Clips from assorted television programs, B-movies, commercials, music performances, newsreels, bloopers, satirical short films and promotional and government films of the 1950s and 1960s are intercut together to tell a single story of various creatures and societal ills attacking American cities.
A young man who steals valuable Oriental objects for a crooked antique dealer is hunted down by the police after his latest Chinatown robbery turns violent.
A young woman arrives in San Francisco's Chinatown, from Hong Kong, with the intention of marrying a rakish nightclub owner, unaware he is involved with one of his singers.
Charlie Chan's investigation of a blackmail-induced suicide as a case of murder leads him into a world of magick and mysticism peopled with a stage magician, a phoney spiritualist, and a for-real mind reader.
While Charlie is distracted with the birth of his first grandchild, son Jimmy impersonates his father in order to investigate a murder aboard a freighter in the harbor.
Mary Whitman has gone to Reno to obtain a divorce. While there she is arrested on suspicion of murdering a fellow guest at her hotel (which specializes in divorcers). There are many others at the hotel who wanted the victim out of the way. Charlie comes from his home in Honolulu to solve the murder.
Eddie Darrow, seeking a mobster's widow in Macao, gets involved in a casino owner's affairs.
Frank Johnson, a sole witness to a gangland murder, goes into hiding and is trailed by Police Inspector Ferris, on the theory that Frank is trying to escape from possible retaliation. Frank's wife, Eleanor, suspects he is actually running away from their unsuccessful marriage. Aided by a newspaperman, Danny Leggett, Eleanor sets out to locate her husband. The killer is also looking for him, and keeps close tabs on Eleanor.
Charlie Chan, with son Jimmy on a week's pass from the Army, takes up a request for help at a castle-home, miles from anywhere in the American desert south-west and inhabited by an eccentric, reclusive historian and his wife, a descendant of Lucrezia Borgia. Once there, he finds the request's legitimacy denied by all who are present, but still necessary as one houseguest has already been murdered, the other guests are at each other's throat, and the Borgia-related chatelain is suspected...
After a drunken night out, a longshoreman thinks he may have killed a man.
A carnival showman tries to keep Japanese spies from sabotaging the Panama Canal.
A couple wash up on an uncharted island where Nazi experiments are going on.
A man in priestly robes, seemingly the long-awaited Father O'Shea, arrives at a little-frequented Catholic mission in 1947 China. Though the man seems curiously uncomfortable with his priestly duties, his tough tactics prove very successful in the Seven Villages, as around them China disintegrates in civil war and revolution. But he has a secret, and his friendship with mission nurse Anne (an attractive war widow) seems to be taking on an unpriestly tone.
A fisherman with money problems hires out his boat to transport criminals.
On a cruise ship from Honolulu to San Francisco, the famous Chinese detective encounters four more murders while trying to figure out the murder of a Scotland Yard friend.
A wax museum run by a demented doctor contains statues of such crime figures as Jack the Ripper and Bluebeard. In addition to making wax statues the doctor performs plastic surgery. It is here that an arch fiend takes refuge.
Charlie impersonates an employee of the U.S. government to foil an espionage plot which would destroy part of the Panama Canal, trapping a Navy fleet on its way to the Pacific after maneuvers in the Atlantic.
When Charlie's old friend from Scotland Yard is murdered when they attend a police convention in New York, Chan picks up the case he was working on.
When the elderly woman sponsoring a treasure hunt is murdered on board her docked ship, Charlie Chan must deal with a treasure map in four pieces, the ghost of a hanged pirate, a talking parrot, a recalcitrant sea captain and several suspicious passengers - and a second murder.
In Rio de Janiero to arrest a nightclub singer on suspicion of a murder in Hawaii, Charlie Chan becomes involved with the Rio police in solving the singer's own murder.
In San Francisco's Chinatown, Charlie helps two different people search for their missing relatives and uncovers a murder for insurance scheme.
A treasury agent on the trail of counterfeit money confides to fellow ocean liner passenger, Charlie Chan, that there have been two attempts on his life.
