority, to head the TVA's land purchasing office after its previous supervisor quit. He is responsible for supervising the clearing of land to be flooded but must first acquire Garth Island on the Tennessee River, the last piece of property yet to be sold to the government. The previous supervisor was unable to convince elderly Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), matriarch of a large family that has lived on the island for decades, to sell her land to the government, which to avoid bad publicity the TVA wants to acquire without using force. The clearing of the land for the coming lake is also proceeding behind schedule because the mayor, the town's barber, uses only white labor. Chuck goes to Garth Island but Ella and the other Garth women, including Ella's granddaughter Carol Baldwin (Lee Remick), refuse to listen to him. He tries to reason with Ella's three grown sons, Hamilton (Jay C. Flippen), Cal (James Westerfield), and Joe John, but being relocated means working for a living and they have never worked in their lives. Joe John tosses Chuck into the river. Hamilton comes to Chuck's room soon after to invite him to the island for a formal apology and to speak with Ella. Chuck arrives the next day to find Ella castigating President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal to her black farm hands and their families. To make her point to Chuck, she feigns attempting to compel Sam Johnson (Robert Earl Jones), a field hand, to sell her his beloved hunting dog against his will. Chuck tries to reason with Ella, passionately laying out the benefits the dam will bring, but Ella denounces dams and the taming of the river as going "against nature." When he asks Ella what's going to happen to her, she takes him to the family cemetery plot on the highest point of the island. There he learns from Carol that she is a widow with two small children who moved back to the island when her husband died three years before. She is also expected to marry Walter Clark (Frank Overton), a businessman in town, but Chuck urges her not to if she doesn't love him. She walks Chuck back to the ferry where the anxious field hands are also waiting. Chuck invites them to come to his office to discuss working for the TVA, reasoning that when they leave the island, Ella will have no choice except to sell. On an impulse, Carol invites Chuck to see her former home above the landing on the opposite shore. Her loneliness and attraction to Chuck combine to make her beg him to spend the night with her there. The next morning, saying goodbye, it is apparent to both that they are falling in love. Back in town Chuck apprises the mayor, who is sympathetic, of his plan but is warned that hiring "colored labor" will cause the white workers to quit and bring out other elements to oppose him. When Chuck hires Ella's field hands, three prominent businessmen urge Chuck to create segregated work gangs and pay the black workers less than the whites, which Chuck refuses to do despite insinuations that "less responsible" opponents will use harsher tactics. Carol and Chuck are confused by their passion for each other but spend another night together again at her house, unaware that Walter Clark has seen them. The next morning Ella's workers and their families pack up and leave, and Ella remains alone except for Sam, who loyally refuses to go. Ella knows what Carol and Chuck have done and when Carol begs her grandmother to join her at her own house, orders her off the island. The "less responsible" element is led by R. J. Bailey (Albert Salmi), a bully who farms cotton using black workers who are leaving him to work for the TVA. To scare Chuck from seeing Carol, Walter agrees to lure him back that night to his hotel room, where Bailey is waiting, but experiencing a change of heart when Chuck treats him decently about their rivalry for Carol, Walter warns him at the last second. Bailey demands to be compensated by the government for a worker who quit and when Chuck refuses, literally shakes him down for the money. Bailey gives it to Walter to purchase some moonshine for Chuck to console himself with. The two men get drunk together and go out to the island to talk with Ella, to whom Chuck admits his understanding of her fight to protect her dignity. The following day, Chuck learns that the dam's flood gates will be closed in a few days and Ella must be evicted immediately. Hamilton and Cal tell Chuck that they are going to have Ella declared legally incompetent to permit them to sell the land themselves, which Chuck rejects. He reluctantly asks the U.S. marshal to have Ella removed the next day, then goes to the island to use the machinations of her sons in a final attempt to persuade her to leave on her own. She calls her sons worthless and refuses to talk to him further. Carol knows that Chuck will be moving on to a new assignment within a few days and pleads with him to take her with him, telling him she would make a "damned good wife" for him. Chuck is still trying to cope with his new feelings and does not know what to say. Walter rushes to Carol's house to warn them that Bailey and his men are coming to terrorize them. While the local sheriff stands aside, telling his deputy, "They're just having some fun", the thugs shoot out a window with a rifle, overturn Chuck's car, and drive Walter's truck into the side of the house. Refusing to be run out of town, Chuck confronts Bailey but is knocked out with one punch. Carol leaps on Bailey, who hits her too, finally forcing the sheriff to run off the crowd. Chuck proposes to Carol and they are married that night by a justice of the peace. The next day, with Chuck and Carol present, Ella is read the eviction notice and leaves her island as her former workers fell the trees. At her new home, Ella sits on the porch, dispiritedly refusing to speak. Soon after, while Chuck is supervising the burning of the Garth house, Carol tells him that Ella just died. Before leaving the valley, Chuck and Carol join her family and former workers in burying Ella in the family plot, now the only part of Garth Island above water in the new lake. 

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Upper-middle class Mathieu, is spending his summer vacation on the French coast before beginning studies in the autumn to become an architect. His mother is deeply depressed because of the death of his baby brother from cancer, and is cared for by her sister, while Mathieu and his moody younger sister cannot get along. Then he meets Cédric at the beach, who is attractive and obviously looking for a boyfriend. The boys embark on a romance, and Mathieu's sudden secrecy and long hours away from home invite the curiosity of both his sister and aunt. A parallel plotline focuses on Mathieu eighteen months later, as he recovers from the shock of their separation. After Mathieu has tried to commit suicide, he chooses to go back to the small seaside town to learn how to deal with what happened. The film ends on a hopeful note when Mathieu looks up Pierre, another former boyfriend of Cédric's living in the seaside town, and they overcome past tensions to discover that they understand each other. 

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The story is set in Thamesmead, a working class area of South East London dominated by post-war council estates. Jamie, a teen who is infatuated with his classmate, Ste, has to deal with his single mother Sandra, who is pre- occupied with ambitious plans to run her own pub and with an ever-changing string of lovers, the latest of whom is Tony, a neo-hippie. Sandra finds herself at odds with Leah, a sassy and rude neighbour who has been expelled from school, does several drugs, and constantly listens and sings along to her mother's Cass Elliot records. While Jamie's homosexuality remains concealed, his introvert nature and dislike of football are reason enough for his classmates to bully him at every opportunity. Ste, who is living together with his drug-dealing brother and abusive, alcoholic father in the flat next door, is one night beaten by his father so badly that Sandra takes pity and lets him sleep over. In the absence of a third bed, Ste has to make do with sleeping 'top-to-toe' with Jamie. On the second night they share a bed: after a massage and a minor conversation, the boys soon change sleeping arrangements and Jamie kisses Ste for the first time. The next morning, Ste panics and leaves before Jamie awakens, avoiding him for days. Jamie works up the nerve to steal a Gay Times from a newsagent, apparently starting to accept his sexuality and affection for Ste. Jamie finally spots Ste at a nearby party and confronts him; they prepare to leave together. The party ends badly, with Sandra taking vengeance on Leah for gossiping, who then threatens to 'spill the beans' about Ste and Jamie and confesses to having covered up for Ste in front of his father and brother. Ste reacts poorly, angrily rejecting Jamie and running away. Slowly, Ste accepts Jamie's love and their relationship begins to develop as they visit a gay pub together. Sandra follows them and discovers their secret, and the story reaches its climax as a bad trip by Leah (on an unnamed drug) precipitates Sandra's breakup with Tony; the news of Sandra's new job comes out; and Sandra confronts Ste and Jamie. Sandra comes to accept her son's relationship. The play ends with the two boys slow-dancing in the courtyard of their council flats to the Cass Elliot song "Dream a Little Dream of Me", while a guarding Sandra dances defiantly at their side with Leah as the local residents look on; some of them shocked, some of them enjoying the moment themselves. 

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Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) is a well-liked English literature teacher, living a quiet life in the fictional town of Greenleaf, Indiana, with his fiancée and fellow teacher Emily Montgomery (Joan Cusack), who recently lost 75 pounds. The town is filled with anticipation over the nomination of Howard's former student Cameron Drake (Matt Dillon) in the Best Actor category at the Academy Awards for his portrayal of a gay soldier in To Serve and Protect. Cameron does indeed win the award and, in his acceptance speech, thanks Howard, adding, ". . . and he's gay." Howard's family, friends, students, co-workers and Emily are shocked; but that is nothing compared to Howard's own reaction of disbelief and indignation. He angrily reassures those who know him that he is heterosexual. Reporters invade his hometown, harassing him for interviews, following the awards night telecast. Howard is placed under the scrutiny of his boss, Principal Tom Halliwell (Bob Newhart), who is uncomfortable with the attention being brought to the school. Although the other reporters leave after getting their story, one stays behind: on-camera entertainment reporter Peter Malloy (Tom Selleck), who wants to wait the week out so he can cover Howard's wedding to Emily. Howard continues to be harassed and dismayed by the changed attitudes of everyone around him, and decides that he must sleep with Emily in order to prove his heterosexuality. Howard finds he cannot go through with it due to his conflicting emotions and Emily's concern for his well- being. Howard crosses paths with Peter, who reveals he is gay and, trying to provide a helpful ear, narrates his own experience in coming out to his family. Howard insists that he is not gay, prompting Peter to kiss him. Although shocked, Howard reacts somewhat positively to the kiss. Howard's final measure to restore his heterosexuality is the use of a self-help audio cassette, although that fails as well. During the wedding ceremony, Emily recites her vow without hesitation, but when Howard is prompted by the minister, he instead says, "I'm gay." The wedding is called off, and although Peter is proud of Howard, Howard is angry with himself for hurting Emily. Howard is fired from the school because of his outing. Despite no longer being on the faculty, Howard attends the graduation ceremony to support his students. Having learned of the ensuing media blitz while in Los Angeles, Cameron flies to his hometown with his supermodel girlfriend (Shalom Harlow) and shows up at the ceremony. When he learns that his former teacher became ineligible for the "Teacher of the Year" award due to being dismissed for being gay, he publicly questions if the reason given, that the community would not have supported Howard's continued employment, is valid. Spurred on by this, when one student who got into college—thanks to Howard's hard work—proclaims to be gay, his classmates join him to proclaim themselves to be gay as well, showing their support. Howard's family follows suit, as do his friends, and all the townsfolk assembled. Although Howard does not win "Teacher of the Year", Cameron presents him with his Oscar. Howard's wedding- crazy mother (Debbie Reynolds) finally gets a wedding—her own, when she and her husband (Wilford Brimley) renew their vows. Howard, Peter and the rest of the townsfolk attend the reception. Among the crowd are Emily and Cameron, who appear to have begun a relationship. Everyone dances to the Village People's song "Macho Man". 

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Ma Hon Keung (Jackie Chan), a Hong Kong cop, comes to New York to attend the wedding of his Uncle Bill (Bill Tung). Uncle Bill owns the Wa-Ha Supermarket in The Bronx, an area with a high level of crime. He meets Bill's neighbor Danny (Morgan Lam), a disabled Chinese-American boy, and his aunt-to-be Whitney (Carrie Cain Sparks), an African-American woman working at Bill's supermarket. Bill is trying to sell his supermarket, and he meets a potential buyer, Elaine (Anita Mui), who is reluctant to buy it for Bill's price. Nonetheless, Bill invites Elaine to his wedding, hoping that there's still a chance to sell it. Unbeknownst to Keung and Elaine, Bill's market is a victim of frequent shoplifting and a protection racket, and he is desperate to sell it. The next day, at the wedding, Keung helps negotiate a deal that convinces Elaine to buy the market. One day, when Keung is helping Elaine at the market, members of a local biker gang led by Tony (Marc Akerstream)) attempt to shoplift many goods the market, but Keung thwarts and beats them. Later that night, Keung notices a woman (Francoise Yip) getting abducted. He scares away her would-be kidnappers. However, when Keung "rescues" the woman, she attacks him, revealing a ploy to lure him into a spot where Tony's gang attacks him again. Keung is cornered into a dead-end alleyway. The gang severely injures him with glass bottles. Afterwards, Keung almost makes it back to his Uncle's apartment, but not before fainting in front of Nancy, who is Tony's girlfriend and the woman who lured Keung earlier. It is revealed that Nancy is Danny's neglectful older sister. She fixes Keung's wounds upon realizing that he is also Danny's friend. Danny informs Keung about Nancy's help the next morning, but Keung still doesn't know that Nancy was the one who lured him. Later that morning, Keung goes to Elaine's market to inform her that he lost the contract (during the alleyway brawl with the gang). The supermarket is a mess due to a failed attempt to stop thieves, and Elaine informs Keung about her desire to back out of the deal upon realizing how often the market is a victim of theft and a protection racket. When two thugs demanding "protection money" come by, Keung scares them away. However, Tony and his gang come back to the store, demanding "compensation" for Keung hurting them earlier. Elaine gives into their demand, and they rob and vandalize the store. Keung confronts them outside, and tells the gang that he's the boss of the store and that he has called the police on them. The gang disperses upon the police's arrival. Later, Tony and his gang attempt to chase down Keung for revenge, which leads to Keung making a daring escape by jumping from the roof of a parking garage to a fire escape on a building across the street. Later, a member of Tony's gang named Angelo (Garvin Cross) gets involved in an illegal diamond deal gone bad and steals the diamonds. A criminal syndicate led by White Tiger (Kris Lord) is after the diamonds. Keung and Danny are outside together, and they witness some of the carnage go down. Keung and Danny run inside for safety, leaving Danny's wheelchair in the apartment hallway. Unable to run and hide from the syndicate, Angelo stuffs the diamonds in Danny's wheelchair cushion. Some of the syndicate members are arrested (along with Angelo), but all are let go due to a lack of evidence. Meanwhile, at Danny and Nancy's apartment, Nancy eavesdrops on a conversation between Keung and Danny, where she listens to Danny talk about the emotional difficulty of being disabled. Upon hearing this, she comes out into the living room and tearfully apologizes to Keung and Danny, while both Keung and Danny agree to keep their previous encounter a secret. Meanwhile, Elaine tries to scare away the thugs from the protection racket. However, they are not intimidated, and they assault her while taking her money. After this, she tries to sell the market to another Chinese couple, selling it using the same lies and tactics that Uncle Bill used to convince her. Keung witnesses this, and gives her back the check she used to buy the market, asking that she only pay him back once she makes money. Later that evening, Keung goes out, but not before being questioned by the syndicate men (who are posing as FBI agents) looking for the diamonds. They give Keung a number to call if he finds anything. Later Keung visits Nancy at a nightclub where she is a lingerie dancer and model. When the gangsters see this, they chase Keung and Nancy, but they escape after Nancy knocks over their motorcycles. Keung advises her to stay away from Tony's gang and to look after Danny. A romantic relationship develops between them. After failing to confront Keung, the bikers trash Elaine's supermarket. During the commotion, two of Tony's men are captured by White Tiger's men, who are searching for Angelo. Angelo's friends are unaware of his diamond heist and one of them is executed in a tree-shredder. Meanwhile, Keung and Nancy go to the bikers' headquarters after the latest supermarket attack, and Keung defeats them in another brawl. After the brawl, he berates and insults the gang for their criminal lifestyle and urges them to change for the better. Immediately after, one of the gangsters comes back to the hideout, with the executed gangster's remains, which he reveals was a warning to return the goods that Angelo stole. Keung agrees to help Tony and his gang find Angelo. Keung contacts the syndicate (which he thought was the FBI) after they find Angelo. Angelo reveals that he hid the diamonds in Danny's wheelchair. Tony, Angelo, and Nancy are taken hostage while some of White Tiger's thugs go with Keung to Danny and Nancy's apartment. Keung eventually subdues the gangsters after they find the diamonds. When White Tiger calls one of the gangsters, Keung takes the cell phone and reveals that he has his diamonds and his thugs held hostage. White Tiger tells him that he'll arrange an exchange and warns him not to contact the police. Keung makes Danny wait at school for his own safety. When one of the syndicate thugs interrogates Tony, demanding Keung's whereabouts, Tony tells him that Keung is the owner of the Wa-Ha supermarket. Keung goes to Elaine for advice, but later, the syndicate's thugs destroy the supermarket with a tow truck as a warning to Keung. Keung calls the police for help. They give Keung recording equipment and instruct him to just show the gangsters one diamond, and to try to get the gang to talk about the murder and robbery. However, during their meeting, Keung reveals that he knows of the name "White Tiger", which make the syndicate men realize that Keung is working with the police. They take Keung to a secret place to have him executed. But before they can execute him, Keung overpowers them and escapes. Later, the police come and chase the gangsters away. White Tiger's men hijack a hovercraft and are pursued by Keung and the New York Police Department in the Hudson River. The hovercraft ends up running through the streets, causing much damage to property. Keung ends the chase by stealing a large sword from a museum, clamping it onto a sports car window and driving into the hovercraft, shredding the rubber skirt and crashing the vehicle. Keung forces them to reveal White Tiger's location, Keung drives the repaired hovercraft to a golf course where White Tiger is playing. He runs them over, leaving White Tiger naked on the ground. 

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MI6 field operative James Bond arrives at a Swiss bank in Bilbao, Spain, to retrieve money for British oil tycoon Sir Robert King from a Swiss banker claiming to return the money King had used to buy a stolen MI6 report taken from a murdered MI6 operative. Bond demands the name of the MI6 agent's killer, but the banker is killed by his assistant before he can reveal it. Bond escapes from the banker's office with the money, but it is revealed to be booby- trapped; Sir Robert is killed by an explosion inside MI6 headquarters in London. Bond gives chase to the assassin on a Q-modified speedboat down the Thames to the Millennium Dome, where she attempts to escape by hot air balloon. Bond offers her protection, but she refuses and blows up the balloon, killing herself. Although injured falling from the balloon, Bond is cleared for duty, attends Sir Robert's funeral, and traces the recovered money to Viktor "Renard" Zokas, a KGB field operative -turned-terrorist. Following an earlier attempt on his life by MI6 agent 009, Renard was left with a bullet in his brain, which is gradually destroying his senses, making him immune to pain until he dies. M assigns Bond to protect King's daughter Elektra against Renard, who had previously abducted her. Bond travels to Azerbaijan, where Elektra is overseeing the construction of a new segment of her family's oil pipeline. During a tour of the pipeline's proposed route through the mountains, Bond and Elektra are attacked by a Russian hit squad that is either hired or trained by the Russian GRU in armed, paraglider-equipped snowmobiles. Despite being unarmed, Bond is able to dispatch the snowmobiles by using the terrain to his advantage and a protective shield in his jacket. Bond visits Valentin Zhukovsky at his Baku casino to acquire information about Elektra's attackers; he deduces that Elektra's head of security, Davidov, is secretly in league with Renard. Bond kills Davidov and takes his place on a plane bound for a Russian ICBM base in Kazakhstan. He poses as a Russian nuclear scientist and meets American nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones, before entering the silo. Inside, Renard is removing the GPS locator card and weapons-grade plutonium from a nuclear bomb. Before Bond can kill him, Jones blows his cover. Renard drops a hint that he and Elektra are collaborating and flees with the plutonium, while Bond and Jones escape the exploding silo with the locator card. Back in Azerbaijan, Bond discloses to M that Elektra may not be as innocent as she seems, before they discover the stolen bomb from Kazakhstan is attached to an inspection rig heading towards the oil terminal. Bond and Jones enter the pipeline to deactivate the bomb, and Jones discovers that half of the plutonium is missing. They both jump clear of the rig before a large section of pipeline is destroyed, and they are presumed killed. Back at the command centre, Elektra reveals that she and Renard are conspirators, and that she killed her father as revenge for using her as bait for Renard. She abducts M, whom she resents for advising her father not to pay the ransom money, and imprisons her in the Maiden's Tower. Bond and Jones accost Zukovsky at his caviar factory in the Caspian Sea for information on Elektra, Bond having deduced Elektra's culpability himself; they are then attacked by Elektra's sawing helicopters. Zukovsky reveals his arrangement with Elektra was in exchange for the use of a submarine, currently being captained by Zukovsky's nephew, Nikolai, who is poisoned, along with his crew, by Renard. The group goes to Istanbul, Turkey, where Jones realizes that if Renard were to insert the stolen plutonium into the submarine's nuclear reactor, the resulting nuclear explosion would destroy Istanbul entirely, sabotaging the Russians' oil pipeline in the Bosphorus and leaving Elektra's pipeline as an uncontested monopoly. Bond then receives a signal from the locator card M has activated using a clock battery, just before Zukovsky's apprentice, Bullion, blows up the command centre. Bond and Jones are captured and separated by Elektra's henchmen. Jones is taken aboard the submarine, while Bond is taken to the tower, where Elektra tortures him with a garrote. Zukovsky and his men arrive and seize the tower, but Elektra shoots Zukovsky. Before dying, he manages to break Bond's restraints with his cane gun. Bond then kills Elektra and frees M, before diving after the submarine. Bond boards the submarine and frees Jones. Following a firefight with the crew, the submarine hits the bottom of the Bosphorus, causing its hull to rupture, and the vessel starts flooding. Bond catches up with Renard and the two engage into a decisive battle. Bond kills Renard by impaling him with the plutonium rod. Bond and Jones escape from the submarine using the torpedo launcher, leaving the flooded reactor to detonate safely underwater. As MI6 tries to locate Bond by satellite surveillance, he and Jones celebrate in Turkey. 

