In Panama, Maggie King meets soldier Skid Johnson on his last day in the army and reluctantly agrees to a date to celebrate. The two become involved in a nightclub brawl which causes Maggie to miss her ship back to the States. Now stranded, she's forced to move in with Skid and his pal Harry. She soon falls in love with Skid. Skid gets a job playing the trumpet at a local club and becomes a big success. Fame and fortune go to his head which eventually destroys his relationship with Maggie and his career.
Larry Poole, in prison on a false charge, promises an inmate that when he gets out he will look up and help out a family. The family turns out to be a young girl, Patsy Smith, and her elderly grandfather who need lots of help. This delays Larry from following his dream and going to Venice and becoming a gondolier. Instead, he becomes a street singer and, while singing in the street, meets a pretty welfare worker, Susan Sprague. She takes a dim view of Patsy's welfare under the guardianship of Larry and her grandfather and starts proceedings to have Patsy placed in an orphanage.
After being run out of town after town for trying to sell worthless stock, two con artists breeze into the small town of Chesterville, where they find themselves accused of kidnapping a young boy to whom they offered a ride. When that misunderstanding is cleared up, the two conmen hatch a plot to unload all their worthless paper on the gullible citizens of Chesterville.
When a gang tries to rob Haldain, Jim and Walla Walla break it up. Haldain is carrying stuffed animals and Jim's suspicion that they are stuffed with gold is soon confirmed. The gang's boss is banker Cutting and he is after Haldain's gold. He also receives Jim's mail at his bank and changes one of Jim's letters to make it look like Jim is after the gold. His sends Haldain's daughter after her father thereby leading the gang to the secret gold field.
Jonathan Pride is a mild-mannered dance instructor in 1820 Boston. En route to visit relatives, Jonathan is shanghaied by a band of zany pirates and forced to work as a galley boy. When the pirate vessel arrives at the port of Las Palomas, Jonathan, clad in buccaneer's garb, makes his escape. Everyone in Las Palomas, including Governor Alcalde (Frank Morgan) and fetching senorita Serafina (Steffi Duna), assumes that Jonathan is the pirate chieftain, leading to a series of typical comic-opera complications.
A bitter widow and a grumpy widower find themselves stuck in a hotel that is cut off from the outside by a snowstorm. Although both have no intention of getting married again, they begin to fall for each other. Their children, however, are determined to see that the "romance" never gets off the ground and do everything they can to see that they are kept apart.
Timid milkman, Burleigh Sullivan, somehow knocks out a boxing champ in a brawl. The fighter's manager decides to build up the milkman's reputation in a series of fixed fights and then have the champ beat him to regain his title.
A super-efficient secretary at a department store falls for and marries her boss, but finds out that taking care of him at home (and especially his spoiled-brat daughter) is a lot different than taking care of him at work.
A disparate group of people meet as passengers on a superspeed train crossing the U.S. Aboard are a seductive blackmailer and the stage director he intends to frame, a woman chasing her husband who is running away with the blackmail victim, and the stage director's feisty leading lady.
Grant hides stolen money in the luggage of Bonnie Shea who is moving west. Later when he and his men arrive to retrieve the money, they also kidnap Bonnie. This sends Reasonin' Bates and his cowhands on their horses after the gangsters in their cars.
Hard-boiled newspaper reporter Larry Doyle (Robert Armstrong) goes a bit too far in celebrating a work bonus and wakes up on a train bound for St. Louis with only a buck on his person. To remedy the problem, Doyle pawns the revolver he's carrying. When the gun is subsequently used in a murder, Doyle's problems only multiply. In the meantime, he's also fallen in love with a comely stranger (Maxine Doyle) he convinced to impersonate his wife.
Down-on-his-luck film director Jimmie Dale takes a job at a fly-by-night acting school. He is drawn into the plans of the school's owner to bilk a wealthy young man out of the funds he has supplied to shoot a movie starring pretty student Alice Perkins. But Jimmie hopes to bilk the bilkers by actually completing the movie as ostensibly planned.
Gangster Chandler and his accomplice Tracy arrive at a dude ranch. Cowboy Kentucky arrives at the same time. When Tracy double-crosses his boss and has the stage robbed, Kentucky finds the outlaws and brings them in. Tracy frames him for the murder of the driver but his pal Cactus gets him out of jail. He returns just as Chandler shoots Tracy and Kentucky finds himself arrested for another murder.
Two military pilots are close friends, and share in a lot of hazardous missions while engaging in a series of good-natured romantic rivalries. But when one of the pilots loses a girl he really cared for, he cannot forgive his friend. Soon afterwards, they must work together on their most dangerous mission yet.