When a troupe of showgirls with their impresario and press agent vacation at a Malibu Beach resort, two of them are garroted. Charlie takes on the case assisted by Number Two Son Jimmy and faithful chauffeur Birmingham Brown.
With its electrifying flight sequences and high-powered cast, The Hunters is a mesmerizing film based on the best-selling novel by veteran fighter pilot James Salter. Set during the height of the Korean War, the story centers on Major Cleve Saville (Robert Mitchum), a master of the newly operational F-86 Sabre fighter jets. But adept as he is at flying, Saville¹s personal life takes a nosedive when he falls in love with his wingman¹s (Lee Philips) beautiful wife (May Britt). To make matters worse, Saville must cope with a loud-mouthed rookie (Robert Wagner) in a daring rescue mission that threatens all their lives in this well-crafted war drama.
George McAllister, the black sheep of a wealthy family who has squandered his share of the family inheritance, lives in constant jealousy, hatred and resentment of his half-brother Barry, who has been supporting him. George gets his girlfriend, Carlotta Duval, a job as Barry's nurse, with the idea being to marry him, kill him, and inherit his money—and marrying George.
A Soviet nurse helps a U.S. pilot, his buddies and a scientist escape from North Korea. American International Pictures originally distributed this film as a double feature with "Suicide Battalion".
After a woman shoots a man to death, a damning letter she wrote raises suspicions.
Rick Leland makes no secret of the fact he has no loyalty to his home country after he is court-martialed out of the army and boards a Japanese ship for the Orient in late 1941. But has Leland really been booted out, or is there some other motive for his getting close to fellow passenger Doctor Lorenz? Any motive for getting close to attractive traveler Alberta Marlow would however seem pretty obvious.
Detective Charlie Chan springs into action when top officials of a New Orleans chemical company begin dropping like flies.
Soon after a Chinese princess comes to the US to buy planes for her people, she is murdered by a poison dart fired by an air rifle.
Charlie attempts to solve a triple murder in which a dead man's finger prints show up at all three murder sites, and all three victims were connected with the conviction and execution of an evidently innocent man.
In order to learn the location of a fabled Aztec treasure, a professor kidnaps his colleague, the only man able to read the ancient Aztec script that is supposed to reveal the location of the treasure. Charlie Chan and his #1 and #2 sons journey to the jungles of Mexico to find the victim and bring the kidnapper and his gang to justice.
A gold mine in Arizona, that was formerly losing a lot of money, suddenly turns into a veritable money-making machine. However, the owner, instead of being happy about his now profitable business, insists to Charlie that something is fishy and that someone is out to murder him. Charlie and his "crew" travel to the mine, pretending to be tourists staying at a nearby dude ranch so as not to arouse suspicion, and discover that the owner may well be right--it looks like the mine is being used as a cover for criminal activities, and that someone is indeed out to murder him.
A celebrated New York cabbie is pressed into service for a perilous journey through World War II China.
Shortly before Pearl Harbor, American opportunist Jones and partner Johnny are in China to sell oil to the invading Japanese army. Cynical about the sufferings of the Chinese, Jones meets compassionate teacher Carolyn Grant while travelling cross-country to Shanghai. Sparks fly between these strong-willed characters, neither budging an inch. But when Jones witnesses a Japanese atrocity, his feelings toward his customers (and Carolyn) begin to change...
Shanghai, China. The last expatriate Westerners still living in the city are imprisoned in a hotel by the communist authorities in order to find the spy hiding among them.
Hoping to become a lawyer, Alec (Roddy McDowall) becomes a tuna fisherman in order to pay a debt. This turn of events puts Alec on the outs with his taciturn family. Eventually, the lad proves himself on all fronts, and is welcomed back into the family fold.
Without lights and in a driving rain, a bus is lumbering along the muddy Assam Road en route from Chunking to the Indian border. Passengers include a European of unknown nationality, a missionary a French officer, and a White Russian. There is also an ancient Chinese lady on an important diplomatic mission to Indian and her traveling companion. The trip is halted when Japanese planes bomb the road and hit a munitions truck and kill many Chinese soldiers. The Chinese commander puts the wounded soldiers on the bus and directs it to a nearby secret airport where the officer in charge is an American attached to the Chinese Air Force.