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The play concerns Catherine, the daughter of Robert, a recently deceased mathematical genius in his fifties and professor at the University of Chicago, and her struggle with mathematical genius and mental illness. Catherine had cared for her father through a lengthy mental illness. Upon Robert's death, his ex- graduate student Hal discovers a paradigm-shifting proof about prime numbers in Robert's office. The title refers both to that proof and to the play's central question: Can Catherine prove the proof's authorship? Along with demonstrating the proof's authenticity, the daughter also finds herself in a relationship with 28-year-old Hal. Throughout, the play explores Catherine's fear of following in her father's footsteps, both mathematically and mentally and her desperate attempts to stay in control. ;Act I The play opens with Catherine sitting alone in the backyard of her large, old house. Robert, her father, approaches her with a bottle of champagne to celebrate her 25th birthday. Catherine complains that she hasn't done any worthwhile work in the field of mathematics, at least not to the same level as her father, a well- known math genius. He reassures her that she can still do good work as long as she stops lying in bed till all hours and wasting time reading magazines. Catherine confesses she's worried about inheriting Robert's inclination towards mental instability. He begins to comfort her but then alludes to a "bad sign" when he points out that he is, in fact, dead. He died a week ago. Robert disappears as Catherine dozes off. She awakens when Hal, one of Robert's students, exits the house. He's been studying the hundreds of notebooks Robert left behind after his death, looking for any work that could be published. Catherine assures him that the notebooks are filled with scribbles and nonsense since her father wrote them when he was at his most delusional. Hal, attempting to flirt, invites her to go see his band later that night. Catherine becomes suspicious of him and demands to see what's in his backpack. She roots through it to find nothing but becomes infuriated when a notebook falls out of Hal's jacket. She dials the police while accusing him of trying to steal her father's work and pass it off as his own. He admits that he was sneaking it away but only to give it back to her later as a birthday present. He opens to a page that Robert wrote during a time when he was lucid. In it, Robert writes it's a "good day" and thanks to Catherine for taking care of him and expresses hope for the future. Hal leaves Catherine with the notebook. She begins to cry until she hears police sirens. The next day Claire, Catherine's sister who just flew in from New York, is setting up a large brunch for them in the backyard. Catherine enters and Claire tries to goad her into idle chitchat as Catherine quietly seethes. Claire declares she's getting married and invites Catherine to stay with her and her fiance in New York. Catherine assures her she'll come in January for the wedding, but Claire keeps pressing her to go earlier. When Catherine demands to know why Claire is inundating her with questions, Claire tells her the police came over earlier to check in on Catherine. Catherine admits to calling the police the previous night and tries to explain her altercation with Hal but only ends up sounding unhinged to the dubious Claire. Hal appears and asks to continue his work sorting the notebooks. Catherine lets him inside and Claire drops a hint for Catherine to try flirting with Hal by offering a bagel. Catherine storms into the house. Later that night, after the funeral, Claire holds a party in the house for her friends as well as Hal and Robert's students. Catherine escapes to the porch where Hal finds her and offers her a beer. Hal confesses that he's not so sure about his own mathematical abilities since he considers math to be a "young man's game". Catherine tries to reassure him with a quote from Gauss. Hal responds by kissing her, much to Catherine's surprise. He apologizes for trying to steal the notebook and she apologizes for calling the police. They kiss again and Hal asks Catherine if she remembers meeting him years earlier. She says she does and recalls she thought he was "not boring". They continue to kiss. The next morning Catherine sits outside. Hal exits the house and tells her he'd like to spend the rest of the day with her. Catherine gives him a key to Robert's desk and tells him to look inside. He goes into the house. A moment later, Claire comes into the backyard, extremely hungover. Catherine, now in a good mood, tries to make nice with Claire. Claire takes the opportunity to continue to push Catherine to moving to New York. Catherine asks why she would move to New York to which Claire confesses that she's selling the house. Catherine becomes enraged at the idea and she accuses Claire of abandoning her to take care of their sick father alone. Claire insists that the reason she did so was to keep working to pay for the house as well as Catherine's education. Catherine reveals that she had to quit school to tend to Robert and then accuses Claire of trying to have her committed. Claire admits that she's researched doctors and facilities for Catherine but insists that she wasn't planning on having her committed. In the middle of the row, Hal appears clutching a notebook, barely containing his excitement. He tells Claire that Catherine is in possession of one of Robert's notebooks which holds a very important proof. Claire asks Catherine where she found it and Catherine tells them she didn't find it. She wrote it. ;Act II We flashback to years earlier, with Robert sitting in the backyard. Catherine tells him she thinks he's getting better and he agrees. She blurts out that she's decided to go to college in a couple months, funded by Claire, but promises she'll be only a short drive away if he were to need her again. Robert protests and demands to know why she waited so long to tell him. When she points out that he hadn't been well until recently and was, at one point, trying to decode extraterrestrial messages in library books, he becomes upset. Hal interrupts, much to his embarrassment, to present his final dissertation to Robert. Robert assures him they'll work out the problem points together, then suddenly realizes he's forgotten Catherine's birthday. He apologizes and offers to take her out to dinner. Catherine invites Hal along but he says he can't go. Catherine shows Hal out and Robert sits down to write a notebook entry, declaring it to be a "good day". We flash forward to where Act I left off. Catherine declares she was the one who wrote the proof and is met with incredulity by both Hal and her sister. The handwriting is very much like Robert's and Hal questions Catherine's mathematical abilities given that she only had a few months' education at Northwestern. Catherine tells him that her real education was living with Robert. When Hal offers to show it to other math experts to confirm the authenticity of the proof, Catherine refuses. She tells Hal she trusted him and then accuses him of having no talent and being past his prime. Hal storms off and Catherine begins to rip the notebook apart. Claire gets it away from her and Catherine runs into the house. Later, Hal attempts to visit Catherine and apologize for his behavior. Claire stops him and tells him Catherine won't talk to her, let alone Hal. Claire accuses him of sleeping with Catherine despite her being unstable. Hal argues that he had no bad intentions and insists Catherine is stronger than Claire thinks. He requests to have the notebook to verify its authenticity with fellow mathematicians. Claire gives it to him and tells him she's taking Catherine with her to New York the next day. She expresses concern for Catherine's future mental stability. We flashback to Robert in the backyard, sitting in the cold and writing furiously. Catherine enters and reprimands him for sitting in the cold with no jacket. Robert tells her it's too hot in the house and that the cold is better for helping him work. Catherine is shocked that he's working again and he assures her that he's sharper than ever. She's ecstatic that his previous mental instability has passed and asks to see his work. He says he'd love for her to take a look and asks if she'd like to take time off school to work with him. Before she decides, Robert insists she look at his latest idea and thrusts a notebook into her hands. Catherine glances at it and becomes quiet. She tells him they need to go inside and Robert explodes with fury. He yells at her to read what he's written. She reads aloud, a nonsensical, rambling paragraph about winter and books and the cold. It's obvious that Robert's mind is deteriorating as it had been before. Catherine begins to cry as Robert descends into confusion and begins to shiver uncontrollably. Catherine tries to take him inside when he asks her not to leave. She promises she won't. We flash forward to Claire in the backyard. Catherine enters with her suitcase. She asks Claire about life in New York. Claire mentions potential schools or jobs for Catherine but Catherine is quick to mock her by making ridiculous demands for a Freudian psychiatrist who will listen as she blames all her problems on Claire. Claire begins to cry and throws Catherine's plane ticket in front of her before storming off. Hal enters and tells Catherine that the proof checks out and apologizes for not believing her. Catherine tells him there's no proof that she wrote it and he can claim it as his own if he wants. Hal tells her he believes she's the one who wrote it and offers to read through it with her. Catherine admits she knows she's like her father but is terrified of becoming like her father. Hal reassures her that maybe she'll be better. Catherine opens the proof and begins to talk through it with Hal. 

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The Sorcerer traps Aladdin in the magic cave. The story is often retold with variations. The following is a précis of the Burton translation of 1885.Burton (2009) pp. 1 ff Aladdin is an impoverished young ne'er-do-well, dwelling in "one of the cities of China". He is recruited by a sorcerer from the Maghreb, who passes himself off as the brother of Aladdin's late father, Mustapha the tailor, convincing Aladdin and his mother of his good will by pretending to set up the lad as a wealthy merchant. The sorcerer's real motive is to persuade young Aladdin to retrieve a wonderful oil lamp from a booby-trapped magic cave. After the sorcerer attempts to double-cross him, Aladdin finds himself trapped in the cave. Aladdin is still wearing a magic ring the sorcerer has lent him. When he rubs his hands in despair, he inadvertently rubs the ring and a jinnī (or "genie") appears and releases him from the cave, allowing him to return to his mother while in possession of the lamp. When his mother tries to clean the lamp, so they can sell it to buy food for their supper, a second far more powerful genie appears who is bound to do the bidding of the person holding the lamp. With the aid of the genie of the lamp, Aladdin becomes rich and powerful and marries Princess Badroulbadour, the sultan's daughter (after magically foiling her marriage to the vizier's son). The genie builds Aladdin and his bride a wonderful palace, far more magnificent than the sultan's. The sorcerer hears of Aladdin's good fortune, and returns; he gets his hands on the lamp by tricking Aladdin's wife (who is unaware of the lamp's importance) by offering to exchange "new lamps for old". He orders the genie of the lamp to take the palace, along with all its contents, to his home in the Maghreb. Aladdin still has the magic ring and is able to summon the lesser genie. The genie of the ring cannot directly undo any of the magic of the genie of the lamp, but he is able to transport Aladdin to the Maghreb where, with the help of the "woman's wiles" of the princess, he recovers the lamp and slays the sorcerer, returning the palace to its proper place. The sorcerer's more powerful and evil brother plots to destroy Aladdin for killing his brother by disguising himself as an old woman known for her healing powers. Badroulbadour falls for his disguise and commands the "woman" to stay in her palace in case of any illnesses. Aladdin is warned of this danger by the genie of the lamp and slays the impostor. Aladdin eventually succeeds to his father-in-law's throne. 

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In the 1st century BC, the Roman Republic has slid into corruption, its menial work done by armies of slaves. One of these, a proud and gifted Thracian named Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), is so uncooperative in his position in a mining pit that he is sentenced to death by starvation. By chance, he is displayed to unctuous Roman businessman Lentulus Batiatus (Peter Ustinov), who – impressed by his ferocity – purchases Spartacus for his gladiatorial school, where he instructs trainer Marcellus (Charles McGraw) to not overdo his indoctrination because he thinks "he has quality". Amid the abuse, Spartacus forms a quiet relationship with a serving woman named Varinia (Jean Simmons), whom he refuses to rape when she is sent to "entertain" him in his cell. Spartacus and Varinia are subsequently forced to endure numerous humiliations for defying the conditions of servitude. Batiatus receives a visit from the immensely wealthy Roman senator Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier), who aims to become dictator of the stagnant republic. Crassus buys Varinia on a whim, and for the amusement of his companions arranges for Spartacus and three others to fight to the death. When Spartacus is disarmed, his opponent, an African named Draba (Woody Strode), spares his life in a burst of defiance and attacks the Roman audience, but is killed by an arena guard and Crassus. The next day, with the ludus' atmosphere still tense over this episode, Batiatus takes Varinia away to Crassus's house in Rome. Spartacus kills Marcellus, who was taunting him over his affections, and their fight escalates into a riot. The gladiators overwhelm their guards and escape into the Italian countryside. Spartacus is elected chief of the fugitives and decides to lead them out of Italy and back to their homes. They plunder Roman country estates as they go, collecting enough money to buy sea transport from Rome's foes, the pirates of Cilicia. Countless other slaves join the group, making it as large as an army. One of the new arrivals is Varinia, who escaped while being delivered to Crassus. Another is a slave entertainer named Antoninus (Tony Curtis), who also fled Crassus's service after Crassus insinuated that he expected Antoninus to become his sex slave. Privately, Spartacus feels mentally inadequate because of his lack of education during years of servitude. However, he proves an excellent leader and organizes his diverse followers into a tough and self-sufficient community. Varinia, now his informal wife, becomes pregnant by him, and he also comes to regard the spirited Antoninus as a sort of son. The Roman Senate becomes increasingly alarmed as Spartacus defeats the multiple armies it sends against him. Crassus's populist opponent Gracchus (Charles Laughton) knows that his rival will try to use the crisis as a justification for seizing control of the Roman army. To try and prevent this, Gracchus channels as much military power as possible into the hands of his own protege, a young senator named Julius Caesar (John Gavin). Although Caesar lacks Crassus's contempt for the lower classes of Rome, he mistakes the man's rigid outlook for nobility. Thus, when Gracchus reveals that he has bribed the Cilicians to get Spartacus out of Italy and rid Rome of the slave army, Caesar regards such tactics as beneath him and goes over to Crassus. Crassus uses a bribe of his own to make the pirates abandon Spartacus and has the Roman army secretly force the rebels away from the coastline towards Rome. Amid panic that Spartacus means to sack the city, the Senate gives Crassus absolute power. Now surrounded by Romans, Spartacus convinces his men to die fighting. Just by rebelling and proving themselves human, he says that they have struck a blow against slavery. In the ensuing battle, after initially breaking the ranks of Crassus's legions, the slave army ends up trapped between Crassus and two other forces advancing from behind, and most of them are massacred. Afterward, the Romans try to locate the rebel leader for special punishment by offering a pardon (and return to enslavement) if the men will identify Spartacus, living or dead. Every surviving man responds by shouting "I'm Spartacus!". As a result, Crassus has them all sentenced to death by crucifixion along the Via Appia between Rome and Capua, where the revolt began. Meanwhile, Crassus has found Varinia and Spartacus's newborn son and has taken them prisoner. He is disturbed by the idea that Spartacus can command more love and loyalty than he can and hopes to compensate by making Varinia as devoted to him as she was to her former husband. When she rejects him, he furiously seeks out Spartacus (whom he recognizes from having watched him at Batiatus' school) and forces him to fight Antoninus to the death. The survivor is to be crucified, along with all the other men captured after the great battle. Spartacus kills Antoninus to spare him this terrible fate. The incident leaves Crassus worried about Spartacus's potential to live in legend as a martyr. In other matters, he is also worried about Caesar, whom he senses will someday eclipse him. Gracchus, having seen Rome fall into tyranny, commits suicide. Before doing so, he bribes his friend Batiatus to rescue Spartacus's family from Crassus and carry them away to freedom. On the way out of Rome, the group passes under Spartacus's cross. Varinia is able to comfort him in his dying moments by showing him his little son, who will grow up free and knowing who his father was. 

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The series begins in 2068. In the first episode, the crew of the Zero-X spacecraft are investigating the surface of Mars after mysterious radio signals are found to be coming from the planet.Production documentation confirms that the Zero-X in "The Mysterons" is the same vehicle that previously appeared in the film Thunderbirds Are Go, placing Captain Scarlet within the same fictional universe as Thunderbirds (Bentley 2001, p. 59). Spectrum personnel biographies in Bentley's The Complete Book of Captain Scarlet also place Fireball XL5 and Stingray in this universe (Bentley 2001, pp. 46–47, 50). Episode 1. The source is discovered to be an alien city, which the astronauts fire on and destroy after mistaking a harmless surveillance device for a weapon. The city's inhabitants, the Mysterons, are sentient computers that form a collective consciousness. They are the remnants of the original Mysteron race: beings from another galaxy that maintained their colony on Mars for 3,500 years before abandoning the planet at the turn of the 20th century. The Mysteron computers use their power of "reversing matter" to rebuild their city before vowing revenge for the humans' unwarranted aggression. Reversing matter, also called "retro- metabolism", enables the Mysterons to re-create people and objects as facsimiles that they can control. Episode 2. This ability is used to wage a "war of nerves" against Earth whereby the Mysterons issue threats against specific targets (from world leaders and military installations to cities and continents) and then destroy and reconstruct whatever instruments are needed (be they human or object) to carry out their plans. The presence of the Mysterons is indicated by two circles of green light that trail scenes of destruction and reconstruction. Although the Mysterons are able to influence events from Mars, their actions on Earth are usually performed by their replicated intermediaries. Zero-X mission leader Captain Black becomes the aliens' primary agent when they seize control of his mind.The transformation of Captain Black from human to Mysteron is indicated by a paling of his complexion combined with a deepening of his voice to match that of the Mysterons.Bentley 2001, p. 43.Bentley 2001, p. 47. Prior to the events of the series, Black was an officer of Spectrum, a worldwide security organisation that mobilises its personnel, vehicles and other resources to counter the Mysteron threat. Spectrum's most senior agents hold military ranks and colour codenames and are posted to the organisation's headquarters, Cloudbase – an airborne aircraft carrier stationed above the Earth's surface – where they answer to its commander-in-chief, Colonel White.In communications, Spectrum personnel use the call signal "S.I.G." ("Spectrum Is Green") as their affirmative code. The negative, "S.I.R." ("Spectrum Is Red"), is used less frequently. Episode 19. Cloudbase is defended by Angel Interceptor fighters flown by a squadron of five female pilots codenamed Destiny (squadron leader), Harmony, Melody, Rhapsody, and Symphony. Spectrum also incorporates a fleet of armoured Spectrum Pursuit Vehicles (SPV), which are hidden in secret locations around the world, as well as patrol cars, hovercraft and machine-gun equipped helicopters. Captain Scarlet becomes Spectrum's main asset in its fight against the Mysterons after the events of the first episode, in which the Mysterons attempt to assassinate Earth's World President as their first act of retaliation.In the fictional universe of Captain Scarlet, power from many individual nations has been vested in a world government, which is headed by an elected World President and possesses its own military and security forces. Spectrum is a unified operation formed to provide greater efficiency than these separate bodies as it is unobstructed by interdepartmental red tape (Bentley 2001, p. 43).Bentley 2001, p. 44. The original Scarlet is killed in a road accident engineered by the Mysterons and replaced with a double under their control. However, after the reconstruction is shot by Spectrum's Captain Blue and falls to his death from a tower, he returns to life with the consciousness of the original Scarlet restored and is thereafter free of the Mysteron influence.In the series, Mysteron reconstructions that are killed are usually permanently destroyed. The one exception is Scarlet, who recovers from injuries that would normally be fatal. The character's biography in The Complete Book of Captain Scarlet states that the Mysterons intended their double of Scarlet to be "indestructible", unlike their other reconstructions (Bentley 2001, p. 44).In the original script for "The Mysterons", Scarlet is resurrected with the aid of an advanced computer (Bentley, p. 15). In the finished episode, he returns to life of his own accord and there is no explanation as to how he regains his human personality. However, the audio play Introducing Captain Scarlet suggests that this is restored by computer as in the pilot script (Bentley 2001, p. 94). Scarlet's new body possesses two extraordinary abilities: he is able to sense other Mysteron reconstructions nearby and, if injured or killed, returns to full health through retro- metabolism. Now able to use suicidally reckless tactics to thwart Mysteron plots, Scarlet repeatedly sacrifices himself in the knowledge that whatever his injuries he will return to face the Mysterons again. Over the course of the series, it is discovered that Mysteron reconstructions are particularly vulnerable to electricity and can be detected by X-rays, to which they are resistant. Episode 8. Consequently, Spectrum develops two anti-Mysteron devices: the "Mysteron Gun" and "Mysteron Detector".Dialogue in "Spectrum Strikes Back" states that the Mysteron Gun is "the only gun that kills a Mysteron." The gun, which fires lethal beams of electrons, does not appear in any other episodes, although it does appear in the audio play Captain Scarlet versus Captain Black, where it is called the "Electro-Ray Rifle". In episodes preceding and following "Spectrum Strikes Back", Mysteron agents are vulnerable to conventional means of destruction such as bullets and explosions. Episode 9. A three-episode story arc focuses on the discovery of a Mysteron base on the Moon, its destruction by Spectrum, and Spectrum's efforts to negotiate with the Mysterons after converting the base's salvaged power source into an interplanetary communication device. Episode 12. Episode 17. A failed attempt to survey Mars, aborted military conferences and the sabotaged construction of a new Earth space fleet hinder Spectrum's progress in taking the fight to the Mysterons, and the organisation twice fails to capture Captain Black. Episode 18. Episode 7. Episode 22. Episode 24. Episode 4. Episode 21. In the penultimate episode, the Mysterons destroy Cloudbase with a fleet of spacecraft, but this is revealed to be a nightmare dreamt by a shot- down Symphony Angel. Episode 31. The final episode is a clip show that ends the series inconclusively with regard to the war between Earth and Mars. Episode 32. 

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St George's Church tower, seen in the film after being gutted in the Baedeker raids (modern photograph) The story concerns three young people: British Army Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), U.S. Army Sergeant Bob Johnson (played by real-life Sergeant John Sweet), and a "Land Girl", Miss Alison Smith (Sheila Sim). The group arrive at the railway station in the fictitious small Kent town of Chillingbourne (filmed in Chilham, Fordwich, Wickhambreaux and other villages in the area), near Canterbury, late on Friday night, 27 August 1943. Peter has been stationed at a nearby Army camp, Alison is due to start working on a farm in the area, and Bob left the train by mistake, hearing the announcement "next stop Canterbury" and thinking he was in Canterbury. As they leave the station together Alison is attacked by an assailant in uniform, who pours glue on her hair before escaping. It transpires that this has happened to other women, and the mystery attacker is known locally as "the glue man". Alison asks Bob if he will spend the weekend in Chillingbourne to help her solve the mystery. The next day, while riding a farm cart in the countryside, Alison meets Peter, who surrounds her cart with his platoon of three Bren Gun Carriers. Alison agrees to meet Peter again. The three decide to investigate the attack, enlisting the help of the locals, including several small boys who play large-scale war games. The three use their detective skills to identify the culprit as a local magistrate, Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), a gentleman farmer and pillar of the community, who also gives local history lectures to soldiers stationed in the district. Alison interviews all the glue man's victims to identify the dates and times of their attacks. Gibbs visits Colpeper at his home and steals the fire watch roster listing the nights Colpeper was on duty in the town hall, whilst a paper drive for salvage by Johnson's boy commandos lets Johnson discover receipts for gum used to make glue sold to Colpeper. The dates of the attacks correspond with Colpeper's night watches, for which he wore a Home Guard uniform kept in the town hall. On their train journey to Canterbury on the Monday morning, Colpeper joins the three in their compartment. They confront him with their suspicions, which he does not deny, and they discover that his motive is to prevent the soldiers from being distracted from his lectures by female company, as well as to help keep the local women faithful to their absent British boyfriends. In Colpeper's words, Chaucer's pilgrims travelled to Canterbury to "receive a blessing or to do penance". On arriving in the city of Canterbury, devastated by wartime bombing, all three young people receive blessings of their own. Alison discovers that her boyfriend, believed killed in the war, has survived after all; his father, who had blocked their marriage because he thought his son could do better than a shopgirl, finally relents. Bob receives long-delayed letters from his sweetheart, who is now a WAC in Australia. Peter, a cinema organist before the war, gets to play the music of Johann Sebastian Bach on the large organ at Canterbury Cathedral, before leaving with his unit. He decides not to report Colpeper to the Canterbury police, as he had planned to do. 

