Griffith billed this film as a "simple tale of plain people." This modest remark does little to convey the scale and significance of one of this director's most ambitious works and his most popular after Birth of a nation.

Two strangers met by chance, spent a night together in Vienna, and parted before sunrise. Nine years later, Jesse has written a book about the encounter. During his accelerated European book tour, he meets up with Celine in Paris. Before Jesse's flight home, he joins Celine for a picturesque walk around the city and they have an intimate conversation, ending at Celine's apartment. Will they get the chance to fall in love all over again?

Rachel Cameron is a 35-year old school teacher living in New England. Her life is small and safe. She has no man in her life and lives with her mother. She wants to do anything to keep from slipping into spinsterhood. When a man from the big city returns and asks her out, she has to make decisions about her life and where she wants it to go.

How far will a man go to climb the corporate ladder? C.C. 'Bud' Baxter, a lowly insurance clerk, has a trump card: his apartment. He "loans" it out to married company executives for secret trysts. In return, he's well looked after, although he does grapple with his conscience. One day he asks out one of the elevator girls, Miss Kubelik, but she stands him up because of a crisis in her relationship with the big boss, Mr. Sheldrake. On Christmas Eve,...

Set in San Francisco's Chinatown in the late 1950's. Pretty Mei Li has stowed away on a Chinese steamer with her professor father to become a mail-order bride for nightclub owner Sammy Fong. Sammy, however, is completely infatuated with saucy showgirl Linda Low, who is intent on making him jealous enough to propose to her. As Sammy sets out to assign his marriage contract (and Mei Li) to Wang Ta, a handsome college student living in Chinatown, complications,...

Guiliana is the wife of Ugo, a plant manager in Ravenna. Recently released from the hospital after a car accident, Giuliana is in dire straits mentally, but Ugo thinks she's just hysterical. When she meets the charming Corrado, he seems sympathetic, shares her feeling of being lost, but he doesn't fully understand and his amatory advances are not what she needs. Living in the shadow of industry, surrounded by the blighted landscape of the mechanized...

In Venice, during the spring of 1866, it is the last month of the Austrian occupation of the Veneto. The Italian government has forged a pact with Prussia, and another war of liberation in the ongoing Risorgimento is imminent. Countess Livia Serpieri, unloved by her collaborator-husband but sympathetic to the cause of freedom espoused by her patriotic cousin Roberto, meets Austrian officer Franz Mahler as she begs him to call off a duel with Roberto....