A pilot carrying a valuable amulet is shot down over China by a ruthless Russian agent, who also wants the amulet.
Larry Morgan, a private detective, is hired by a woman who wants Larry to trail her husband. The husband is murdered and, shortly afterwards, the wife is also killed. Larry shuffles through a long list of suspects before revealing the killer...
In the jungle near Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Mr. Moto poses as an ineffectual archaeologist and a venerable holy man with mystical powers to help foil two insurgencies against the government.
Reverend John Burnside, American missionary in the Far East, prepares to return home after twenty years to take up the fight against Communism. The Reds imprison him and send in his place a spy who is his double, but who is instructed to come out for Communism. The spy is accepted in Burnside's home town, and he reports to local Communist headquarters, where James John, prominent local businessman but in reality a Red agent, has instructions to assist him in all details of his mission. He does a series of personal appearances and radio interviews and talk shows, using an anti-Communist approach.
After avenging the death of his teacher, a Shaolin monk flees China to the American West and helps people while being pursued by bounty hunters.
Mike Locken is one of the principal members of a group of freelance spies. A significant portion of their work is for the CIA, and while on a case for them one of his friends turns on him and shoots him in the elbow and knee. His assignment, to protect someone, goes down in flames. He is nearly crippled, but with braces is able to again become mobile. For revenge as much as anything else, Mike goes after his ex-friend.
Ernie Reardon, the superintendent, and Bill O'Hara, the foreman, of a construction company crew working on a bridge to a remote valley, are constantly quarreling over small and minor matter, especially when it comes to Peg Mallory, whom both men are romancing and Peg enjoys the attention. Thed work is suspended when a worker is killed, but a flood is approaching and the valley citizens are in dire straits unless the bridge is completed - in a hurry.
World War II espionage drama, starring Preston Foster and Lynn Bari.
An American tourist in South America finds love and unexpected trouble.
Blackie is seen leaving a Chinese laundry where the proprietor has been murdered, and must track down the real killer in Chinatown.
Mr. Moto Heads to China on a quest for seven ancient scrolls that reveal the location of Genghis Khan's tomb—a crypt filled with fabulous treasure! But Moto isn't the only one stalking the scrolls—so is a shadowy band of thieves. But when his ruthless rivals go too far, the mild-mannered detective's quest for antiquities becomes a passion for vengeance—because if he can't bring these villains to justice... he'll bring them to their knees.
China, during the rule of the Qing Dynasty. The arranged marriage between Wang Lung, a humble farmer, and O-Lan, a domestic slave, will endure the many hardships of life over the years; but the temptations of a fragile prosperity will endanger their love and the survival of their entire family.
A philanthropist's will dictates that four people receive $5,000 apiece, with the stipulation that the first one who can double the amount -- without dishonesty-- will win a cool million. Hindering the four are the avaricious relatives of the late millionaire.
Filmed in the months immediately following Pearl Harbor, 20th Century-Fox's Little Tokyo USA is 63 minutes' worth of speculation about prewar Japanese espionage activities. Los Angeles cop Preston Foster suspects that there's dirty work afoot in the city's Japanese community, but no one will believe him except for intrepid girl reporter Brenda Joyce. When the spies frame Foster on a trumped-up murder charge, Joyce does a little detective work herself. The enemy agents are rounded up just before they can do any real damage. Because of its strident insistence that most (if not all) Japanese-American citizens were secretly loyal to the Rising Sun, Little Tokyo USA is seldom seen these days.
During WWII, a group of brave Americans spy on the Japanese after their invasion of the Philippines and became the first U.S. Guerrilla fighters.
Alpha's been raised along scientific principles, and will make Mike Regan a great human interest story for his paper. But when his interview prompts Alpha to run away from the institute and ask him to show her some magic, Mike gets more responsibility than he bargained for. Especially since another story of his, one involving gangsters, has also come home to roost.