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After a government agency makes first contact with aliens in 1961, alien refugees live in secret on Earth by disguising themselves as humans. Men in Black (MIB) is a secret agency that polices these aliens, protects Earth from extraterrestrial threats and uses memory-erasing neuralyzers to keep alien activity a secret. MIB agents have their former identities erased while retired agents are neuralyzed. After an operation to arrest an alien criminal named Mikey near the Mexican border by Agents K and D, the latter decides that he is too old for his job, prompting the former to neuralyze him so he can retire. Meanwhile, NYPD undercover officer James Darrell Edwards III pursues an unnaturally fast and agile suspect into the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Impressed, K interviews James about his encounter, then neuralyzes him and leaves him a business card with an address. Edwards goes to the address and undergoes a series of tests, for which he finds unorthodox solutions, including a rational hesitation in a targeting test. While the other candidates, who are military-grade, are neuralyzed, K offers Edwards a position with the MIB. Edwards accepts and his identity and civilian life are erased as he becomes Agent J. In upstate New York, an alien illegally crash- lands on Earth, kills a farmer named Edgar and uses his skin as a disguise. Tasked with finding a device called "The Galaxy", the Edgar alien goes into a New York restaurant and finds two aliens (disguised as humans) who are supposed to have it in their possession. He kills them and takes a container from them but is angered to find only diamonds inside. After learning about the incident in a tabloid magazine, K investigates the crash landing and concludes that Edgar's skin was taken by a "bug", a species of aggressive cockroach-like aliens. He and J head to a morgue to examine the bodies the bug killed. Inside one body (which turns out to be a piloted robot) they discover a dying Arquillian alien, who says that "to prevent war, the galaxy is on Orion's belt". The alien, who used the name Rosenberg, was a member of the Arquillian royal family; K fears his death may spark a war. MIB informant Frank the Pug explains that the missing galaxy is a massive energy source housed in a small jewel. J deduces that the galaxy is hanging on the collar of Rosenberg's cat, Orion, which refuses to leave the body at the morgue. J and K arrive just as the bug takes the galaxy and kidnaps the coroner, Laurel Weaver. Meanwhile, an Arquillian battleship fires a warning shot in the Arctic and delivers an ultimatum to the MIB: return the galaxy within a "galactic standard week", in an hour of Earth time, or they will destroy Earth. The bug arrives at the observation towers of the 1964 New York World's Fair New York State Pavilion at Flushing Meadows, which disguise two real flying saucers. Once there, Laurel escapes the bug's clutches when it accidentally drops her. It activates one of the saucers and tries to leave Earth, but K and J shoot it down and the ship crashes into the Unisphere. The bug sheds Edgar's skin and swallows J and K's guns. K provokes it until he too is swallowed. The bug tries to escape on the other ship, but J slows it down by taunting it and crushing cockroaches, angering it. K blows the bug apart from the inside, having found his gun inside its stomach. J and K recover the galaxy and relax, thinking the whole ordeal over, only for the still living upper half of the bug to pounce on them from behind, but Laurel kills it with J's gun. At the MIB headquarters, K tells J that he has not been training him as a partner, but a replacement. K bids J farewell before J neuralyzes him at his request; K returns to his civilian life, and Laurel becomes J's new partner, L. 

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Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes), a successful and happily married architect from Harlem, is married to Drew (Lonette McKee), who works as a buyer at Bloomingdales. Together, they have a young daughter, Ming (Veronica Timbers). At work, Flipper discovers that an Italian-American woman named Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra) has been hired as a temp and his secretary. Initially Flipper is upset that he is the only person of color working at Mast & Covington,but after being told employees are hired according to their ability and not race, he relents. Angie lives in Bensonhurst with her abusive father, Mike (Frank Vincent), and her two brothers, Charlie (David Dundara) and Jimmy (Michael Imperioli). Paulie runs a corner store and lives with his elderly widowed father, Lou (Anthony Quinn). Angie feels suffocated in her home life. Every night when she returns home from work, she is expected to cook for her father and two brothers. Flipper and Angie begin to spend many nights in the working late hours. The next night, they have sex. The sexual encounter begins their tumultuous relationship. Flipper wakes up the next morning, ignoring his daughter. Afterwards, Flipper demands to be promoted to partner at the company but gets delayed by his superiors, Jerry (Tim Robbins) and Leslie (Brad Dourif), to which he responds by resigning and having plans to start his own firm. Eventually, Flipper admits his infidelity to his longtime friend, Cyrus (Spike Lee). Cyrus criticizes Flipper for having an affair with a white woman, referring to the cause as "jungle fever " - an attraction borne of sexualized racial myths rather than love. Flipper pleads with Cyrus not to tell anyone, including his wife. Angie's friends are shocked when Angie tells them she is having a relationship with a black man. Drew learns about Flipper's affair, through Cyrus' wife, Vera (Veronica Webb) after Cyrus told Vera about Flipper's infidelity and throws him out of their home. Flipper moves in temporarily with his father, Southern Baptist preacher The Good Reverend Purify (Ossie Davis) and mother, Lucinda Purify (Ruby Dee). Later, Angie comes home to a severe and brutal beating with a belt from her father when word gets out that she is dating a black man after one of Angie's friends tells one of Angie's brothers. Flipper tries to reconcile with Drew, but pushes his luck by making an assumption. She orders him to leave her place of business. Being multiracial, Drew feels Flipper was attracted to her for being half-white, but is now unfaithful to her because she is half-black and that Flipper was searching for a white, light-skinned woman as he was a successful black man. Flipper and Angie find an apartment in Greenwich Village and move in together. As a couple, they encounter discrimination such as being insulted by a waitress named LaShawn (Queen Latifah) in a restaurant , chastisement from The Good Reverend , and financial issues. After some play fighting, Flipper gets restrained by two policemen (the same ones who killed Radio Raheem two years prior) who receives a call that he was attacking Angie. The incompatibility of Flipper and Angie's relationship is compounded by Flipper's feelings for Drew and Ming, and the fact Angie wants to have children of her own. Eventually the couple break up - echoing what Cyrus told him earlier, Flipper tells Angie their relationship has been based on sexual racial myths and not love, but Angie does not concede the point. Things begin to turn worse for Flipper when his crack-addicted older brother Gator (Samuel L. Jackson) - who has been constantly pestering Flipper and his family for money - steals and sells Lucinda's TV for crack. Flipper's family refuses to give Gator money because he has repeatedly spent their money on crack. Flipper searches all over Harlem for Gator, finding him in a crack house. He finally gives up on his brother and cuts him off, (not before attacking Vivian after hearing about what happened to the TV) telling him that he is not allowed to ask anyone in his family for money. Flipper also concludes that no one in the family will give Gator any more money. Rebelling, Gator arrives at his parents' house to ask for money and, after Lucinda refuses him, begins to ransack the home. Gator's erratic behavior leads to an altercation with both of his parents. It ends with The Good Reverend shooting him in the groin region, proclaiming his son to be "evil and better off dead". Gator collapses, screaming in pain, before he finally dies in a weeping Lucinda's arms with The Good Reverend watching remorsefully. Another subject, on which the film focuses is Paulie, the former fiancé of Angie. Paulie is taunted by his racist Italian-American friends for having lost his girlfriend to a black man. Paulie asks one of his customers - a friendly black woman named Orin Goode (Tyra Ferrell) - on a date. This angers Paulie's father, whom Paulie defies. On his way to meet Orin, Paulie is surrounded and assaulted viciously by his customers for his attempt at an interracial relationship. Although beaten, Paulie still arrives at Orin's for their date. Frankie, one of the attackers despises black people although loves Public Enemy. Angie later is accepted back into her father's home and Flipper tries to mend his relationship with Drew. Unfortunately, it is unsuccessful. He talks to his daughter as she is in bed. As Flipper leaves his apartment, a young crack-addicted prostitute propositions him, calling him "daddy"; in response, Flipper throws his arms around her and cries out in torment. In a deleted scene, Flipper is driving a car with Cyrus inside when Frankie asks him to pull over. Eventually, Flipper takes off while Frankie stares at the open space in shock. 

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The film describes the life of Lady Caroline Lamb (Sarah Miles) after she marries William Lamb (Jon Finch). Later she meets and falls in love with Lord Byron (Richard Chamberlain), but when he deserts her for a younger woman Miss Millbanke (Silvia Monti), she descends into madness. At the end of the film she dies from a broken heart. 

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In 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, middle-class bachelor friends are restless on several Saturday nights because they have no dates. Gene, who works in a menial position in a Wall Street brokerage, has dreams of the exciting society life to be found in Manhattan, while his friends are content to stay in the neighborhood. Gene meets Helen, who is crashing a party (as is Gene). He schemes to "get rich quick", but his plan backfires and he barely escapes jail. 

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Descent is set in 2169. The story begins with a briefing between an anonymous executive of the PTMC and the player's character, PTMC's best "Material Defender", who is hired on a mercenary basis to eliminate the threat of a mysterious alien computer virus infecting the machines and robots used for off-world mining operations. The game progresses throughout the Solar System outward from Earth. After defeating the boss robot on Charon, the Material Defender is informed he cannot return to the PTMC's headquarters in Earth orbit, as there is a chance his ship may be infected with the same virus as the defeated robots. His employer also mentions that PTMC has lost contact with their deep-space installations outside the Solar System, hinting at the events of the sequel. 

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Calvin Cambridge and his two best friends, Murph and Reg Stevens, live in an orphanage. Murph is the youngest of the trio, and has a very close bond with Calvin. At night they all have to sell chocolate for the troublesome orphanage director, Stan Bittleman, after each home game of the NBA team, the Los Angeles Knights. Calvin meets the team's coach, who is impressed by Calvin's knowledge of basketball and honesty about the chocolates, and offers Calvin tickets for the next game. Inside a thrift store donation box, Calvin finds a pair of old sneakers with the initials "MJ" written on them; believing that they were worn by Michael Jordan. Calvin's sneakers are taken by a jealous bully named Ox who throws them onto an overhead power line. When Calvin tries to retrieve them that night during a rainstorm, he is shocked by a lightning bolt. Calvin and his friends attend the basketball game between the Knights and the Minnesota Timberwolves. After the second quarter ends, the team's star player, Tracy Reynolds, prepares for a halftime contest. Calvin's ticket number is called and he goes one on one with Tracy. Calvin ends the contest with a dunk after bouncing the ball off the backboard. Reg and the crowd give Calvin a standing ovation. Calvin is signed to a one-day contract by the Knights. Calvin prepares for his first game with the Knights, but realizes that he is not there to play. When the Knights play the San Antonio Spurs they start losing badly and Coach Wagner decides to let Calvin play in the fourth quarter. Calvin leads a comeback against the Spurs and they win, which leads to Calvin getting a season contract. Reynolds becomes his mentor since Calvin is still a minor. Calvin brings teamwork to the Knights and makes them one of the best teams in the league. Tracy starts to respect Calvin after he gets himself into trouble when making sure that Tracy didn't miss his curfew. Bittleman signs a contract with the team that all of Calvin's money will go to him until Calvin is eighteen, or adopted. When the second option is about to become true, Bittleman grows desperate and steals Calvin's shoes and bets US$100,000 against the Knights. After convincing Ox and his cohorts that Bittleman is selfish, Ox takes the shoes out of Bittleman's safe. The kids head to the arena with Calvin's sneakers. Bittleman escapes and sends goons after Calvin in a failed attempt to retrieve the shoes. Calvin makes it to the arena with the shoes after the 3rd quarter ends with Vince Carter and the Toronto Raptors routing the Knights 80–59. In the fourth quarter of the last regular season game, Calvin is put into the game by the coach and the Knights start to make a comeback. After a pile on towards the end of the game, Calvin's shoes are ruined with the Knights down by one point. Without the shoes, and wanting to be a normal child, Calvin tells the team that this will be his last game. In the final play, Calvin manages to pump fake to get Vince Carter to jump and pass the ball to Tracy. Tracy makes the game winning shot to clinch the Knights their first playoff appearance. After going back to his orphanage, Calvin and Murph get adopted by Tracy, and Reg by a different family, though they stay in touch. Bittleman is missing because he doesn't have enough money to pay the bet, and the orphanage is now sponsored by the Knights. 

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Stevenson's map of Treasure Island Jim Hawkins hiding in the apple-barrel, listening to the pirates An old sailor named Billy Bones comes to lodge in the rural Admiral Benbow Inn on the Bristol Channel, in England. He tells the innkeeper's son, Jim Hawkins, to keep a lookout for "a one-legged seafaring man". A former shipmate, Black Dog, confronts Bones and engages in a violent fight with him. After Black Dog is run off, a blind beggar named Pew visits to give Bones "the black spot" as a summons to share a map leading to buried treasure. Shortly thereafter, Bones suffers a stroke and dies. Pew and his accomplices attack the inn, but Jim and his mother save themselves while taking some money and a mysterious packet from Bones's sea chest. Pew is then trampled to death by excise officers. Inside the packet, Jim and his mother find a map of an island on which the infamous pirate Captain Flint hid his treasure. Jim shows the map to the local physician Dr. Livesey and the squire John Trelawney, and they decide to make an expedition to the island, with Jim serving as a cabin boy. They set sail on Trelawney's schooner, the Hispaniola, under Captain Smollett. Much of the crew, as it is later revealed, are pirates who served under Captain Flint, most notable of which is the ship's one-legged cook Long John Silver. Jim, sitting in an apple barrel, overhears the conspirators' plan to mutiny after the salvage of the treasure and to assassinate the captain and the loyal men. Arriving off the coast of the island, Jim joins the shore party and begins to explore the island. He meets a marooned pirate named Ben Gunn, who was also a former member of Flint's crew. The situation comes to a head after the mutineers arm themselves, and Smollett's men take refuge in an abandoned stockade. During an attack on the stockade, Jim finds his way there and re-joins the crew. Jim manages to make his way to the Hispaniola and cuts the ship's anchorage, allowing the ship to drift along the ebb tide. Jim boards the Hispaniola and encounters Israel Hands, who was severely injured in a dispute with one of his companions. Hands helps Jim beach the schooner in the northern bay, but then attempts to kill Jim with a knife. Jim escapes, climbs into the shrouds of the ship and shoots his pursuer. Jim goes back ashore and returns to the stockade, where he is horrified to find only Silver and the pirates. Silver prevents Jim's immediate death and tells Jim that when everyone found the ship was gone, the captain's party agreed to a treaty whereby they gave up the stockade and the map. In the morning, the doctor arrives to treat the wounded and sick pirates and tells Silver to look out for trouble when they find the site of the treasure. After he leaves, Silver and the others set out with the map, taking Jim along as hostage. They encounter a skeleton, arms oriented toward the treasure, which unnerves the party. Eventually, they find the treasure cache empty. The pirates nearly charge at Silver and Jim, but shots are fired by the ship's command along with Gunn, from ambush. Livesey explains that Gunn had already found the treasure and taken it to his cave. The expedition members load much of the treasure onto the ship and sail away. At their first port in Spanish America, where they will sign on more crew, Silver steals a bag of money and escapes. The rest sail back to Bristol and divide up the treasure. Jim says there is more left on the island, but he for one will not undertake another voyage to recover it. 

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At first, the brothers are not a particularly peaceful lot and end up quarreling with the local constable, juryman, vicar, churchwarden, and teachers—not to mention their neighbours in the village of Toukola. No wonder young girls' mothers do not regard them as good suitors. When the brothers are required to learn to read before they can accept church confirmation and therefore official adulthood—and the right to marry—they decide to run away. Knight and the Snake King, Illustration for Seitsemän veljestä by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1907 The Seven Brothers on top of a Boulder by in 1910 Eventually they end up moving to distant Impivaara in the middle of relative wilderness, but their first efforts are shoddy—one Christmas Eve they end up burning down their sauna. The next spring they try again, but are forced to kill a nearby lord's herd of bulls and pay them back with wheat. Ten years of hard work clearing the forest for fields, hard drinking—and Simeoni's apocalyptic visions from delirium tremens—eventually lead them to mend their ways. They learn to read on their own and eventually return to Jukola. In the end, most of them become pillars of the community and family men. Still, the tone of the tale is not particularly moralistic. 

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Many of the plots featured, included or revolved around spoofing particular things, including films such as Jurassic Park and It Came From Outer Space, and television programmes, including The Crystal Maze and the long-running televised fundraisers Children in Need and Comic Relief. There were also frequent references to other Robin Hood incarnations, most notably ITV's Robin of Sherwood (and in particular that series' Clannad soundtrack is lampooned in the episode "The Whitish Knight") and the contemporary film adaptation Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The latter actually features Howard Lew Lewis (Rabies) among its cast - hence his doubly witty line in the episode "They Came from Outer Space," which episode also passingly satirises the film for casting the lead with an American accent (Kevin Costner). 

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The Simpsons spend a night playing scrabble reminds Bart that he should stimulate his brain by improving his vocabulary if he hopes to pass his intelligence test at school. After Bart cheats by inventing a nonsense word, kwyjibo -- basing its definition on an insulting description of his father -- Homer angrily chases after him. At Springfield Elementary School, Bart is busted for vandalism by Principal Skinner after the class genius, Martin Prince, snitches on him. To get revenge, Bart surreptitiously switches exams with Martin. When the school psychologist, Dr. Pryor, studies the IQ test results, he labels Bart a genius. Homer and Marge enroll him in a school for academically gifted students. Lisa is not fooled by Bart's supposed genius and still thinks he is a moron; Skinner shares her belief but is pleased Bart no longer attends Springfield Elementary. At the Enriched Learning Center for Gifted Children, Bart feels out of place among the other students with advanced academic skills. Ostracized by his brilliant classmates, Bart visits his former school, where his old friends reject him because of his perceived intelligence. After Bart's chemistry experiment explodes, filling the school lab with green goo, he confesses to Dr. Pryor that he switched tests with Martin. Dr. Pryor realizes that he was never a genius and has him readmitted to Springfield Elementary. Bart returns home and admits to Homer that he cheated on the intelligence test, but he is glad they are closer than before. Though Homer is touched by this sentiment, he is ultimately upset and angry at Bart for lying to him about the test and chases him through the house as Lisa declares that Bart is back to being his normal, dumb self. 

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The book is presented as a manuscript written by its protagonist, a middle-aged man named Harry Haller, who leaves it to a chance acquaintance, the nephew of his landlady. The acquaintance adds a short preface of his own and then has the manuscript published. The title of this "real" book-in-the-book is Harry Haller's Records (For Madmen Only). As the story begins, the hero is beset by reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of everyday, regular people, specifically for frivolous bourgeois society. In his aimless wanderings about the city he encounters a person carrying an advertisement for a magic theatre who gives him a small book, Treatise on the Steppenwolf. This treatise, cited in full in the novel's text as Harry reads it, addresses Harry by name and strikes him as describing himself uncannily. It is a discourse on a man who believes himself to be of two natures: one high, the spiritual nature of man; the other is low and animalistic, a "wolf of the steppes". This man is entangled in an irresolvable struggle, never content with either nature because he cannot see beyond this self-made concept. The pamphlet gives an explanation of the multifaceted and indefinable nature of every man's soul, but Harry is either unable or unwilling to recognize this. It also discusses his suicidal intentions, describing him as one of the "suicides": people who, deep down, knew they would take their own life one day. But to counter that, it hails his potential to be great, to be one of the "Immortals". By chance, Harry encounters the man who gave him the book, just as the man has attended a funeral. He inquires about the magic theater, to which the man replies, "Not for everybody." When Harry presses further for information, the man recommends him to a local dance hall, much to Harry's disappointment. When returning from the funeral, Harry meets a former academic friend with whom he had often discussed Oriental mythology, and who invites Harry to his home. While there, Harry is disgusted by the nationalistic mentality of his friend, who inadvertently criticizes a column Harry wrote. In turn, Harry offends the man and his wife by criticizing the wife's bust of Goethe, which Harry feels is too thickly sentimental and insulting to Goethe's true brilliance. This episode confirms to Harry that he is, and will always be, a stranger to his society. Trying to postpone returning home, where he fears all that awaits him is his own suicide, Harry walks aimlessly around the town for most of the night, finally stopping to rest at the dance hall where the man had sent him earlier. He happens upon a young woman, Hermine, who quickly recognizes his desperation. They talk at length; Hermine alternately mocks Harry's self-pity and indulges him in his explanations regarding his view of life, to his astonished relief. Hermine promises a second meeting, and provides Harry with a reason to live (or at least a substantial excuse to continue living) that he eagerly embraces. During the next few weeks, Hermine introduces Harry to the indulgences of what he calls the "bourgeois". She teaches Harry to dance, introduces him to casual drug use, finds him a lover (Maria) and, more importantly, forces him to accept these as legitimate and worthy aspects of a full life. Hermine also introduces Harry to a mysterious saxophonist named Pablo, who appears to be the very opposite of what Harry considers a serious, thoughtful man. After attending a lavish masquerade ball, Pablo brings Harry to his metaphorical "magic theatre", where the concerns and notions that plagued his soul disintegrate as he interacts with the ethereal and phantasmal. The Magic Theatre is a place where he experiences the fantasies that exist in his mind. The Theater is described as a long horseshoe-shaped corridor with a mirror on one side and a great number of doors on the other. Harry enters five of these labeled doors, each of which symbolizes a fraction of his life. 

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Mrs. Krabappel takes Bart's class on a field trip to the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Distracted when Bart waves at him, Homer crashes an electric cart into a cooling vent and is fired. Homer searches for a new job without success. Feeling like a failure, he writes a note to his family and decides to commit suicide by attaching a boulder to himself and jumping off a bridge. Lisa finds Homer's note and alerts the family. They hurry to the bridge to save him, but they are almost run over by a speeding truck. Homer pulls them to safety just in time, and he is suddenly filled with a new reason to live: to place a stop sign at the dangerous intersection. After successfully petitioning the city council, Homer embarks on a public safety crusade that involves placing speed bumps and warning signs throughout the town. Unsatisfied with his own efforts, Homer takes on the biggest danger in Springfield, the nuclear power plant. After Homer rallies people to his cause, Mr. Burns decides to end the furor he is creating by offering him a new position as the plant safety inspector, along with a higher salary. Homer, torn between his principles and his livelihood, tearfully tells his followers that they must fight their battles alone from this point on and takes the job. 

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Happenstance While changing planes in Miami after closing down a Mexican heroin smuggling operation, the British Secret Service operative James Bond meets Junius Du Pont, a rich American businessman whom Bond had briefly met and gambled with in Casino Royale. Du Pont asks Bond to watch Auric Goldfinger, with whom Du Pont is playing canasta, to discover if he is cheating. Bond soon realises that Goldfinger is using his assistant, Jill Masterton, to spy on Du Pont's cards. Bond blackmails Goldfinger into admitting his guilt and paying back Du Pont's lost money; Bond also has a brief affair with Masterton. Back in London, Bond's superior, M, tasks him with determining how Goldfinger is smuggling gold out of Britain; M also suspects Goldfinger of being connected to SMERSH and financing their western networks with his gold. Bond visits the Bank of England for a briefing on the methods of gold smuggling. Coincidence Bond contrives to meet and play a round of golf with Goldfinger; Goldfinger attempts to win the golf match by cheating, but Bond turns the tables on him, beating him in the process. He is subsequently invited to Goldfinger's mansion near Reculver where he narrowly escapes being caught on camera looking through the house. Goldfinger introduces Bond to his factotum, a Korean named Oddjob. Issued by MI6 with an Aston Martin DB Mark III, Bond trails Goldfinger in his vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost (adapted with armour plating and bulletproof glass), driven by Oddjob. Both travel by air ferries to Switzerland. Bond manages to trace Goldfinger to a warehouse in Geneva, where he finds that the armour of the Rolls-Royce is actually white-gold, cast into panels at his Kent refinery. When the car reaches the factory in Switzerland (Enterprises Auric AG), he recasts the gold from the armour panels into aircraft seats and fits the seats to the aeroplanes of Mecca Charter Airline, in which he holds a large stake. The gold is finally sold in India at a large profit. Bond foils an assassination attempt on Goldfinger by Jill Masterton's sister, Tilly, to avenge Jill's death at Goldfinger's hands: he had painted her body with gold paint, which killed her. Bond and Tilly attempt to escape when the alarm is raised, but are captured. Enemy action Bond is tortured by Oddjob when he refuses to confess his role in trailing Goldfinger. In a desperate attempt to escape being cut in two by a circular saw, Bond offers to work for Goldfinger, a ruse that Goldfinger initially refuses but then accepts. Bond and Tilly are subsequently taken to Goldfinger's operational headquarters in a warehouse in New York City. They are put to work as secretaries for a meeting between Goldfinger and several gangsters (including the Spangled Mob and the Mafia), who have been recruited to assist in "Operation Grand Slam"—stealing gold from the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox. One of the gang leaders, Helmut Springer, refuses to join the operation and is killed by Oddjob. Bond learns that the operation includes killing the inhabitants of Fort Knox by introducing poison into the water supply. He manages to conceal a message in the toilet of Goldfinger's private plane, where he hopes it will be found and sent to Pinkertons, where his friend and ex-counterpart Felix Leiter now works. Operation Grand Slam commences, and it transpires that Leiter has found and acted on Bond's message. A battle commences, but Goldfinger escapes. Tilly, a lesbian, hopes that one of the gang leaders, Pussy Galore (the leader of a gang of lesbian burglars), will protect her, but she (Tilly) is killed by Oddjob. Goldfinger, Oddjob and the Mafia bosses all escape in the melee. Bond is drugged before his flight back to England and wakes to find he has been captured by Goldfinger, who drugged a BOAC flightcrew and hijacked their jetliner. Bond manages to break a window, causing a depressurisation that blows Oddjob out of the plane; he then fights and strangles Goldfinger. At gunpoint, he forces the crew to ditch in the sea near the Canadian coast, where they are rescued by a nearby weathership. 

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The clubhouse at Royal St George's Golf Club Fleming based some points in the book on events he had read about. The pre-First World War death of a showgirl in Europe after she had covered herself in paint was one such idea, and the depressurisation of Goldfinger's plane was a plot device Fleming had intended to use elsewhere, but which he included in Goldfinger. Some years previously a plane had depressurised over the Lebanon and an American passenger had been sucked out of the window; Fleming, who was not a comfortable airline passenger, had made note of the incident to use it. As he had done in previous Bond novels, Fleming used the names of several friends or associates in the novel. The surname of Sir John Masterman, the MI5 agent and Oxford academic who ran the double-cross system during the Second World War, was used as the basis for the Masterton sisters; Alfred Whiting, the golf professional at Royal St George's Golf Club, Sandwich, became Alfred Blacking; while the Royal St George's Golf Club itself became the Royal St Mark's, for the game between Bond and Goldfinger. In June 1957 Fleming played in the Bowmaker Pro-Am golf tournament at the Berkshire Golf Club, where he partnered Peter Thomson, the winner of The Open Championship; much of the background went into the match between Bond and Goldfinger. One of Fleming's neighbours in Jamaica, and later his lover, was Blanche Blackwell; Fleming used Blanche as the model for Pussy Galore, although the name "Pussy" came from Mrs "Pussy" Deakin, formerly Livia Stela, an SOE agent and friend of Fleming's wife. Fleming's golf partner, John Blackwell (a cousin to Blanche Blackwell), was also a cousin by marriage to Ernő Goldfinger and disliked him: it was Blackwell who reminded Fleming of the name. Fleming also disliked Goldfinger, who, Fleming thought, destroyed Victorian buildings and replaced them with his own modernist designs, particularly a terrace at Goldfinger's own residence at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead. Blackwell had his name used as the heroin smuggler at the beginning of the book, with a sister who was a heroin addict. There were some similarities between Ernő and Auric Goldfinger: both were Jewish immigrants who came to Britain from Eastern Europe in the 1930s and both were Marxists. The fictional and real Goldfingers were physically very different. According to the historian Henry Chancellor the likely model for Auric Goldfinger was the American gold tycoon Charles W. Engelhard Jr., whom Fleming had met in 1949. Engelhard had established a business, the Precious Metals Development Company, which circumvented numerous export restrictions, selling gold ingots directly into Hong Kong. 

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Benjy Stone, the narrator, tells of the summer (in his "favorite year" of 1954) he met his idol, swashbuckling actor Alan Swann (perhaps intended to evoke Errol Flynn, whose title roles like Captain Blood would be evoked by Swann's imagined (but screened) one in Captain from Tortuga). In the early days of television, Benjy works as a junior comedy writer for a variety show called Comedy Cavalcade starring Stan "King" Kaiser broadcast live from the NBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. As a special upcoming guest, they get the still-famous Swann, who is largely washed up. However, when he shows up, he turns out to be a roaring drunk and Kaiser is ready to "dump him" until Benjy intervenes, promising to keep the "washed-up jaboni" sober during the week leading up to his scheduled appearance. As Benjy watches out for Alan, or at least tries to keep up with him, they learn much about each other, including the fact that they each have family they prefer to hide from the rest of the world. In Benjy's case, it's his Jewish mother, who is married to a Filipino former bantamweight boxer, Rookie Carroca, and Benjy's embarrassing relatives, such as uncouth Uncle Morty. For Swann, it is his young daughter, Tess, who has been raised entirely by her mother, one of his many ex-wives. He stays away, but continues to keep tabs on her secretly, frustrated that he cannot muster the courage to reconnect with her. During the week of rehearsals, Kaiser is threatened by corrupt union boss Karl Rojeck (who might evoke the contemporaneous James Hoffa) and objects to being parodied on the show. Disruptive events, ambiguous between sabotage and random accidents, are noted after Kaiser belligerently refuses to stop performing the "Boss Hijack" sketches. In a subplot, Benjy tries, clumsily and over-enthusiastically, to win the affections of co-worker K. C. Downing. Swann advises him on the right approach, which includes crashing a party at the home of K.C.'s affluent parents. The night of the show finally arrives, but minutes away from going on-air, Swann suffers a panic attack when Benjy informs him that the show is broadcast live. (He is accustomed to getting many takes to get his lines right, exclaiming, "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!") Swann gets drunk, and rushes out from the studio, but is confronted by Benjy, who angrily tells him that he always thought of Swann as the swashbuckling hero he saw on the big screen, and that deep down, Swann possesses those qualities as a person. As Benjy puts it, "Nobody's that good an actor!" As the "Boss Hijack" sketch gets underway, Rojeck's men show up backstage and begin beating up Kaiser. The fight spills onto the stage during the live broadcast (with the audience thinking that it is part of the comedy sketch). Swann and Benjy observe the melee from a balcony, when the audience suddenly notices Swann and breaks into enthusiastic applause. Swann grabs a rope and swings into action (dressed as a Musketeer for a later skit), saving Kaiser in front of an appreciative if still clueless audience. Benjy narrates the epilogue, relating that Swann, his confidence bolstered, finally gets up the nerve to visit his daughter the next day and the two apparently have a heartfelt reunion. 

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Gowan McGland (Tom Conti) is a creatively blocked Scottish poet who ekes out a day-to-day existence by exploiting the generosity of strangers in an affluent Connecticut suburb, where he recites his verse to various arts groups and women's clubs. Gowan is something of a leech, cadging expensive dinners from well-off patrons (usually stealing the tips afterward) while seducing their bored wives and affecting a superior attitude toward the smug bourgeois types he exploits. Although a talented poet, he is a chronic drunk, indifferent to the wounds he can casually inflict with his wit. (When one of Gowan's middle-aged conquests undresses for him, he mutters, "Released from their support, her breasts dropped like hanged men," reducing her to tears.) Gowan falls in love with a young college student, Geneva Spofford (Kelly McGillis), who has everything to lose from a relationship with a drunken deadbeat poet unable to hold a job. Gowan instigates two ugly incidents that eventually cause their breakup: first, a bar fight from which Geneva rescues him, and later, when he causes a scene in a fancy restaurant where the waiters know he has stolen their tips. He also suffers an ironic comeuppance from Dr. Jack Haxby (Joel Fabiani). The dentist, after finding out about the poet's affair with his wife, uses the ruse of free dental care for ruining Gowan's smile and forcing him to wear dentures. When Gowan finds out, it is already too late, and the damage is irrevocable. (Gowan fears losing his teeth, equating it with death.) Gowan prepares to hang himself, but while dictating his last thoughts into a tape recorder, he comes up with some good lines and regains his will to write. Unfortunately, his host's pet dog, an Old English sheepdog named Reuben, comes bounding into the room, causing Gowan to lose his balance before he can undo the noose, turning the aborted suicide into accidental asphyxiation. The film's title comprises Gowan's final words, an unsuccessful attempt to halt the dog. 

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Launched in 1977, the Voyager 2 space probe carried a gold phonographic disk with a message of peace, inviting alien civilizations to visit Earth. The probe is intercepted by an alien ship which then sends a small scout vessel to establish first contact with Earth. Instead of greeting the alien craft, the U.S. government shoots it down. Crashing in Chequamegon Bay, Wisconsin, the lone alien occupant, looking like a floating ball of glowing energy, finds the home of recently widowed Jenny Hayden. While there, the alien uses a lock of hair from her deceased husband, Scott, to clone a new body for himself as a terrified Jenny watches. The alien "Starman" has seven small silver spheres with him which provide energy to perform miraculous feats. He uses the first to send a message to his people stating that Earth is hostile and his spacecraft has been destroyed. He arranges to rendezvous with them in three days' time. He then uses the second sphere to create a holographic map of the United States, coercing Jenny into taking him to the rendezvous point in Arizona. Jenny is initially both hostile and frightened of him and attempts to escape. Having a very basic understanding of the English language which has come from the Voyager 2 disk, the Starman learns to communicate with Jenny and assures her that he means no harm. He explains that if he does not reach the rendezvous point, Arizona's Barringer Crater, in three days, he will die. Sympathetic but still wary, Jenny teaches him how to drive a car and use credit cards so he can continue the journey alone, but when she witnesses him miraculously resurrect a dead deer, she is deeply moved and decides to stay with him. They are pursued across the country by the authorities and, after nearly being caught, Jenny is shot and critically wounded by a police officer. In order to escape, the Starman crashes their car into a gas tanker and uses another sphere to protect the two of them from the explosion. They take refuge in a mobile home that is being towed. He uses another silver sphere to heal Jenny. After being assured that Jenny will recover, the Starman proceeds to hitchhike towards Arizona without her, but Jenny manages to catch up to him while he and his driver are stopped at a roadblock. Reunited, the two of them hitchhike together, resuming their journey towards the crater. Later, while stowing away on a boxcar train, the couple makes love. The Starman tells Jenny "I gave you a baby tonight." Jenny explains that she is infertile and cannot have children, but he assures her she is now pregnant. He explains that the baby will be the son of her dead husband, because he (Starman) is a clone of Scott, but as a child of Starman as well, their son will possess all of the Starman's knowledge and will grow up to be a teacher. Starman offers to stop the pregnancy if she wishes, but the joyful Jenny embraces him, accepting the gift. The couple mistakenly travel too far on the train and arrive in Las Vegas. Jenny realizes she has lost her wallet. The Starman uses one of their last quarters in a slot machine, which he manipulates in order to win the $500,000 jackpot. They then buy a new car to complete their journey to Arizona. Meanwhile, National Security Agency director George Fox learns that the Starman's flight trajectory, prior to being shot down, was to the Barringer Crater. Fox arranges to have the Starman captured by the Army, dead or alive. SETI scientist Mark Shermin, another government official involved in the case, criticizes Fox's heavy-handed approach and reminds him that the Starman was invited to Earth. Appalled to learn that Fox is planning to vivisect the alien, Shermin then resolves to help the Starman escape rather than allow Fox to capture him. Jenny and the now slowly dying Starman reach the crater as Army helicopters pursue them. Just as they are surrounded, a large, spherical spaceship appears and descends into the crater. Light surrounds the couple, and the Starman is instantly restored to health. As he prepares to leave, he tells Jenny he will never see her again. Jenny asks him to take her with him, but he says she would die on his world. He then gives her his last silver sphere, telling her that their son will know what to do with it. Jenny watches as the ship departs. 

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Emma Moriarty (Sally Field) is a 33-year-old, divorced mother who moves to a rural Arizona town to make a living by training and boarding horses. She becomes friends with the town's pharmacist, Murphy Jones (James Garner), a widower. But a romance between them seems unlikely due to Murphy's age and because Emma allows her ex-husband, Bobby Jack Moriarty (Brian Kerwin), to move back in with her and their 12-year-old son, Jake (Corey Haim). Emma struggles to make ends meet, but is helped by Murphy, an idiosyncratic widower. While refusing to help her outright with charity or personal loan, Murphy buys a horse with her assistance and pays to board it with Emma, while encouraging others to do the same. He also provides emotional support for Emma and Jake. A rivalry develops between Murphy and Bobby Jack. This competition continues until Bobby Jack's newest girlfriend appears with their newborn twin sons. At the end Murphy and Emma choose to pursue a relationship. 

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Oscar "Manny" Manheim is a ruthless bank robber and hero to the convicts of Alaska's Stonehaven Maximum Security Prison. After two previous escape attempts, Manny is put in solitary confinement for three years. A court order compels sadistic Associate Warden Ranken to release him from solitary. Planning a third break out, Manny is forced to advance his plan to mid-winter after he is stabbed. Manny recruits young prisoner Buck McGeehy to help in the complicated plan. After an arduous cross-country hike, including a swim across a freezing river, the two hop on board a train. After the men stow away, the elderly railroad engineer has a heart attack. As the driverless train accelerates, dispatchers Dave Prince and Frank Barstow are alerted to the situation. They try to keep the tracks clear, but the runaway smashes the caboose of another train. The collision damages the cab of the lead locomotive and jams the front door of the second engine, an old EMD F-unit. The convicts are now aware something is wrong. Barstow's superior Eddie McDonald orders him to derail the train. At this point the train's horn blows, alerting the authorities (and the two fugitives) that someone is on the train. Barstow cancels the derailment. Ranken concludes that his two escaped convicts are fleeing by rail. Meanwhile, the two fugitives are discovered by Sara, a locomotive hostler, who explains that she sounded the horn and that the train is out of control. She convinces them that jumping off the train would be suicidal and explains that the only way to stop the train would be to climb into the lead engine and press its kill switch, a near-impossible feat. As they do this, they manage to shut down the third and fourth locomotives and they nearly derail on a bridge. Someone also sees the three people and alerts the dispatch. The dispatchers divert the runaway onto a branch after determining it is only five minutes away from a head-on collision. Further ahead the train has a tight curve near a chemical plant. Barstow agrees that they must crash it, thus condemning the three people, rather than risk a chemical explosion. Warden Ranken forces Barstow to help him reach the train by helicopter. Manny tries to force Buck into a suicidal scramble around the outside of the second engine's frozen nose. Sara's intervention on Buck's behalf forces an armed face-off. Emotionally broken, all three slump into depression. Suddenly Ranken's accomplice is lowered from a helicopter to the lead engine but falls through the windshield of the second engine, and then under the train. Spurred on by the appearance of his arch-enemy and resolved not to return to prison, Manny makes a perilous leap to the lead engine. He barely makes it, crushing his hand. Ranken boards the locomotive from the helicopter, but Manny ambushes and handcuffs him. Ranken orders Manny to stop the train before it crashes, but Manny has chosen to die rather than be recaptured. Ranken says that he knows how to die too. When reminded of Buck and Sara in the second engine, Manny uncouples his out-of-control lead engine. He waves goodbye, ignoring Buck's screaming pleas to shut down the lead engine, and climbs onto the roof of the lone engine in the freezing snow, his arms stretched out, ready to meet his end. Buck and Manny's fellow inmates mourn in their cells as the lone engine disappears into the storm. The film closes with an on-screen quote from William Shakespeare's Richard III: 

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“Fast” Eddie Felson is a former pool hustler turned successful liquor salesman in Chicago. He still stakes bets for players, including fellow hustler Julian, who is outmatched at nine-ball by the young and charismatic Vincent Lauria. Recognizing Vincent’s skill, and his girlfriend Carmen’s inexperience at luring players to lose money, Eddie tells the couple of their excellent potential for hustling. Carmen visits Eddie alone to inquire about his interest in Vincent. Finding him working at Child World, Eddie invites Vincent to leave the next day for six weeks of hustling on the road, culminating in a nine-ball tournament in Atlantic City. Manipulating Vincent’s insecurities about Carmen and giving him a valuable Balabushka cue stick, Eddie persuades him to accept his offer. Eddie’s abrupt departure upsets Julian, as well as Eddie’s girlfriend Janelle. Vincent and Carmen hit the road with Eddie in his Cadillac, visiting a series of pool halls. Serving as Vincent’s , Eddie attempts to teach him the art of hustling, but Vincent chafes at having to play below his ability. At a pool hall run by his old acquaintance Orvis, Eddie becomes fed up with Vincent’s arrogance and leaves him. Rebuking Carmen for her advances toward him, Eddie reminds her they are partners with a mutual business interest in Vincent. Eddie returns to find Vincent grandstanding to “Werewolves of London”, beating the pool hall’s best player but scaring off a wealthier . Eddie and Vincent talk frankly, agreeing Vincent must curb his ego if they are to succeed. Eddie and Carmen struggle to rein in Vincent’s showboating, and his jealousy when they pose as lovers during a scam. After a string of successful games, Vincent plays the famed Grady Seasons, but is directed by Eddie to the game, to inflate the odds against Vincent in Atlantic City. Goaded by Grady, Vincent almost fails to throw the game, and Eddie is inspired to play again. After some success, Eddie is taken in by a named Amos. Humiliated, Eddie leaves Vincent and Carmen with enough money to make it to Atlantic City, taking the Balabushka. Eddie refines his skills at Orvis’ pool hall, and gets a pair of corrective lens sunglasses. On a winning streak, he enters the Atlantic City tournament and runs into Vincent and Carmen, overhearing them arrange a bet with another player. Eddie, winning against Julian; and Vincent, beating Grady, are set to face each other. Janelle arrives to support Eddie, who triumphs against Vincent. As Eddie and Janelle celebrate, Vincent and Carmen surprise Eddie with $8,000 – his “cut” of Vincent’s winnings from intentionally losing their match. In his semifinal match, Eddie sees his reflection in the two-ball; disgruntled, he forfeits the game and returns Vincent’s money. With plans to live with Janelle, and determined to win legitimately, Eddie faces Vincent in a private match, declaring "I'm back!" 