Pinky Scariano, Allan Ross, and Frankie Davis all join the Army Air Forces with hopes of becoming pilots. In training, they meet and become pals with Bobby Grills and Irving Miller, and the five struggle through the rigid training and grueling tests involved in becoming pilots. Not all of them succeed, and tragedy awaits for some.
Dishonorably discharged from the Army Air Corps, Brad Dunham (George Raft) disconsolately decides to try his luck with Shanghai's postwar black market. Teaming with the treacherous Tamara Baranoff (June Havoc), Dunham prospers in his newly-found illicit profession, much to the dismay of his best friend, reporter Mark Andrews (Tom Tully). When Tamara has the troublesome Andrews murdered, Dunham realizes the folly of his behavior and works overtime to squash the black market for good and all.
A treasury agent becomes obsessed with exposing an international drug ring.
A post World War 2, US Army agent is assigned to join the Foreign Legion in search of high ranking Nazi war criminal who may have also enlisted.
A wild-west trader and his New York wife head out for the California by wagon train. The trader is killed enroute, and his wife finds herself with child. She continues on hoping to find a man and a home.
Upon waking up to the news that the man she’d gone on a date with the previous night has been murdered, a young woman with only a faint memory of the night’s events begins to suspect that she murdered him while attempting to resist his advances.
Yankee soldiers-of-fortune smash a spy plot aimed at seizing Hong Kong.
It's 1893 and gold is being smuggled out of the country. Instead of stealing gold bars, the outlaws are stealing high grade ore, having it smelted, and then having it plated to look like lead. The Government sends agents Bret and Larry who arrive in Cripple Creek posing as Texas gunfighters. Bret finds the smelting operation and Larry learns of the payoff. But the crooked town Marshal is suspicious of the two men and the reply of his inquiry to Texas exposes them putting their lives in danger.
American adventurer Jeff Williams is fleeing the communist advance in China when he becomes entangled with a young Chinese orphan, Wei Lin, and a beautiful Red Cross volunteer, who arranges for their harrowing escape to Hong Kong.
An outcast gambler hijacks a wagon train of eligible women taken west by a mayor.
A former housemaid teams up with an English gentleman thief and works a confidence game to bilk the wealthy but their plans for a big job in California go awry.
A group of refugees fleeing Chinese Communist rule via train are beset by a gang of terrifying outlaws.
A U.S. businessman abroad is the patsy for the theft of a rajah's jewels.
Opera singer Ina Massine tries to win back former husband Dr. Lincoln I. Bartlett.
At a mayors convention in San Francisco, ex-longshoreman Steve Fisk meets Clarissa Standish from New England. Fisk is mayor of "Puget City" and is proud of his rough and tumble background. Standish is mayor of "Winona, Maine", and is equally proud of her education and dedication to the people who elected her. Thrown together, the two opposites attract and their escapades during the convention get each of them in hot water back home. Written by Ron Kerrigan
A recently divorced couple see things differently after learning they are going to be parents.
Arriving in IndoChina by parachute, Captain Guy Bertrand and his comrades make a courageous stand against the Communist forces. Jump into Hell is one of the first films to deal with the ongoing conflict in Vietnam or, as it was still known in 1955, French IndoChina.
In this send-up of the Humphrey Bogart detective films of the 1940s, a man idolizes Bogart so much that he has his features altered to look exactly like him and then opens up a detective agency under the name Sam Marlow.
A young farmboy who can't seem to communicate with his father develops an attachment to a young red pony.
A wanderer returns home only to find political turmoil, disease and romantic difficulties.
Vincent Price stars in this early '60s adaptation of Thomas De Quincey's thriller about an opium addict trying to solve a mystery in San Francisco's Chinatown.
Ex-army sergeant Jed Givens and his gang rob an army payroll shipment led by Lt. Hemp Brown. Givens kills a civilian woman and all the soldiers, leaving Brown alive to face a military tribunal in which he is branded a coward, stripped of all insignia and drummed out of the army. Brown sets out to track down Givens in an effort to clear his name.