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George, a low-level working-class gangster recently released from prison, is given a job in London by his former boss, Denny Mortwell, as the driver and bodyguard for a high-priced prostitute named Simone. Mortwell also wants George to gather information on one of Simone's wealthy customers for blackmail purposes. Simone, who has worked hard to develop high-class manners and an elite clientele, initially dislikes the uncouth and outspoken George, and he regards her as putting on airs. But as George and Simone find out more about each other, they form a friendship, and George begins to fall in love with her. George agrees to risk his own life to help Simone find her teenage friend Cathy, who has disappeared, and who Simone fears is being abused by her violent former pimp, Anderson. George increasingly finds himself torn between his feelings for Simone, his obligations to his boss Mortwell, and his relationship with his teenage daughter Jeannie, a sweet normal girl who has matured while he was in prison and wants to have her father in her life. After Anderson attacks George, Simone flees to Brighton. George finally finds Cathy and takes her to Brighton to reunite her with Simone, where he lends Simone his gun. He discovers that Simone and Cathy are lovers, and that Simone doesn't care about him and only used him to find Cathy. Mortwell and Anderson then arrive to take back control of Simone and Cathy, and an enraged Simone shoots them both dead and then threatens to shoot George. He punches her, takes the gun and leaves - upset at her ingratitude. Freed of his underworld obligations, George returns to a more normal life, working in his friend's garage and spending time with Jeannie. 

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Veteran photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods) has been taking his camera to the world's trouble spots for over 20 years. While he does good work, Boyle's fondness for booze and drugs, and his colossal arrogance, have given him a reputation that's left him practically unemployable. One morning, he finds that his wife has abandoned him, taking their child with her. Broke and with no immediate prospects, Boyle and his buddy, Doctor Rock (Jim Belushi), an out-of-work disc jockey, head to El Salvador, where Boyle is convinced that he can scrounge some lucrative freelance work amidst the nation's political turmoil. However, when Boyle and Rock witness the execution of a student by government troops just as they enter the country, it becomes clear that this war is more serious than they were expecting. After he asks a soldier for a general he met during the Football War, he and Rock are taken to him in a school-turned-barracks where both discuss the situation and he learns that the army is supplied by the United States. Feeling that El Salvador is a disaster starting to happen, Boyle eventually decides that it's time to get out, but he's reunited with an old flame named María (Elpidia Carrillo) and her two children (one of whom is his), and he doesn't want to leave her behind. In the meantime, both he and Maria go to a mass by Archbishop Oscar Romero. During the mass, the Archbishop is killed by an assassin sent by the far-right ARANA party (a fascist parody of the real-life ARENA party) and the army outside opens fire on the escaping crowd with Boyle and Maria barely escaping. Following this, he goes to the United States Embassy to convince the ambassador to cut aid for the Salvadoran government as their human rights abuses increase but is denied and is told to leave the country for his own safety, prompting him to leave the embassy in anger. While attempting to get her out of the country, Boyle is harassed by the military due to his profession and eventually leads to the deaths of innocent people either close to him or María by death squads. John Cassady (John Savage), Boyle's friend and fellow photojournalist, is also killed during a battle between the government and rebels in Santa Ana when the Salvadoran army starts using American vehicles and air support to crush the rebels. Boyle and María eventually leave the country towards the United States. However, upon entering California, their bus is stopped by immigration officers and María allows herself to be deported alongside her children due to the guilt of leaving her home country behind while Boyle is arrested after desperately arguing with the officers. An epilogue reveals that Maria and her children survived and were last rumored to be in a refugee camp in Guatemala. Doctor Rock eventually returned to San Francisco. John Cassady's photos were published and Richard Boyle is still looking for Maria and her children. 

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Ironweed is set during the Great Depression and tells the story of Francis Phelan, an alcoholic vagrant originally from Albany, New York, who left his family after accidentally killing his infant son while he may have been drunk. The novel focuses on Francis's return to Albany, and the narrative is complicated by Phelan's hallucinations of the three people, other than his son, whom he killed in the past. The novel features characters that return in some of Kennedy's other books. 

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In 1965, Airman Second Class Adrian Cronauer arrives in Saigon to work as a DJ for Armed Forces Radio Service. Private Edward Garlick takes him to the radio station, where his attitude and demeanor contrast sharply with those of many staff members. His show consists of reading strictly censored news and irreverent humor segments mixed with rock and roll music, which is frowned upon by his superiors, Second Lieutenant Steven Hauk and Sergeant Major Phillip Dickerson. Hauk adheres to strict Army guidelines in terms of humor and music programming while Dickerson is generally abusive to all enlisted men. However, Brigadier General Taylor and the other DJs quickly grow to like Cronauer and his eccentric brand of comedy. Cronauer follows Trinh, a Vietnamese girl, to an English class; after bribing the teacher to let him take over, Cronauer instructs the students in American slang. Once class is dismissed, he tries to talk to Trinh but is stopped by her brother Tuan; realizing the futility of pursuing her, Cronauer instead befriends Tuan and takes him to Jimmy Wah's, a local GI bar. Two soldiers, angered at Tuan's presence, initiate a confrontation that escalates into a brawl. Dickerson reprimands Cronauer for the incident. While relaxing in Jimmy Wah's one afternoon, he is pulled outside by Tuan, saying that Trinh wants to see him. Moments later, the building explodes, killing two soldiers and leaving Cronauer shaken. The cause of the explosion is determined to be a bomb; Dickerson declares the news censored, but Cronauer locks himself in the studio and reports it anyway, to Dickerson's outrage. Dickerson cuts off the broadcast and Cronauer is suspended, to the delight of Hauk and Dickerson. Hauk takes over the show, but his poor attempts at humor and polka music choices lead to a flood of letters and phone calls demanding that Cronauer be reinstated. Demoralized, Cronauer spends his time drinking and pursuing Trinh, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. At the radio station, Taylor intervenes, ordering Hauk to reinstate Cronauer, but he refuses to go back to work. Garlick and Cronauer's vehicle is stopped in a congested street amidst a convoy of soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division heading for Nha Trang, where Garlick persuades him to do an impromptu "broadcast" before they go off to fight. The soldiers' appreciation reminds Cronauer why his job is important, and he returns to work. Dickerson seizes an opportunity to permanently rid himself of Cronauer by approving his request to interview soldiers in the field and routing him through the Viet Cong-controlled highway to An Lộc. Cronauer and Garlick's Jeep hits a mine, and they are forced to hide from VC patrols. In Saigon, Tuan learns of the trip after Cronauer fails to show up for English class and steals a van to go after them. After finding them, the van breaks down and they flag down a Marine helicopter to take them back to the city. Back at the base, Dickerson tells Cronauer that he is off the air for good after Tuan is revealed as a VC operative and the one responsible for the bombing of Jimmy Wah's; Dickerson has arranged for Cronauer's honorable discharge. General Taylor informs Cronauer that, regrettably, he cannot help him since his friendship with Tuan would damage the reputation of the US Army. After Cronauer leaves, Taylor informs Dickerson that he is being transferred to Guam, citing his vindictive attitude as the reason. Cronauer chases down Tuan, decrying his actions against American soldiers. Emerging from the shadows, Tuan retorts that the US army devastated his hometown, resulting in the deaths of most of his family and his friends, thereby making the United States his enemy. Before disappearing back into the jungle, Tuan reminds Cronauer that in spite of this, he still saved his life in An Loc, implying that he valued his friendship in spite of opposing sides. On his way to the Tan Son Nhat Airport with Garlick, under MP escort, Cronauer sets up a quick softball game for the students from his English class (which he promised to do for them, and even the MPs join in) and says goodbye to Trinh, parting ways as friends. He gives Garlick a taped farewell message and boards the plane to take him back home to Queens; Garlick — taking Cronauer's place as DJ – plays the tape on the air the next morning, which opens with Cronauer saying "Goodbye, Vietnam!" 

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Jennifer Beals and Michael Nouri star in Flashdance Alexandra "Alex" Owens (Jennifer Beals) is an eighteen-year-old welder at a steel mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who lives with her dog, Grunt, in a converted warehouse. Although she aspires to become a professional dancer, she has no formal dance training, and works as a sensual dancer by night at Mawby's, a neighborhood bar and grill that hosts a nightly cabaret. Lacking family, Alex forms bonds with her coworkers at Mawby's, some of whom also aspire to greater artistic achievements. Jeanie (Sunny Johnson), a waitress, is training to be a figure skater, while her boyfriend, short-order cook Richie (Kyle T. Heffner), hopes to become a stand-up comic. One night, Alex catches the eye of customer Nick Hurley (Michael Nouri), the owner of the steel mill where she works. After learning that Alex is one of his employees, Nick begins to pursue her on the job, though Alex turns down his advances at first. Alex is also approached by Johnny C. (Lee Ving), who wants Alex to dance at his nearby strip club, Zanzibar. After seeking counsel from her mentor, retired ballerina Hanna Long (Lilia Skala), Alex attempts to apply to the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory. Alex becomes intimidated by the scope of the application process, which includes listing all prior dance experience and education, and she leaves without applying. Leaving Mawby's one evening, Richie and Alex are assaulted by Johnny C. and his bodyguard, Cecil. Nick intervenes, and after taking Alex home, the two begin a relationship. In a skating competition, Jeanie falls twice during her performance and sits defeated on the ice and has to be helped away. Later, feeling she will never achieve her dreams, and after Richie has left Pittsburgh to try his luck in Los Angeles, Jeanie begins going out with Johnny C. and works for him at Zanzibar. Finding out that she is working as a stripper, Alex drags her out while she protests and cries. After seeing Nick with a woman at the ballet one night, Alex throws a rock through a window of his house, only to discover that it was his ex-wife (Belinda Bauer) whom he was meeting for a charity function. Alex and Nick reconcile, and she gains the courage to apply to the Conservatory. Nick uses his connections with the arts council to get Alex an audition. Alex is furious with Nick, as she did not get the opportunity based on her own merit, and decides not to go through with the audition. Seeing the results of others' failed dreams and after the sudden death of Hanna, Alex becomes despondent about her future, but finally decides to go through with the audition. At the audition, Alex initially falters, but begins again, and she successfully completes a dance number composed of various aspects of dance that she has studied and practiced, including breakdancing, which she has seen on the streets of Pittsburgh. The board responds favorably, and Alex is seen joyously emerging from the Conservatory to find Nick and Grunt waiting for her with a bouquet of roses. 

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In April 1967, 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen is admitted to McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts, after attempting suicide by overdosing on pills. She denies that it was a suicide attempt to a psychiatrist, who suggests she take time to regroup in McLean, a private mental hospital. Susanna is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and her stay extends to 18 monthsSusanna Kaysen finds stability in examining youthful 'insanity', Knight-Ridder Newspapers, August 4, 1993 rather than the proposed couple of weeks. Fellow patients Polly, Cynthia, Lisa Rowe, Lisa Cody, Georgina and Daisy contribute to Susanna's experiences at McLean as she describes their personal issues and how they come to cope with the time they must spend in the hospital. Susanna also introduces the reader to particular staff members, including Valerie, Dr. Wick and Mrs. McWeeney. Susanna and the other girls are eventually informed that the recently released Daisy died by suicide on her birthday. Daisy's death deeply saddens the girls and they hold a prolonged moment of silence in her memory. Susanna reflects on the nature of her illness, including difficulty making sense of visual patterns, and suggests that sanity is a falsehood constructed to help the "healthy" feel "normal" in comparison. She also questions how doctors treat mental illness, and whether they are treating the brain or the mind. During her stay in the ward, Susanna also undergoes a period of depersonalization, where she bites open the flesh on her hand after she becomes terrified that she has "lost her bones." She develops a frantic obsession with the verification of this proposed reality and even insists on seeing an X-ray of herself to make sure. This hectic moment is described with shorter, choppy sentences that show Kaysen's state of mind and thought processes as she went through them. Also, during a trip to the dentist with Valerie, Susanna becomes frantic after she wakes from the general anesthesia, when no one will tell her how long she was unconscious, and she fears that she has lost time. Like the incident with her bones, Kaysen here also rapidly spirals into a panicky and obsessive state that is only ultimately calmed with medication. After leaving McLean, Susanna mentions that she kept in touch with Georgina and eventually saw Lisa, now a single mother who was about to board the subway with her toddler son and seemed, although quirky, to be sane. 

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The Great God Om tries to manifest himself once more in the world, as the time of his eighth prophet is nigh. He is surprised, however, when he finds himself in the body of a tortoise, stripped of his divine powers. In the gardens of Omnia's capital he addresses the novice Brutha, the only one able to hear his voice. Om has a hard time convincing the boy of his godliness, as Brutha is convinced that Om can do anything he wants, and would not want to appear as a tortoise. Brutha is gifted with an eidetic memory and is therefore chosen by Vorbis, the head of the Quisition, to come along on a diplomatic mission to Ephebe. However, Brutha is also considered unintelligent, since he never learned to read, and rarely thinks for himself. This begins to change after Brutha discovers Ephebe's philosophers; the idea of people entertaining ideas they're not certain they believe or even understand, let alone starting fistfights over them, is an entirely new concept to him. With the help of Ephebe's Great Library, and the philosophers Didactylos, his nephew, Urn, and Abraxas, Om learns that Brutha is the only one left who believes in him. All others either just fear the Quisition's wrath or go along with the church out of habit. While in Ephebe, Brutha's memory aids an Omnian raid through the Labyrinth guarding the Tyrant's palace. While in the library of Ephebe, Brutha also memorizes many scrolls in order to protect Ephebeian knowledge as Didactylos sets fire to the building, to stop Vorbis reading the scrolls there. Completely unrelated to the story, the Librarian of the Unseen University travels through L-Space to rescue several of the abandoned scrolls. Fleeing the ensuing struggle by boat, Brutha, Om and a severely injured Vorbis end up lost in the desert. Trekking home to Omnia, they encounter ruined temples as well as the small gods who are faint ghost- like beings yearning to be believed in to become powerful. Realizing his 'mortality' and how important his believers are to him, Om begins to care about them for the first time. While Brutha, Vorbis, and Om are in the desert, the Tyrant of Ephebe manages to regain control of the city and contacts other nations who have been troubled by Omnia's imperialistic interactions with the other countries around it. On the desert's edge, a recovered Vorbis attempts to finish off Om's tortoise form, abducts Brutha, and proceeds to become ordained as the Eighth Prophet. Brutha is to be publicly burned for heresy while strapped on a heatable bronze turtle when Om comes to the rescue, dropping from an eagle's claws onto Vorbis' head. As a great crowd witnesses this miracle they come to believe in Om and he becomes powerful again. Om manifests himself within the citadel and attempts to grant Brutha the honour of establishing the Church's new doctrines. However, Brutha does not agree with Om's new rule and explains that the Church should care for people while having a tolerance for other religious practices. Meanwhile, Ephebe has gained the support of several other nations and has sent an army against Omnia, establishing a beachhead near the citadel. Brutha attempts to establish diplomatic contact with the generals of the opposing army. Despite trusting Brutha, the leaders state they do not trust Omnia and that bloodshed is necessary. At the same time, Simony leads the Omnian military to the beachhead and uses Urn's machine of war in order to fight the Ephebians. While the fighting occurs on the beachhead, Om attempts to physically intervene, but Brutha demands he does not interfere with the actions of humans. Om becomes infuriated but obeys Brutha, but he travels to the highest mountain on Discworld where gods gamble on the lives of humans in order to gain or lose belief. While there, Om manages to unleash his fury, striking other gods and causing a storm that disrupts the battle. Eventually, he forces all other gods of the forces at the battle to tell their soldiers to stop fighting and make peace. In the book's conclusion Brutha becomes the Eighth Prophet, ending the Quisition and reforming the church to be more open-minded and humanist. Om also agrees to forsake the smiting of Omnian citizens for at least a hundred years. The last moments of the book see Brutha's death a hundred years to the day after Om's return to power and his journey across the ethereal desert towards judgement, accompanied by the spirit of Vorbis, whom Brutha found still in the desert and upon whom he took pity. It is also revealed that this century of peace was originally meant to be a century of war and bloodshed which the History Monk Lu-Tze changed to something he liked better. 

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The plot revolves around the comfortable relationship between widower Harry and his gay son Jeff and their individual searches for the right mate. Harry unconditionally loves his rugby-playing son and even takes an active part in Jeff's search for Mr. Right. Harry reveals that his mother (Jeff's grandmother) was a lesbian, perhaps accounting for his accepting attitude toward Jeff. Jeff's new boyfriend, Greg, who is closeted from his own homophobic father, finds it difficult to relate to Harry's well-meaning matchmaking ways. Greg is ejected from his own home by his father when he discovers his son's sexuality. Harry, via a video dating service, finds a woman that he likes, a divorcee named Joyce, who may not be so understanding after spying a gay magazine in Harry and Jeff's house. Unfortunately, Harry suffers a massive stroke and is left unable to speak or walk. Jeff cares for him as best as he can, taking him to the park for an outing one day. Jeff and Greg meet up in the park and agree to try and rekindle their romance, while Jeff's father, although unable to speak, gives his overwhelming approval. 

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With the opening of the novel, the island of Leshp, which had been submerged under the Circle Sea for centuries, rises to the surface. Its position, exactly halfway between Ankh- Morpork and Al Khali (the capital of Klatch), makes the island a powerful strategical point for whoever lays claim to it, which both cities do. In Ankh- Morpork, a Klatchian Prince named Khufurah is parading through Ankh-Morpork, where he will be presented with a Degree in Sweet Fanny Adams (Doctorum Adamus cum Flabello Dulci), but an assassination attempt occurs, and the Prince is wounded. Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, begins investigating the crime, originally suspecting both a Klatchian named 71-Hour Ahmed and a senior Morporkian peer, Lord Rust, of being involved. The attempted assassination breaks off relations between Ankh-Morpork and Klatch as Prince Khufurah's brother, Prince Cadram, effectively declares war on the city of Ankh-Morpork. At this point, Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh- Morpork, resigns—apparently of his own free will—and Lord Rust takes command of the city. Vetinari has refused to become involved in the war with Klatch, due to the fact Ankh-Morpork does not have an army to stand against any opposing forces (the reason given being that killing enemy soldiers makes it difficult to sell them things afterwards), but Rust declares Martial law and orders the city's noble families to revive their old private regiments. Vimes, refusing to follow Rust, stands down as Commander of the Watch. Captain Carrot resigns as well, as do Sergeant Colon, Sergeant Detritus and Corporal Angua. The idea of putting the watch under the command of Corporal Nobbs is rejected by the ruling Council of Guild leaders and the Watch is disbanded. Vimes then recruits the Watch into his own private army regiment, reasoning that, as an official noble, he is entitled to do so by law and by Lord Rust's command, with the group remaining independent as knights legally fall under command of the king or his duly appointed representatives, neither of which exist in Ankh-Morpork. Angua, following 71-Hour Ahmed, is captured by the Klatchians and taken to Klatch. Carrot, rather than rush off to save her, reports back to Vimes, who gets his private army to head for Klatch. Meanwhile, Nobby and Sergeant Colon have been recruited by Vetinari and his pet inventor, Leonard of Quirm, on a secret mission of their own, unknown to Vimes. Vetinari, Leonard of Quirm, Colon, and Nobby end up in Leonard's "Going-Under-the-Water- Safely Device" and discover that Leshp is actually floating on top of a huge bubble of gas, and that the gas is escaping from said bubble, meaning that Leshp will, ultimately, sink back under the sea again. Vimes catches up with 71-hour Ahmed and has, by this time, figured out that Ahmed is a fellow policeman. Ahmed tells Vimes that Prince Cadram was responsible for the assassination attempt on Prince Khufurah. Ahmed and his band of Klatchian D'regs and Vimes' army head towards Gebra, in Klatch, where the war is due to start. To help blend in, Vetinari, Nobby and Fred Colon get hold of some Klatchian clothing, though Nobby ends up wearing the costume of a dancing girl and gets in touch with his feminine side. The three also head to Gebra. Arriving at Gebra they discover that Carrot has convinced the two armies to get together and play a game of football (he has an inflatable football in his backpack for just such an emergency), Vimes is preparing to arrest both Klatchian Prince Cadram and Lord Rust for various breaches of the peace (such as being prepared for war) and 71-hour Ahmed is supporting him. Vetinari prevents an international incident by ostensibly declaring the surrender of Ankh-Morpork and offering war reparations. To be ratified on Leshp in one week. Vetinari is returned to Ankh-Morpork, under arrest and in disgrace, but as Leshp has vanished back under the sea again, the treaty was to be signed in a non-existent territory and thus the charge of treason is invalid. Seeing he has been tricked, and with the people and generals turning against him, Prince Cadram flees, with 71-hour Ahmed in pursuit. His brother Khufurah recovers and resumes control of Klatch. Vimes is informed by Carrot that Vetinari has been "reminded" that the old rank of Commander was the same as the old rank of Duke. He objects, claiming that only a King can make a Duke, but then realises that Carrot was speaking to Vetinari. Since Carrot is, of course, very much not the King of Ankh-Morpork his reminding of Vetinari is all that is required for Vimes to get his new position and rank. Vimes "accidentally" loses his "dis-organiser" (given to him by his wife) which kept giving him incorrect information. It is explained that, had Vimes reacted slightly differently in the beginning—staying in Ankh-Morpork rather than attempting to follow Ahmed and rescue Angua—the whole history of the Ankh-Morpork v. Klatch war would have gone very differently. 

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The narrator is Fanny, whose mother (called "The Bolter" for her habit of serial monogamy) and father have left her to be brought up by her Aunt Emily and the valetudinarian Davey, whom Emily marries early in the novel. Fanny also spends holidays with her Uncle Matthew Radlett, Aunt Sadie, and numerous cousins at Alconleigh. Linda, the second Radlett daughter, is Fanny's best friend and the main character of the novel. The early chapters recount the Radlett children's bizarre upbringing, including their contrasting obsessions with hunting and preventing cruelty to animals, and the activities of their secret society, "the Hons." The Radlett daughters receive little in the way of formal education, and as Linda grows older she is increasingly consumed by a desire for romantic love and marriage. Louisa, the eldest Radlett child, makes her début and quickly becomes engaged to John Fort William, a Scottish peer more than twenty years her senior. Linda finds Lord Fort William an unromantic choice of husband, but is deeply jealous that Louisa is getting married. Linda becomes bored and depressed, awaiting her own coming-out party. During this time she makes friends with Lord Merlin, a neighbouring landlord who is a wealthy, charming aesthete with many fashionable friends. Merlin brings Tony Kroesig, heir to a wealthy banking family, as a last-minute guest to Linda's coming-out ball. Linda falls in love with Tony, but their relationship is rocky from the start. Uncle Matthew disapproves of Tony's German ancestry (he believes that all foreigners are fiends), and is furious when Linda and Fanny sneak away to Oxford to have luncheon with Tony. Linda and Tony eventually marry despite the strong disapproval of their families. Linda very quickly realises that she has made a serious mistake, but she keeps up a pretence of having a happy marriage. Linda and Tony have one child, Moira, to whom Linda takes an instant dislike. Linda almost dies during Moira's birth, and her doctors strongly advise her to have no more children. Moira is soon abandoned to the care of her paternal grandparents. During this time, Fanny marries a young man called Alfred and begins a family of her own; she therefore sees Linda less frequently. After nine years of marriage, Linda leaves Tony for Christian Talbot, an ardent Communist. Christian is kind but vague, and ultimately uninterested in individuals, preferring to focus on the plight of the working class. Linda's divorce and remarriage cause a rift between her and her parents, but after some months they reconcile. Linda and Christian go to France to work with Spanish refugees in Perpignan during the Spanish Civil War, where they meet Linda's old friend Lavender Davis, an efficient young woman also volunteering to help the refugees. Linda realises that Christian and Lavender are falling in love with one another and that they would be a better pairing. Linda decides to leave Christian and leave France. On the way back to England, Linda runs out of money in Paris and meets Fabrice de Sauveterre, a wealthy French duke. Linda becomes his mistress and lives with him in Paris for eleven months. During this time she cultivates a great interest in clothes, which Fabrice encourages and finances, but most of her happiness is the result of the fact that she has finally found the love of her life. When World War II breaks out, Fabrice persuades Linda to return to England alone, for he has work to do in the French Resistance. During the war, he is able to visit Linda in England once. She becomes pregnant. Meanwhile, for safety during the London Blitz, Fanny, Louisa, and their children are living at Alconleigh, along with Matthew, Sadie, Emily, Davey, "the Bolter," and her new lover Juan (whom Uncle Matthew calls "Gewan"). When Linda's house is bombed, she also goes to stay at Alconleigh. The Bolter sees Linda as a younger version of herself, which Linda resents, because she is certain that she has found the love of her life in Fabrice and will not run off from any more husbands. Fanny is also expecting a baby, and she and Linda give birth to their sons on the same day. Linda dies in childbirth, as the doctors had warned; around this same time, Fabrice is killed in the war. Fanny and her husband adopt Linda's child and name him Fabrice. Mitford wrote two sequels to the novel, Love in a Cold Climate (1949) and Don't Tell Alfred (1960). Her penultimate novel, The Blessing (1951), also references The Pursuit of Love and characters from The Blessing later appear in Don't Tell Alfred. 

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Nina, an interpreter, is beside herself with grief at the recent death of her boyfriend, Jamie, a cellist. When she is on the verge of despair, Jamie reappears as a "ghost" and the couple are reunited. Nina is ecstatic. But Jamie tells her about his days while she is at work, and one dialogue suggests she should embrace the life around her; one of these is about a memorial plaque in a park about a dead child and how parents who read it feel an immediate, compelling need to hug their children. The returned Jamie also reminds her that he also irritated her, and as a ghost he manifests behaviours she'd have little patience for – turning up the central heating to stifling levels, moving furniture around and inviting back "ghost friends" to watch videos. This infuriates her, and their relationship deteriorates. She meets Mark, a psychologist, to whom she is attracted, but she is unwilling to become involved with him because of Jamie's continued presence. Nina continues to love Jamie but is conflicted by his self-centred behaviour and ultimately wonders out loud, "Was it always like this?" Over Nina's objections, Jamie decides to leave to allow her to move on. Towards the end of the film, Jamie watches Nina leave and one of his fellow ghosts asks, "Well?" and Jamie responds, "I think so... Yes." At this point the central conceit of the movie has become clear: Jamie came back specifically to help Nina get over him by tarnishing her idealised memory of him. 

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After their boss is killed during a bank heist, London gangsters Brian Hope (Idle) and Charlie McManus (Coltrane) desire to lead more peaceful lives in Brazil, disapproving of their new younger and more brash boss, Casey (Patterson). While planning to rob a local Triad gang of their ill-gotten drug money, Brian meets and falls in love with a waitress, Faith (Coduri). During the robbery, Brian and Charlie betray their fellow gangsters, Abbott and Morley, steal the money and flee, but are forced to abandon their car when it runs out of petrol and seek refuge in a nearby nunnery during the ensuing gunfight. Faith, who had tried to warn Brian beforehand, is shot in the wrist by Abbott, while one of the triads is shot and hospitalised. After this, Casey places a bounty on Brian and Charlie's heads. Disguising themselves as nuns, Brian and Charlie introduce themselves to the Sister Superior, Liz, as Sisters Inviolata and Euphemia, respectively. Faith, having witnessed the gunfight and Brian and Charlie fleeing into the nunnery, follows them and poses as a mature student to get inside. Her gunshot wound is exposed and she is taken to the infirmary. Brian pays her a secret visit and claims he is married in order to end their relationship for her safety. When Faith intends to go to church and confess, Charlie distracts the priest, Father Seamus, while Brian poses as him. Faith admits she still loves Brian, but Brian convinces Faith to keep silent. On her way out, she is abducted by the Triads and interrogated. She directs them to Casey and they set her free, but bumps into a lamppost and hits her head on the road, ending up in the hospital, where one Triad has infiltrated the staff as a janitor. Brian and Charlie acquire tickets to Brazil, despite Brian's desire to take Faith with them. Brian decides to tell Faith the truth, but discovers she has not returned to the nunnery. They go to her apartment and only barely escape from Abbott and Morley, who had been sent to retrieve her by Casey. They sneak back into the nunnery and manage to slip into their spare habits after accidentally waking up an eccentric nun, Sister Mary. In conversation, Brian learns that Faith is in the hospital, with her father and brother who are protecting her from the gang. He visits her, but she is heartbroken, believing that Brian no longer loves her. They attempt to flee for the airport the next morning, but are caught and exposed by Sister Mary. In desperation, they steal a truck and head for the airport pursued by Sisters Liz and Mary, Morley and Abbott, and eventually Casey and the Triads. Brian forces Charlie to go to the hospital, where Brian tells Faith the truth while Charlie stalls the gangsters. They manage to escape the hospital with Faith and Casey is arrested, though one briefcase of money is lost during the chase. Sister Liz and Sister Mary find the lost case of drug money and, ignoring the police's concerns, decide to use it to fund a drug rehabilitation clinic. Sister Liz then leads the nuns in prayer, thanking God for sending them Sisters Euphemia and Inviolata, and asking him to, "keep on eye on them, won't you? They need you." Brian, Charlie and Faith reach the airport and check-in, when an airport policeman warns the attendant about Brian and Charlie. They board the flight disguised as attendants and successfully escape the UK for Brazil. 

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The show followed the adventures of Doctor Snuggles, a kind old gentleman who lives in a comfortable home with his elderly housekeeper, Miss Nettles. Doctor Snuggles spends most of his time inventing, and throughout the series creates a housekeeping robot (Mathilda), a wormmobile, a machine to restore the colours of the rainbow, a gadget to fight depression, a fire-proof lotion and a time machine, amongst other inventions. He travels by means of a talking pogo-stick/umbrella and a spacecraft made of wood called the Dreamy Boom Boom. Doctor Snuggles also has to deal with the malevolent powers of the crazy magician - Professor Emerald, who is his arch enemy. 

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On Friday in South Central Los Angeles, Craig Jones is newly unemployed after being accused of stealing boxes. He hangs out on his front porch with his best friend, Smokey, a snappy, mischievous drug dealer who sells weed for Big Worm, the psychopathic neighborhood supplier. Throughout the day, Craig and Smokey observe the goings-on in their neighborhood, including Debbie, whom Craig is interested in. Smokey, who has been smoking rather than selling his consignment of marijuana, has a confrontation with Big Worm. In an attempt to explain his money shortage, Smokey incriminates Craig. Big Worm threatens to kill Craig and Smokey if they do not give him $200 by 10:00 pm. Craig angrily confronts Smokey about his lack of initiative in selling the marijuana before deciding to help Smokey. Craig unsuccessfully attempts to borrow money from his mother Betty, his sister Dana (who eventually tells their father about the situation), and his jealous girlfriend, Joi, who is seen cheating on him earlier in the film. Craig's father, Willie, eventually learns of Craig's plan, as well as the fact that Craig is carrying a gun. Willie tells Craig that he should use his fists, instead of guns, to resolve his problems, while telling Craig the story of how Willie's brother lost his life due to gun violence. Smokey heads to Debbie's house and notices Red's bike, which Deebo had stolen, on the lawn. He sneaks in and finds Deebo asleep with Felisha. Smokey tries to retrieve the money that he and Deebo stole from Stanley's house earlier, but is interrupted by Ezal. Both escape without the money before Deebo wakes up. Smokey enlists Craig's help to go back and try again, but at that moment, Deebo rides Red's bike past them. The two notice a black car driving slowly and they hide, suspecting a possible drive-by shooting. Scared, they run to Craig's room. Then, after Willie confronts them about the situation with Big Worm, and with 10:00 approaching, Craig and Smokey decide to step out. Once outside, they notice a van parked in the middle of the street with its headlights off. The two flee as Big Worm's men start shooting at them. Meanwhile, the neighbors come out of their houses after hearing the gunshots. Debbie then confronts Deebo for assaulting Felisha, after Deebo falsely accuses Felisha of Smokey's attempted theft. Deebo eventually assaults Debbie, as Craig and Smokey arrive. Angered that Deebo has assaulted Debbie, Craig stands up to him, and threatens him with his gun. Deebo scoffs at the threat and Willie encourages Craig to put the gun down and fight with his hands. Shortly after, Craig and Deebo fight. After nearly losing, Craig wins by using various objects as weapons (such as a brick and a trash can). As Debbie tends to Craig, Smokey steals back the money he was robbed of earlier from a knocked-out Deebo and flees the scene. Red punches Deebo to make sure he doesn't wake up, and retrieves his stolen chain and bicycle, while Ezal steals Deebo's shoes. Craig and Debbie agree to meet up the following day and Craig breaks up with Joi on the phone. Later that night, Smokey settles with Big Worm, and ends the feud. He announces that he is giving up drug dealing and going to rehabilitation. After hanging up, Smokey looks up, lights a joint, and closes the movie by breaking the fourth wall and telling the audience, "I was just bullshittin'! And you know this, man!" 

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Snoopy takes a book out from the library – on Charlie Brown's card – and the book is about magic tricks, which inspires Snoopy to hold a magic show, taking the stage name "The Great Houndini", using Marcie and Sally as his assistants. In the show, once Snoopy silences a kid heckling his "Woodstock-out-of-the-hat" trick, he does the "stick-in-the-hole" trick to Franklin, the "amputation-decapitation" trick to Peppermint Patty, cutting Linus' trademark security blanket into strips, the "levitation" trick to Lucy Van Pelt, and biggest of all, making Charlie Brown literally disappear. Unfortunately, a sudden rainstorm ends the show early, and Charlie Brown is left invisible. Convinced he's going to remain that way for the rest of his life, he prepares to "roam the world as a lost soul", and Sally begins moving her stuff into his room. When Snoopy realizes he can't yet reverse the trick, he tries a couple of different ideas to make Charlie Brown somewhat visible again, including draping a sheet over his head, which scares Sally, and causes Charlie Brown to faint when he sees himself in the mirror. Meanwhile, Snoopy tries working on reversing the invisible trick, but still has trouble with it even after seeing his supper dish floating in mid-air. While Snoopy searches for a counterspell, Charlie Brown realizes he has a golden opportunity to kick Lucy's infamous football without her usual pulling- away prank. Taking advantage of his invisibility, Charlie Brown finally kicks the ball out of Lucy's hand and taunts her about it. Lucy is at a loss to know what is going on as she can only hear Charlie Brown's voice. But when he tries another attempt, Snoopy casts the counterspell to make him visible again just as he runs toward the football, and this time Lucy does her usual prank, with Charlie Brown again landing flat on his back. Nevertheless, Charlie Brown is happy that he finally kicked the ball at least once with Snoopy as a witness. When Lucy scoffs at Snoopy, the insulted beagle magically levitates Lucy into the sky, and leaves her stuck there for payback. Snoopy and Charlie Brown happily laugh and dance away to conclude a satisfying day, while Linus eventually pulls Lucy down with his blanket. 

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The British Secret Service agent James Bond is asked by his superior, M, to join him at M's club, Blades. A club member, the multi-millionaire businessman Sir Hugo Drax, is winning considerable money playing bridge, seemingly against the odds. M suspects Drax is cheating, and while claiming indifference, is concerned as to why a multi-millionaire and national hero would cheat. Bond confirms Drax's deception and manages to turn the tables—aided by a stacked deck of cards—and wins £15,000. Drax is the product of a mysterious background, purportedly unknown even to himself. Presumed to have been a British Army soldier during the Second World War, he was badly injured and stricken with amnesia in the explosion of a bomb planted by a German saboteur at a British field headquarters. After extensive rehabilitation in an army hospital, he returned home to become a wealthy industrialist. After building his fortune and establishing himself in business and society, Drax started building the "Moonraker", Britain's first nuclear missile project, intended to defend Britain against its Cold War enemies. The Moonraker rocket was to be an upgraded V-2 rocket using liquid hydrogen and fluorine as propellants; to withstand the ultra-high combustion temperatures of its engine, it used columbite, in which Drax had a monopoly. Because the rocket's engine could withstand high heat, the Moonraker was able to use these powerful fuels, greatly expanding its effective range. After a Ministry of Supply security officer working at the project is shot dead, M assigns Bond to replace him and also to investigate what has been going on at the missile-building base, located between Dover and Deal on the south coast of England. All the rocket scientists working on the project are German. At his post on the complex, Bond meets Gala Brand, a beautiful police Special Branch officer working undercover as Drax's personal assistant. Bond also uncovers clues concerning his predecessor's death, concluding that the man may have been killed for witnessing a submarine off the coast. Drax's henchman Krebs is caught by Bond snooping through his room. Later, an attempted assassination by triggering a landslide nearly kills Bond and Brand, as they swim beneath the Dover cliffs. Drax takes Brand to London, where she discovers the truth about the Moonraker by comparing her own launch trajectory figures with those in a notebook picked from Drax's pocket. She is captured by Krebs, and finds herself captive in a secret radio homing station—intended to serve as a beacon for the missile's guidance system—in the heart of London. While Brand is being taken back to the Moonraker facility by Drax, Bond gives chase, but is also captured by Drax and Krebs. Drax tells Bond that he was never a British soldier and has never suffered from amnesia: his real name is Graf Hugo von der Drache, the German commander of a Werwolf commando unit. He was the saboteur whose team placed the car bomb at the army field headquarters, only to be injured himself in the detonation. The amnesia story was simply a cover he used while recovering in hospital, in order to avoid Allied retribution, although it would lead to a whole new British identity. Drax remains a dedicated Nazi, bent on revenge against England for the wartime defeat of his Fatherland and his prior history of social slights suffered as a youth growing up in an English boarding school before the war. He explains that he now means to destroy London, with a Soviet-supplied nuclear warhead that has been secretly fitted to the Moonraker. He also plans to play the stock market the day before to make a huge profit from the imminent disaster. Brand and Bond are imprisoned where the blast from the Moonraker's engines will incinerate them, to leave no trace of them once the missile is launched. Before the launch, the couple escape. Brand gives Bond the coordinates he needs to redirect the gyros and send the Moonraker into the sea. Having been in collaboration with Soviet Intelligence all along, Drax and his henchman attempt to escape by Soviet submarine—only to be killed as the vessel makes its escape through the waters onto which the Moonraker has been re-targeted. After their debriefing at headquarters, Bond meets up with Brand, expecting her company—but they part ways after she reveals that she is engaged to a fellow Special Branch officer. 

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Boodle's, a gentlemen's club in London, was the model for Blades; Fleming was a member of three clubs, including Boodle's. The locations draw from Fleming's personal experiences. Moonraker is the only Bond novel that takes place solely in Britain, which gave Fleming the chance to write about the England he cherished, such as the Kent countryside, including the White Cliffs of Dover, and London clubland. Fleming owned a cottage in St Margaret's at Cliffe, near Dover, and he went to great lengths to get the details of the area right, including lending his car to his stepson to time the journey from London to Deal for the car chase passage. Fleming used his experiences of London clubs for the background of the Blades scenes. As a clubman, he enjoyed membership of Boodle's, White's and the Portland Club, and a combination of Boodles and the Portland Club is thought to be the model for Blades; the author Michael Dibdin found the scene in the club to be "surely one of the finest things that Ian Fleming ever did." The early chapters of the novel centre on Bond's private life, with Fleming using his own lifestyle as a basis for Bond's. Fleming used further aspects of his private life, such as his friends, as he had done in his previous novels: Hugo Drax was named after his brother-in-law Hugo Charteris and a navy acquaintance Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, while Fleming's friend Duff Sutherland (described as "a scruffy looking chap") was one of the bridge players at Blades. The name of the Scotland Yard superintendent, Ronnie Vallance, was made up from those of Ronald Howe, the actual assistant commissioner at the Yard, and of Vallance Lodge & Co., Fleming's accountants. Other elements of the plot came from Fleming's knowledge of wartime operations carried out by T-Force, a secret British Army unit formed to continue the work of the Fleming-established 30 Assault Unit. 

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In New York City, Karen (Rainbow Harvest) is a streetwise teen from a lower-middle-class family with a emotionally and sometimes physically abusive father who pursues a friendship with 11-year-old Lonnie (Sarah Boyd). Lonnie is from a wealthy, upper-class family. After becoming friends, over the course of the summer they expose each other to the very different lifestyles they live. In the process, they learn lessons each culture has to offer. The situation becomes complicated when Karen's brother, Johnny (Neill Barry), shows interest in Lonnie and Lonnie begins to develop a crush on him. Soon, a sensual new neighbor (Roxanne Hart) moves into Karen's apartment building, and Johnny becomes slightly infatuated with her. Circumstances arise that will test Karen and Lonnie's friendship. 

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In early 1942, aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis is struggling to develop a means of attacking Germany's dams in the hope of crippling German heavy industry. Working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, as well as his own job at Vickers, he works feverishly to make practical his theory of a bouncing bomb which would skip over the water to avoid protective torpedo nets. When it hit the dam, backspin would make it sink whilst retaining contact with the wall, making the explosion far more destructive. Wallis calculates that the aircraft will have to fly extremely low () to enable the bombs to skip over the water correctly, but when he takes his conclusions to the Ministry, he is told that lack of production capacity means they cannot go ahead with his proposals. Angry and frustrated, Wallis secures an interview with Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris (played by Basil Sydney), the head of RAF Bomber Command, who at first is reluctant to take the idea seriously. Eventually, however, he is convinced and takes the idea to the Prime Minister, who authorises the project. Bomber Command forms a special squadron of Lancaster bombers, 617 Squadron, to be commanded by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, and tasked to fly the mission. He recruits experienced crews, especially those with low-altitude flight experience. While they train for the mission, Wallis continues his development of the bomb but has problems, such as the bomb breaking apart upon hitting the water. This requires the drop altitude to be reduced to . With only a few weeks to go, he succeeds in fixing the problems and the mission can go ahead. The bombers attack the dams. Eight Lancasters and their crews are lost, but two dams are breached and the overall mission succeeds. 

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The Marshalls are brought to the mysterious world by means of a dimensional portal, a device used frequently throughout the series and a major part of its internal mythology. This portal opens when they are swept down a gigantic 1,000-foot waterfall. In "Circle", which explains the time paradox, this portal is actually opened by Rick Marshall himself, while in Enik's cave, as a way for the current Marshalls to return to Earth, resolving the paradox and allowing Enik to also return to his time. Outfitted only for a short camping trip, the resourceful family from California takes shelter in a natural cave and improvises the provisions and tools that they need to survive. Their most common and dangerous encounters are with dinosaurs, particularly a Tyrannosaurus rex they nickname "Grumpy", which frequents the location of their cave. However, many of the dinosaurs are herbivores, posing no threat to the Marshalls, unless unintentionally provoked. One is a particularly tame young Brontosaurus that Holly nicknames "Dopey", and upon which Holly looks as a pet. They also encounter the mostly hostile Sleestak (lizard men), and the primate-like creatures called Pakuni (one of whom, Cha-Ka, they befriend), as well as a variety of dangerous creatures, strange geography and unfamiliar technology. The main goal of the three is to find a way to return home. They are occasionally aided in this by the Altrusian castaway Enik. At the start of the third season, Rick Marshall (played by Spencer Milligan) is explained to have been accidentally returned to Earth alone, leaving his children behind. Rick is immediately replaced by his brother Jack. Rick Marshall abruptly disappeared while trying to use one of the pylons to get home; Jack stumbled upon his niece and nephew after he embarked on a search of his own to find them. Though the term "time doorway" is used throughout the series, Land of the Lost is not meant to portray an era in Earth's history, but rather an enigmatic zone whose place and time are unknown. Indeed, within the first few minutes of the pilot, the Marshall family father tells his children that he spotted three moons in the sky. The original creators of these time portals were thought to be the ancestors of the Sleestak, called Altrusians, though later episodes raised some questions about this. Many aspects of the Land of the Lost, including the time doorways and environmental processes, were controlled by the Pylons, metallic obelisk- shaped booths that were larger on the inside than the outside and housed matrix tables – stone tables studded with a grid of colored crystals. Uncontrolled time doorways result in the arrival of a variety of visitors and castaways in the land. 

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In December 1958, Norville Barnes, a business college graduate from Muncie, Indiana, arrives in New York City, looking for a job. He struggles due to lack of experience and becomes a mailroom clerk at Hudsucker Industries, a large corporation. Soon thereafter, the company's founder and president, Waring Hudsucker, unexpectedly commits suicide during a business meeting by jumping out of a top-floor window. Afterwards, Sidney J. Mussburger, a ruthless member of the company's board of directors, knowing that Hudsucker Industries' bylaws call for Hudsucker's stock shares to be sold to the public, suggests a scheme to buy the controlling interest in the company by temporarily depressing the stock price by hiring a clearly incompetent president to run the business. In the mailroom, Norville is assigned to deliver a "Blue Letter" to Mussburger; the letter is a top-secret communication from Hudsucker, sent shortly before his death. However, Norville takes the opportunity to engage with Mussburger, pitching an invention of his (indicated with no other explanation than a simple drawing of a circle and his cryptic explanation, "you know: for kids."). Believing Norville to be an idiot, Mussburger selects him as a proxy for Hudsucker. Across town, Amy Archer, a brassy Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Manhattan Argus newspaper, is assigned to write a story about Norville and find out what kind of man he really is. She obtains a job at Hudsucker Industries as his personal secretary, pretending to be yet another desperate graduate from his alma mater in Muncie. One night, Amy searches the building to find clues and meets Moses, a man who operates the tower's giant clock and knows "just about anything if it concerns Hudsucker". He tells her Mussburger's plot, and she takes the story back to her Chief, but he does not believe it. The other executives at Hudsucker Industries decide to produce Norville's invention in hopes that it will flop and further depress the company's stock. However, the invention is the hula hoop, which initially fails in obscurity but then becomes an enormous success. Norville allows success to go to his head and becomes yet another uncaring tycoon. Amy, who had fallen for his naive charm, is infuriated over Norville's new attitude and leaves him. Buzz, the eager elevator operator, pitches a new invention: the flexi-straw. Norville dismisses it and fires Buzz. Meanwhile, Aloysius, a Hudsucker janitor, discovers Amy's true identity and informs Mussburger. Mussburger reveals Amy's secret identity to Norville and tells him he will be dismissed as president after the new year. Mussburger also convinces the board that Norville is insane and must be sent to the local psychiatric hospital. On New Year's Eve, Amy finds Norville drunk at a beatnik bar. She apologizes, but he storms out and is chased by an angry mob led by Buzz, whom Mussburger had convinced that Norville had stolen the flexi-straw idea after re-hiring him to his elevator job. Norville escapes to the top floor of the Hudsucker skyscraper and changes back into his mailroom uniform. He climbs out on the ledge, where Aloysius locks him out and watches as he slips and falls off the building at the stroke of midnight. Suddenly, while Norville plummets, Moses stops the building's giant clock which freezes time. Waring Hudsucker appears to Norville as an angel and tells him to read the Blue Letter (still in Norville's uniform pocket) that was supposed to be delivered to Mussburger: it contains Hudsucker's instructions to transfer his shares to his immediate successor as president, rather than to the public. This would have been Mussburger, but, unaware of this, he proceeded with his scheme to elect Norville. Inside the building's giant clock, Moses fights Aloysius, defeating him. Norville falls safely to the ground. He and Amy reconcile. As 1959 progresses, it is Mussburger who attempts suicide and is sent to the asylum while Norville develops a new invention — "for kids" — an enigmatic circle on a folded sheet of paper that will ultimately turn out to be a frisbee. 

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Elwood P. Dowd is a middle-aged, amiable though somewhat eccentric man whose best friend is an invisible tall white rabbit named Harvey. As described by Elwood, Harvey is a pooka, a benign but mischievous creature from Celtic mythology who is especially fond of social outcasts (like Elwood). Elwood has driven his sister and niece (who live with him and crave normality and a place in society) to distraction by introducing everyone he meets to his friend, Harvey. His family seems to be unsure whether Elwood's obsession with Harvey is a product of his (admitted) propensity to drink or perhaps mental illness. Elwood spends most of his time in the local bar, and throughout the film invites new acquaintances to join him for a drink (or to his house for dinner). The barman and regulars accept the existence of Harvey, and the barman asks how they both are and unflinchingly accepts an order from Elwood for two martinis. Veta (Josephine Hull) and Myrtle Mae (Victoria Horne) Elwood's sister, Veta Louise Simmons, tries to have him committed to a sanatorium. In exasperation, she admits to the attending psychiatrist Dr. Lyman Sanderson that, after so many years of putting up with the invisible rabbit, she sees Harvey every once in a while herself. This causes Dr. Sanderson to let Elwood out and lock Veta up. After sorting out the mistake, Dr. Chumley, head of the sanatorium, decides that to save the reputation of the sanatorium he must bring Elwood back. At one point, when her daughter asks how someone possibly could imagine a rabbit, Veta says to her "Myrtle Mae, you have a lot to learn and I hope you never learn it." When tracked down, Elwood goes through several ordeals, although he remains largely oblivious to the plans put in place for him by Dr. Chumley, Judge Gaffney, and Veta Louise. In a scene where Dr. Sanderson and his nurse Miss Kelly follow Elwood into an alley at the back of his and Harvey's favorite bar, Charlie's, Elwood tells the incredible story of how he came to meet Harvey, and explains the way in which people react when they meet them. In a later scene, he gives Dr. Chumley an insight into his philosophy of life: Elwood also explains that Harvey has the power to stop time: "Did I tell you he could stop clocks? Well, you've heard the expression 'His face would stop a clock'? Well, Harvey can look at your clock and stop it. And you can go anywhere you like, with anyone you like, and stay as long as you like. And when you get back, not one minute will have ticked by. You see, science has overcome time and space. Well, Harvey has overcome not only time and space, but any objections." In the final scene of the film, Elwood (along with everybody else) arrives back at the hospital. By this point, Dr. Chumley is not only convinced of Harvey's existence, but has begun spending time with him on his own, with a mixture of admiration and fear. Dr. Sanderson convinces Elwood to come into his office where he will receive a serum called Formula 977 that will stop Elwood from "seeing the rabbit". As they are preparing for the injection, Elwood's sister is told by their cab driver about all the other people he has driven to the sanatorium to receive the same medicine, warning her that Elwood will become "just a normal human being. And you know what stinkers they are." Upset by the very thought of this, Veta halts the injection by banging on the examining room door, at which point Elwood comforts her and explains her tears to others with, "Veta's all tired out, she's done a lot today." Peggy Dow and James Stewart, with William H. Lynn in the background. As Elwood is leaving, Dr. Chumley asks Elwood for Harvey's help, and Elwood, being the obliging fellow he is, makes no objection. Dr. Chumley, arm in arm with an invisible companion, asks: "Have you ever been to Akron?" After the gates to Chumley's Residence are closed, and Elwood is leaving, he stops, turns around and has a conversation with an invisible Harvey, who is already back from his trip to Akron and reaffirms their friendship. Harvey opens the gate, and Elwood and his invisible companion saunter off towards the bus stop, following Veta and Myrtle Mae, towards the planned last stop of Charlie's Bar and another drink. Throughout the film, Elwood looks up at Harvey. Stewart, at , decided that Harvey should be for the film, but the script lines stating that Harvey was were unchanged from the play. 

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In the late 1850s, the elderly emigrant Lasse Karlsson and his son Pelle reach the Danish island of Bornholm after having left Skåne County, in southern Sweden, following the death of the boy's mother. Lasse finds it difficult to find work, given his advanced age and Pelle's youth. They are forced to work at a large farm, where they are generally mistreated by the managers. The managers work under the tyrannical Kongstrup, who has a history of affairs with women employees, and resulting illegitimate children. Among such children is Rud, who befriends Pelle and helps him learn Danish. Eventually, Pelle becomes more confident, and begins going to school, though he is still discriminated against as a foreigner. Pelle also befriends the Swedish worker Erik, who is constantly harassed for alleged sloth. Erik shares his dream of visiting America, China and "Negroland" with Pelle, to "conquer" the world. Rud runs away after poor performance at school, but Pelle begins to do well. After Kongstrup impregnates a visiting young woman, Mrs. Kongstrup castrates him for his abuses. Lasse begins an affair with Mrs. Olsen, believed to be a widow since her husband has not returned from a long sea voyage. Pelle is teased at school for his father's affair. At the farm, Erik is injured and disabled after attempting to lead a revolt against management. Mrs. Olsen's husband returns from his voyage, and Lasse is overcome with depression and alcoholism. The two appeal to the Kongstrups for aid against their harassment. Mrs. Kongstrup offers support, but her husband is silent. Pelle receives a promotion but, after seeing Erik forced from the farm, vows to leave. Lasse at first resolves to go with him, before deciding he is too old to travel. He sends Pelle alone into the world. 

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The film begins with Chorus, in this case a person in modern dress, introducing the subject of the play. He is walking through an empty film studio and ends his monologue by opening the doors to begin the main action. Chorus reappears several times during the film, his speeches helping to explain and progress the action. The following act divisions reflect the original play, not the film. 

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The story is narrated by Sunny von Bülow, who is in a coma after falling into diabetic shock after a Christmas party. Her husband, the dissolute European aristocrat Claus von Bülow, is charged with attempting to murder the hypoglycemic Sunny by giving her an overdose of insulin. Claus's strained relationship with his wife and his cold and haughty personal demeanor led most people to conclude that he is guilty. In need of an innovative defense, Claus turns to law professor Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz is initially convinced of Claus's guilt, but takes the case because von Bülow agrees to fund Dershowitz's defense of two poor black boys accused of capital murder. Employing his law students as workers, Dershowitz proceeds to defend Claus, wrestling with his client's unnerving personal style and questions of von Bülow's guilt or innocence. 

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The Field is set in a small country village in southwest Ireland. Rugged individualist Bull McCabe has spent five hard years of labour cultivating a small plot of rented land, nurturing it from barren rock into a fertile field. When the owner of the field decides to auction it, he believes that he has a claim to the land. The McCabes intimidate most of the townspeople out of bidding in the auction, to the chagrin of auctioneer Mick Flanagan, but Galwayman William Dee arrives from England, where he has lived for many years, with a plan to cover the field with concrete and extract gravel from the adjacent river. An encounter between William and the McCabes ends in William's death and a cover-up. 

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Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) is a lawyer living in North Carolina with his wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) and teenage daughter Danielle (Juliette Lewis). Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a former client whom Sam failed to defend properly, is released from prison after 14 years. Cady was tried for rape and battery of a young woman and, appalled by the attack, Sam buried evidence that might have lightened Cady's sentence or even secured his acquittal. Cady, who has studied law in prison but unsuccessfully appealed his conviction several times, tracks Sam down and begins to terrorise the Bowden family; he lurks near the property and the family dog is mysteriously killed. Sam attempts to have Cady arrested but the police say there is no evidence of a crime. At a bar, Cady intentionally meets Sam's colleague Lori. He later violently attacks and rapes her but she refuses to press charges, ashamed of what happened. Sam hires a private investigator, Kersek, to follow Cady. Cady approaches Danielle at school by impersonating her new drama teacher, and they kiss. Sam warns Cady to leave him and his family alone or suffer the consequences, a conversation that Cady secretly tapes with a hidden recorder. Sam also hires three men to beat Cady; as Sam watches from afar, Cady turns the tide on his attackers and viciously beats them instead. Cady then uses the recording of Sam's threat and an exaggerated display of his own injuries to file for a restraining order against Sam. Kersek anticipates Cady trying to enter the Bowden house while he believes Sam is out of town; the family fakes his departure and hides in the house, hoping that Cady will break in, so that he can be shot in self-defense. Cady kills the Bowden's housekeeper Graciela and dons her clothing before murdering Kersek by garroting him with a piano wire. Horrified after discovering the bodies, Sam, Leigh, and Danielle flee to their houseboat docked upstate along Cape Fear river. Cady, who has followed the family, attacks Sam and prepares to rape Leigh and Danielle while making Sam watch. Danielle sprays Cady with lighter fluid as he lights a cigar, engulfing him in flames and causing him to jump off the boat. However, Cady clings to a rope and pulls himself back on board. As the boat is rocked by a violent thunderstorm, a badly burned and deranged Cady confronts Sam, putting him on a mock trial to condemn him for withholding the specific evidence that would have given him a lighter sentence in jail. Despite Sam's insistence that his crime was too heinous for that evidence to be taken into account, Cady berates him for failing to properly do his duty as a lawyer. The storm eventually knocks Cady off of his feet, allowing Sam to gain the upper hand once the women jump off the boat and make it to shore. Sam then uses Cady's handcuffs to shackle Cady to the boat. When the boat hits a rock and is destroyed, the fight continues on shore, but a raging tide carries Cady away and he drowns. Sam washes the blood from his hands before he rejoins Leigh and Danielle. 

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In Southeast Georgia in 1962, after spending eight years in prison for rape, Max Cady is released. He promptly tracks down Sam Bowden, a lawyer whom he holds personally responsible for his conviction because Sam interrupted his attack and testified against him. Cady begins to stalk and subtly threaten Bowden's family. He kills the Bowden family dog, though Sam cannot prove Cady did it. A friend of Bowden, Police Chief Mark Dutton, attempts to intervene on Bowden's behalf, but he cannot prove Cady guilty of any crime. Bowden hires private detective Charlie Sievers. Cady brutally rapes a young woman, Diane Taylor, when he brings her home, but neither the private eye nor Bowden can persuade her to testify. Bowden hires three men to beat up Cady and coerce him to leave town, but the plan backfires when Cady gets the better of all three. Cady's lawyer vows to have Bowden disbarred. Afraid for his wife Peggy and 14-year-old daughter Nancy, Bowden takes them to their houseboat in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina. In an attempt to trick Cady, Bowden makes it seem as though he has gone to Atlanta. He fully expects Cady to follow his wife and daughter, and he plans on killing Cady to end the battle. On a dark night, Bowden and local deputy Kersek hide in the swamp nearby, but Cady realizes that Kersek is there and drowns him, leaving no evidence of a struggle. Eluding Bowden and setting the houseboat adrift down current, Cady first attacks Mrs. Bowden on the boat, causing Bowden to go to her rescue. Meanwhile, Cady swims back to shore to attack Nancy. Bowden realizes what has happened, and also swims ashore. The two men engage in a final fight on the riverbank. Bowden manages to reach his gun, which he had dropped, and shoots Cady, wounding and disabling him. Cady tells Bowden, "Finish the job," but Bowden decides to do the thing that Cady earlier told him would be unbearableput him in prison for the rest of his life, to "count the years, the months, the hours." In the morning light, the Bowden family are together on a boat, traveling with police back to port. 

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A young doctor, Robert Merivel, enters the service of King Charles II of England after having saved the King's favorite spaniel. Merivel finds himself enjoying a life of debauched pleasure and popularity at court, until the King informs him that he has arranged for Merivel to wed Celia, the King's favorite mistress. The purpose of the arranged marriage is to fool another of the King's mistresses. Merivel is given an estate named Bidnold in Suffolk, and Celia is installed in a house in Kew where the king can visit her secretly. Merivel lives a life of debauchery there, but also finds pleasure in restoring the house to its former beauty with the support of Will Gates, the man who runs the estate. However, things become complicated when Merivel breaks the King's cardinal rule by falling in love with Celia. Elias Finn, a painter commissioned by the King to paint a portrait of Celia, tricks Merivel into revealing his romantic feelings for Celia, who does not return Merivel's affections. After finding out about Merivel's romantic feelings toward Celia, the King banishes him from court back to his life as a physician. Merivel rejoins his old friend, John Pearce, who has opened a Quaker sanitarium. There, Merivel meets Katherine, a troubled young woman whose husband walked out on her after their daughter drowned in the river. Merivel and Katherine become lovers. Pearce falls fatally ill with consumption, and while Merivel is tending to his dying friend, they discover that Katherine is pregnant with Merivel's child. After the death of Pearce, Merivel and Katherine leave. The pair returns to London just as the Great Plague has hit. Katherine gives birth to a daughter, Margaret, via Caesarean section, but dies in the process as there is no way to ward off infection once the body has been cut open. In her dying moments, Merivel promises Katherine that he will care for Margaret, and that he loves Katherine. As the plague continues to kill the people of London, Merivel feels compelled to do what he can as a physician. He leaves Margaret with a wet nurse who promises to care for her in his absence, and goes out into the city, separating the sick from the well, who have all been quarantined together, and does what he can to ease the suffering of the dying. When someone asks for Merivel's name, he says he is John Pearce, as a tribute to his friend. Under this misnomer and in disguise, Merivel is once again summoned to the palace. The King fears that Celia has contracted the plague. Merivel soon assures him that she does not have the plague, but rather has a treatable fever and is with child. With this, Merivel realizes the life he has now is more rewarding and fulfilling than the life and loves at the court he left behind. Suddenly, the court is notified that the city is ablaze, and Merivel races back to the city to retrieve his infant daughter from the flames. He is unable to find her, and falling through burning wood, Merivel lands in a small row boat, unconscious, and is floated by the river current away from the city. When he awakens, he is being cared for by Will Gates back at Bidnold. As Merivel recovers from his fall, he cannot recover from his failure to protect his young daughter from harm, when suddenly the King arrives at the house with his entourage. He informs Merivel that he has discovered the doctor's true identity, and that he was impressed with the man Merivel had become. With that, the King steps aside to reveal a nurse holding Margaret safely in her arms. For his courage and good work done in treating the victims of the plague, the King once again gives Bidnold to Merivel, stating that this time it will never be taken away. The film ends with Merivel returning to London, to set up a new hospital with help from the King. 

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Jack Lucas, a narcissistic, misanthropic shock jock, becomes suicidal and despondent after his insensitive on-air comments inadvertently prompt an unstable caller to commit a mass murder-suicide at a Manhattan restaurant. Three years later, Jack is working for his girlfriend Anne in a video store in a mostly drunken, depressed state. One night, while on a bender, he contemplates suicide. However, he is attacked and nearly set on fire by thugs who mistake him for a homeless person. He is rescued by Parry, a deluded homeless man who claims his mission is to find the Holy Grail. Parry tries to enlist Jack's help in getting the grail, explaining that the Fisher King was charged by God with finding the Holy Grail, but incurred an incapacitating wound for his sin of pride. 'A Fool asks the King why he suffers, and when the King says he is thirsty, the Fool gives him a cup of water to drink. The King realizes the cup is the Grail and asks, "How did you find what my brightest and bravest could not?" The Fool said "I don't know. I only knew that you were thirsty."' Jack is initially reluctant but acquiesces after learning that he is partially responsible for Parry's current condition. Parry, whose real name is Henry Sagan, had been a teacher at Hunter College. After witnessing his wife's gruesome death at the same mass shooting Jack had provoked, Henry had a psychotic break and became catatonic. When he woke, he had taken the persona of Parry and became obsessed with the legend of the Fisher King. With Parry as his shielding persona, mentions of reality panic him and he is continually haunted by a terrifying, hallucinatory Red Knight. Jack seeks to redeem himself by helping Parry find love again. Lydia, a shy woman with whom Parry is smitten, is prodded into meeting Parry and joining Jack and Anne for a dinner date. Following dinner, Parry walks Lydia home and declares his love for her; she reciprocates, but the brush with reality summons the Red Knight. Fleeing his hallucinatory tormentor, he is attacked by the same thugs against whom he had defended Jack. Beaten mercilessly, Parry becomes catatonic again. Jack, feeling whole again after 'saving' Parry, breaks up with Anne and begins to rebuild his career, but has a crisis of conscience during a sitcom pitch after snubbing a vagrant who had previously done him a favor. After finding out what happened to Parry, Jack dons Parry's clothing and infiltrates the Upper East Side castle of a famous architect and retrieves the "Grail", a trophy which Parry believes to be the real Grail. During the theft, Jack finds the architect unconscious after an attempted suicide. He triggers the alarm when leaving, alerting the authorities and saving the man's life. When he brings the Grail to Parry, the catatonia is broken and Parry regains consciousness. Lydia comes to visit Parry in the hospital; she finds him awake and leading the patients of the ward in a rendition of "How About You?" with Jack. Parry and Lydia embrace. Afterwards, Jack reconciles with Anne, telling her that he loves her. She slaps him, but then grabs and kisses him. Later, Jack and Parry lie naked in Central Park gazing at the clouds. 

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The film is structured around flashbacks as the elderly Charlie Chaplin (now living in Switzerland) recollects moments from his life during a conversation with fictional character George Hayden, the editor of his autobiography. Chaplin's recollections begin with his childhood of extreme poverty from which he escapes by immersing himself in the world of the London music halls. After his mother Hannah Chaplin has an attack of nerves on stage during a performance, the four year old Chaplin takes his mother's place on the stage. Hannah retires from performing and is eventually committed to an asylum after developing psychosis. In the years that follow, Chaplin and his brother Sydney gain work with variety show producer Fred Karno, where Chaplin becomes a hit with his comedy drunk act. He begins a relationship with his first love Hetty Kelly; the night before he is due to leave for America he proposes to her but she declines, reasoning she is too young. Chaplin promises to return to England for her when he is a success. Chaplin is sent to America by Karno and is given a job by Mack Sennett, the most famous comedy producer in Hollywood. While there, he creates his iconic Tramp persona and due to the terrible directorial capabilities of Sennett's girlfriend Mabel Normand, Chaplin is allowed to direct his own movies. Before the year is over, Chaplin directs over 20 movies. After Sydney joins him in America to become his manager, Chaplin decides to break away from Sennett to have complete creative control over his films with the goal of one day owning his own studio. In 1917, Chaplin completes work on The Immigrant which causes some concern over the film's political subject matter and starts a brief romance with actress Edna Purviance. Years later at an industry party thrown by Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin meets and begins dating child actress Mildred Harris. Chaplin eventually becomes wealthy and profitable enough to set up his own studio and becomes "the most famous man in the world" all before his thirtieth birthday. Chaplin reveals to Fairbanks that he is to marry Harris as she is pregnant, but later at a party thrown by William Randolph Hearst, the pregnancy is revealed to be a hoax. At the same party, Chaplin has an uncomfortable confrontation with J. Edgar Hoover about actor/directors and their responsibilities with regards to audiences, this confrontation sparks a forty- year-long vendetta and Hoover attempts to ruin Chaplin's reputation. Chaplin and Mildred separate after the premature death of their only child and Chaplin's utter devotion to his films. During the couple's divorce proceedings, Harris's lawyers attempt to steal Chaplin's movie The Kid, reasoning that it is one of his assets. Chaplin and Sydney flee with the film's footage; finish editing it in a remote hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah; and then smuggle it successfully back to Los Angeles. The brothers eventually arrange for their mother to join them in America. Chaplin is initially happy to see her but has been away from her for so long that he is unable to cope with her worsening mental illness. In 1921, seeking a break from film-making and his private life, Chaplin returns to England to attend the UK premiere of The Kid. He reunites with Karno and hopes to locate Hetty, but Karno sadly informs him that she died in an influenza epidemic shorty after the war. Chaplin also discovers that although most are happy to see him, his success has meant that the poverty stricken working class British no longer consider him to be one of their own and resent him for not fighting in the war as they did. Back in America, Hoover is beginning to investigate Chaplin's private life, suspecting that he may be a member of the Communist Party, and Chaplin is forced to consider the implications the introduction of "talkies" may have on his film-making career. Despite the arrival of sound pictures drawing nearer, Chaplin vows never to make a talkie featuring the Tramp. In 1923, Chaplin makes The Gold Rush and marries his leading lady Lita Grey, with whom he goes on to have two children, however Chaplin later confides to George that he always thought of her as a "total bitch" and dedicates no more than five lines to her in the finished autobiography. Years pass and although Chaplin finds a new wife in Paulette Goddard he feels a sense of guilt and sympathy to the millions of Americans who have recently been made unemployed due to the Wall Street Crash (Chaplin avoided losing all of his money in The Great Depression by selling most of his shares the year before). Chaplin decides to address the issue in his next movie Modern Times (the final movie to feature The Tramp) but his complete dedication to getting the movie finished puts excessive strain on his home life and eventually results in the breakup of his marriage. At an industry party Chaplin causes a minor scandal when he refuses to shake hands with a visiting member of the Nazi party. Fairbanks (with his health in great decline) comments that Chaplin looks a lot like Adolf Hitler, providing Chaplin with inspiration for his next movie in their final encounter before Fairbanks' death in 1939. Chaplin's film satirizing the Nazis The Great Dictator is a huge hit throughout the world but Hoover tries to portray the film as a work of anti-American propaganda. Chaplin settles down with and marries Oona O'Neill, an actress who looks identical to his first love Hetty Kelly and the woman with whom he will spend the remainder of his life. However Chaplin is hit with another scandal when it is alleged that he is father to the child of his former lover Joan Barry and despite a blood test proving that the child is not his, Chaplin is ordered to provide financial support for the child. His reputation severely damaged, Chaplin stays out of the public eye for over seven years until re-emerging to produce a new film Limelight. In 1952, during the height of McCarthyism scandal, Chaplin leaves America with Oona on a visit to Britain, but subsequently finds out that the U.S. Attorney General has revoked Chaplin's permit to re-enter the United States. In 1972, ten years after Chaplin and George complete his autobiography, Chaplin is invited back to America in order to receive a special Honorary Award at the Academy Awards. Though Chaplin is initially still resentful at being exiled from the country and fearful that no one will remember him, the audience happily rejoices upon seeing his classic film clips. Chaplin stands on the stage and is moved to tears when the audience provide him with the Oscar's longest standing ovation. 

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Born and raised in Nutbush, Tennessee, Anna Mae Bullock grows up in an unhappy family with her parents leaving and abandoning her at a young age. Following her grandmother's death, Anna Mae relocates to St. Louis, reuniting with her mother and close sister Alline. Anna Mae pursues a chance to be a professional singer, after seeing charismatic bandleader Ike Turner perform one night. Later, she wins her spot in Turner's band after singing onstage, and he begins mentoring her. In time, an unexpected romance develops between the two, after she moves into Ike's home. Shortly afterwards, they marry and begin having musical success together as Ike & Tina Turner. The marriage quickly turns violent when Ike starts physically dominating Tina, leaving her no chance to escape. In public, Tina rises from local St. Louis phenomenon into an R&B; superstar, with Ike growing increasingly jealous of the attention given to her. Ike turns to drugs as his behavior worsens while Tina seeks to find solace in her chaotic life. Her friend turns her on to Buddhism, eventually convincing her that reciting the Lotus Sutra and chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo will help "change her life." Tina grows increasingly confident afterwards and, in a final fight with Ike, finally musters the courage to defend herself; eventually leaving Ike after they arrive at a hotel. Winning the right to retain her stage name after their divorce, Tina continues working to pay bills. Tina gets a break after meeting Roger Davies, who eventually helps her realize her dreams of rock stardom. Despite Ike's attempts to win her back, Tina eventually prevails and finds solo success, accomplishing her dreams without Ike. 

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The film depicts the ordeal of King George III whose bout of madness in 1788 touched off the Regency Crisis of 1788, triggering a power struggle between factions of Parliament under the Tory Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and the reform-minded Leader of the Opposition Charles James Fox. At first, the King's habits appear mildly eccentric, and are purposely ignored for reasons of state. The King is seen as being highly concerned with the wellbeing and productivity of Great Britain, and continually exhibits an encyclopedic knowledge of the families of even the most obscure royal appointments. In fact, the King is growing more unsettled, largely over the loss of America. The King's eldest son George, Prince of Wales, aggravates the situation, knowing that he would be named regent in the event the King was found incapacitated. George chafes under his father's repeated criticism, but also hopes for regency to allow him greater freedom to marry his Catholic mistress Mrs. Fitzherbert. George also knows that he has the moral support of Fox, who is eager to put across an agenda unlikely to pass under the current administration, including abolition of the slave trade and friendlier relations with America. Knowing that the King's behaviour is exacerbated in public, the Prince arranges for a concert playing the music of Handel. The King reacts as expected, interrupting the musicians, acting inappropriately towards Lady Pembroke, Lady of the Bedchamber, and finally assaulting his son. The King's madness is treated using the relatively primitive medical practices of the time, which include blistering and purges, led on particularly by the Prince of Wales' personal physician, Dr. Warren. Eventually, Lady Pembroke recommends Dr. Francis Willis, an ex-minister who attempts to cure the insane through new procedures, and who begins his restoration of the King's mental state by enforcing a strict regimen of strapping the King into a waistcoat and restraining him whenever he shows signs of his insanity or otherwise resists recovery. Meanwhile, the Whig opposition led by Fox confronts Pitt's increasingly unpopular Tory government with a bill that would give the Prince powers of regency. Meanwhile, Baron Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor, discovers that the Prince was secretly and illegally married to his Catholic mistress. Thurlow pays the minister to keep his mouth shut, and himself tears out a record of the marriage from church rolls. The King soon shows signs of recovery, becoming less eccentric and arrives in Parliament in time to thwart passage of the Regency bill. Restored, the King asserts control over his family, forcing the Prince to "put away" his mistress. With the crisis averted, those who had been closest to the King are summarily dismissed from service, including Dr. Willis. During conversations with Pitt, the King appears more at ease and in control of himself. He is less antagonized by America, but also shows signs that his insanity remains. A final message states that the King likely suffered from porphyria, noting that it is an incurable chronic condition and is hereditary. 

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Donald "Sully" Sullivan (Newman) is a worn yet spry hustler living in the peaceful, snowy northern New York state village of North Bath. He free-lances in the construction business, usually with his dim- witted friend Rub (Vince) by his side. He is often at odds with Carl Roebuck (Willis), a local contractor, suing him at every opportunity for unpaid wages and disability. Sully's one-legged lawyer Wirf (Saks) is inept, and his lawsuits are repeatedly dismissed. As a way to irritate him, Sully flirts with Carl's wife Toby (Griffith) openly at every opportunity (which she enjoys). He is a regular at the Iron Horse Saloon, where he often has drinks and plays cards with Wirf, Carl, Rub, Jocko the town pharmacist and Ollie Quinn, the town's Chief of Police. A running joke is the repeated theft of Carl's snowblower. Sully steals it to get back at Carl for his latest failed lawsuit. Carl steals it back, placing it in the yard at his construction business guarded by his doberman pinscher guard dog. Sully, after drugging the dog, steals it a second time. Carl takes it back a final time, and leaves the dog, who is now skittish due to his drugging, at Sully's childhood home for him to find. Sully is a tenant in the home of the elderly Miss Beryl (Tandy), whose banker son Clive (Sommer) strongly urges her to kick him out and sell the house. Family complications of his own develop for Sully with a visit from Peter (Walsh), his estranged son who is a jobless professor at odds with his wife. While he and Sully reconstruct their relationship, Sully begins a new one with young grandson Will (Alexander Goodwin). Peter’s sudden everyday presence does not sit well with Rub, but Sully tells him that although Peter is his son, Rub is still his best friend. Meanwhile, Clive is on the verge of a lucrative deal to build an amusement park in North Bath. However, the deal unexpectedly falls through when the promoter turns out to be a con man, and Clive quietly skips town in shame since he used his bank's resources to help finance the amusement park. After being jailed for punching a police officer named Raymer (Hoffman) who has been persecuting him, Sully's luck seems to be all bad. But his son and grandson start to warm up to him, and his fortune takes a turn for the better when his horse racing trifecta ticket wins. Even the lovely Toby expresses a willingness to leave Carl, mostly due to his constant womanizing, and run away with Sully to Hawaii. Sully realizes he can’t leave his grandson and thanks Toby for considering him, just before she leaves for the airport. In the end, Sully is pretty much back where he began, boarding at Miss Beryl's. But now he is a little richer, both financially and in his soul, he's a new dog owner, and he has become the picture of contentment. 

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In Portland, Oregon in 1964, 30-year-old Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) is a talented musician and composer who has been relatively successful in the exhausting life of a professional musical performer. However, in an attempt to enjoy more free time with his young wife, Iris (Glenne Headley), and to enable him to compose a piece of orchestral music, Holland accepts a teaching position at John F. Kennedy High School. Unfortunately for Holland, he is soon forced to realize that his position as a music teacher makes him a marginalized figure in the faculty's hierarchy. Many of his colleagues, and some in Kennedy High's administration, including the Vice-Principal Gene Wolters (William H. Macy), resent Holland and question the value and importance of music education given the school's strained budget. Principal Ellen Jacobs (Olympia Dukakis) continuously reminds him that teaching is about much more than just giving knowledge, but also about giving an outlet for the knowledge to be useful. Eventually Holland finds success using rock and roll as a way to make classical music more accessible to his students. Although Jacobs and Wolters initially challenge this curriculum move, Mr. Holland bluntly defends himself, claiming he will use any genre of music to teach appreciation, which satisfies them. Football coach, and Army veteran Bill Meister (Jay Thomas) is desperate to improve the failing grade of Louis Russ, a student of his enough to where he can retain his wrestling eligibility. Civilian Holland on the other hand has been saddled with the additional duties of coordinating the marching band. In trade, Meister gets the band competition-ready and after a number of aggravating attempts, Holland equally succeeds in getting Louis to play the bass drum, thereby raising his grade and maintaining his sports eligibility. Louis goes on to make the state- wrestling finals three years running. As Holland's duties at school increase, his lack of quality time with Iris becomes problematic when their infant son Coltrane "Cole" is found to be 90% deaf. Holland reacts with hostility to the news that he can never teach the joys of music to his own child. Iris willingly learns American Sign Language to communicate with her son, but Holland resists. This causes further estrangement within his family. In 1972, Holland learns that Louis Russ was killed in Vietnam. At the time, he is battling Statler, a gifted but overconfident and lazy student. To teach him a lesson in humility, Holland forces Statler to accompany him to Lou Russ's military funeral, which improves both Stadler's attitude as well as his performance. Principal Jacobs soon retires from her duties as principal, and Wolters takes over as principal of John F. Kennedy high. As the years progress, Holland grows closer to his students at Kennedy High but more distant from his own son. He addresses a series of challenges created by people who are either hesitant or hostile towards the concept of musical excellence within the walls of the average American high school and inspires a number of students as a result, but never has private time for himself or his family. In 1980, while organizing a George Gershwin revue for the senior class play, he inspires leading lady Rowena Morgan to pursue a career in singing, inspiring her go to NYC to do so when the play is over. She invites Mr. Holland to join her, but despite the temptation, Holland cannot bring himself to leave his family, but he does see her off, and arranges for a former bandmate of his to take her in. Soon afterwards, Holland has a confrontation with his son, after assuming his son wouldn't understand the tragedy of John Lennon's recent murder. Holland then finally realizes he needs to make some compromises for the sake of their relationship. He organizes a concert with visual lighting effects for Cole and his fellow hearing-impaired students to enjoy, and sings and signs John Lennon's 'Beautiful Boy' dedicating it to Cole. Holland's continuing duties as teacher and father repeatedly delay the completion of his own orchestral composition. Eventually, he reaches an age when it is too late to have a realistic chance of finding financial backing, or ever having it performed live. At the conclusion of the 1994–1995 academic year, the adversaries of the Kennedy High music program win a decisive institutional victory. Wolters faces budget cuts from the board of education. He responds by eliminating music, art, and drama from the school curriculum leading to Holland's early retirement. He realizes that his career in music is likely over, thinking that his former students have mostly forgotten him and is dejected at his failure ever to have his composition, which he views as his life's work, performed. On his final day as a teacher, the 60-year-old Holland enters the school auditorium to see that hundreds of his former students have secretly returned to the school to celebrate his career upon hearing of his retirement. Holland's orchestral piece, never before heard in public, has been put before the musicians by his wife and son, who's now a teacher himself. One of his most musically challenged students, Gertrude Lang, now the Governor of Oregon, takes the podium and explains to Holland that the symphony he wrote is not his only legacy: it also includes the people he has inspired and taught, all of the people he has helped to make a better person. Lang then sits among the musicians, drawn from Holland's students over the decades, with her clarinet, but not before asking Holland to step up on stage and serve as their conductor for the premiere performance of Mr. Holland's Opus ("An American Symphony"). A proud Iris and Cole look on, appreciating the affection and respect that Holland receives. 

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In 1972, the White House Plumbers break into The Watergate and are subsequently arrested. Eighteen months later in December 1973, Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig (Powers Boothe), brings Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) audio tapes for Nixon to listen to. The two men discuss the Watergate scandal and the resulting chaos. After discussing the death of J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon uses profanity when discussing John Dean, James McCord and others involved in Watergate. As Haig turns to leave, Nixon asks Haig why he hasn't been given a pistol to commit suicide like an honorable soldier. Nixon starts the taping system, which triggers memories that begin a series of flashbacks within the film. The first begins on June 23, 1972, about one week after the break-in, during a meeting with H. R. Haldeman (James Woods), John Ehrlichman (J. T. Walsh) and Dean (David Hyde Pierce). Ehrlichman and Dean leave, and Nixon speaks the "smoking gun" tape to Haldeman. The film covers most aspects of Nixon's life and political career and implies that Nixon and his wife abused alcohol and prescription medications. Nixon's health problems, including his bout of phlebitis and pneumonia during the Watergate crisis, are also shown, and his various medicants are sometimes attributed to these health issues. The film also hints at some kind of responsibility, real or imagined, that Nixon felt towards the John F. Kennedy assassination through references to the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the implication being that the mechanisms set into place for the invasion by Nixon during his term as Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice president spiraled out of control to culminate in Kennedy's assassination and, eventually, Watergate. The film ends with Nixon's resignation and departure from the lawn of the White House on the helicopter, Army One. Real life footage of Nixon's state funeral in Yorba Linda, California plays out over the extended end credits, and all living ex-presidents at the time—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and then-president Bill Clinton—are shown in attendance. 

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In the 1930s Porco Rosso, an Italian World War I fighter ace and freelance bounty hunter, fends off an attack on a ferry liner by airborne pirates. Porco treats himself to dinner at the Hotel Adriano, which is run by his friend Gina. At the hotel, the heads of the pirate gangs are contracting Curtis, an arrogant and ambitious American ace, to assist them in their next attacks. Curtis falls in love with Gina on the spot, but is frustrated to see his declarations rebuffed and her affection for Porco. After successfully executing a pirating mission, Curtis tracks down Porco, who is flying to Milan to have his plane serviced, and shoots him down as he experiences an engine outage, claiming to have killed him. Porco survives, though his plane is heavily damaged. Porco continues the trip by train with the remains of the plane, much to the irritation of Gina, who reminds him that there is a warrant for his arrest in Italy. Porco arrives discreetly in Milan to meet Piccolo, his mechanic. He learns that Piccolo's sons have emigrated to find work elsewhere due to the Great Depression, and much of the engineering will have to be carried on by his young granddaughter Fio. Porco is initially skeptical of Fio's abilities as a mechanic, but after seeing her dedication in the repair project he accepts her as a competent engineer. Once Porco's plane is finished, Fio joins him on his flight home, with the justification that if the secret police arrest the team, they can say that Porco forced them to help and took Fio as a hostage. Stopping off to refuel on the way, Porco discovers that the new fascist government is beginning to hire seaplane pirates for their own use, thus putting him out of business. Back at the Hotel Adriano, Curtis proposes to Gina but she turns him down, saying that she is waiting for Porco Rosso. Upon returning home, Porco and Fio are ambushed by the pirates, who threaten to kill Porco and destroy his plane. Fio talks them out of it, but Curtis appears and challenges Porco to a final duel. Fio makes a deal with him declaring that if Porco wins, Curtis must pay off his debts owed to Piccolo's company, and if Curtis wins, he may marry her. That night, while preparing shells for the dogfight, Porco tells Fio a story from World War I. Two days after Gina's first wedding to his friend Bellini, his squadron was attacked by Austro-Hungarian aircraft. Overwhelmed and unable to save his fellow pilots he entered a cloud to evade his pursuers. He recalls blacking out and awakening to find himself in complete stillness above the clouds, with a silver band shimmering high in the distant sky. Allied and enemy aircraft, flown by the airmen who died in the dogfight—Bellini included—rise out of the cloud and fly upward towards the band, ignoring him. Porco soon sees that the band is in fact thousands of planes flying together. He blacks out again, and awakens flying low over the sea, alone. As she falls asleep, Fio (and the viewer) briefly see Marco's true face instead of the pig. The next day, the duel is arranged and a large crowd gathers to observe. The indecisive and long dogfight between Porco and Curtis soon devolves into a bare-knuckle boxing match when both planes' machine guns jam. As they fight, Porco accuses Curtis of being a womaniser, but Curtis responds that he is worse; Fio adores him and Gina is only interested in him. This comes as such a shock to Porco that Curtis is able to knock him down, only for Porco to be saved by a pirate referee signalling the end of a round. The fight ends with both combatants knocking each other out and falling under the shallow water. Gina arrives and calls out to 'Marco' (Porco), who rises first and is declared the winner. She warns the crowd that the Italian air force has been alerted and are on their way, and invites everyone to regroup at her hotel. To Gina's frustration, Porco hands Fio over to Gina, requesting that she look after her, and turns away. Just before Gina's plane takes off, Fio leans out and gives Porco a kiss. As the crowd leave, Porco volunteers to lead the air force away and invites Curtis to join him. Curtis reacts with surprise and asks Porco to turn around, suggesting that—like Fio—he had briefly seen Marco's true face. Fio narrates that in the end Porco outflies the Italian air force and is never hunted by them again; Fio herself became president of the Piccolo company, which is now an aircraft manufacturer; Curtis became a famous actor; and the pirates continued to attend the Hotel Adriano in their old age. She does not divulge whether Gina's hope about Porco Rosso was ever realized, saying it is their secret. However, a red plane can be seen docked by Gina's garden as the jet flies over the hotel. After the credits, a familiar red seaplane appears soaring in the sky before disappearing into the clouds. 

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