A police detective finds himself entangled in the web of the underworld when he falls in love with a nightclub singer accused of murdering a crooked lawyer.
On an airliner bound for Hong Kong, Tony, a career crook who deals in stolen diamonds, agonizes over whether he should stick with his girlfriend or pursue Pamela, an intriguing novelist with whom he's instantly infatuated. Viewing Tony's dastardly deeds as great material for her new book, Pamela gladly encourages him to continue his criminal behavior.
Ben Matthews gives up the flashy life of a riverboat gambler, hoping to settle down in Galena with his girlfriend, luscious entertainer Zoe. But Galena's leading citizen is murdered on the boat; Ben, on arrival, finds a lynch mob after his neck, and flees. Three years of wandering later, Zoe's letters stop coming and Ben returns to find her and attempt the hopeless task of clearing himself.
An American woman arrives in Hong Kong to unravel the mystery of her missing photographer husband. After getting nowhere with the authorities, she is led by some underground characters to an American soldier of fortune working in the area against the Communists. He promises to help find her husband.
Linda Powell, and English girl, stows away on a ship bound for the United States in order to join the G.I. she loves. She assumes the identity of an English war bride, Joyce Giles, who has decided she no longer loves the American soldier she married and is not going to join him in the U.S. Linda arrives to find that her soldier no longer wishes to marry her...
In Shanghai amidst Sino-Japanese warfare an adventurer (Sanders) collecting money from gun suppliers falls in loves with a French singer (Del Rio).
Torchy Blane joins her police-detective fiance to solve a series of murders involving a set of Chinese grave tablets taken and sold to a collector and death-threats written in Chinese characters.
Eddie Miller struggles with his hatred of women, he's especially bothered by seeing women with their lovers. He starts a killing spree as a sniper by shooting women from far distances. In an attempt to get caught, he writes an anonymous letter to the police begging them to stop him.
Pretty female attorney Abigail "AJ" Furnival is hired to keep high-flying cowboy movie star Ben Castle out of trouble in Las Vegas. Despite his many faults, Abigail falls in love with and marries Ben, with the hope that she can mold him into the virtuous hero he plays on the screen.
Pilot disobeys unsafe orders and loses his job. He then starts a flying school which receives a boost when the government launches a program which it hopes will produce 20,000 pilots a year.
In China, a singer and a journalist meet while traveling on a train attacked by bandits.
Nick Cherney, in prison for embezzling from Torno Freight Co., sees a chance to get back at Johnny Torno through his young priest brother Jess. He pays fellow prisoner Rocky, who gets out a week before Nick, to murder Jess... who, dying, tells revenge-minded Johnny that he'd written a clue "in the Bible." Frustrated, Johnny obsessively searches for the missing Gideon Bible from Jess's hotel room.
A cowboy is hired by a stagecoach boss to stop the railroad reaching his territory and putting him out of business. He uses everything from Indians to dancehall girls to try to thwart the plan. But the railroad workers, led by a female sharpshooter and an ambitious salesman, prove tough customers.
In Korea, on 6 September 1950, Lieutenant Benson's platoon finds itself isolated in enemy-held territory after a retreat. Soon they are joined by Sergeant Montana, whose overriding concern is caring for his catatonic colonel. Benson and Montana can't stand each other, but together they must get the survivors to Hill 465, where they hope the division is waiting. It's a long, harrowing march, fraught with all the dangers the elusive enemy can summon.
A girl tries to pay the mortgage on a Nob Hill home and gets involved in selling her father's art treasures.
The new warden of a large American harbor raises the hackles of sailors and fishermen by his strict enforcement of all the safety rules. He takes the time, though, to romance the sister of his biggest rival.
A jewel thief and a con artist are rivals in the theft of a valuable diamond and gem necklace in Bombay and as the Japanese Army invades China.
A detective encounters a woman in a nightclub. He finds that she is being blackmailed by a dancer who is murdered that very night. Of course, the woman becomes the main suspect. She and the gumshoe team up and begin searching for the real killer.
Period musical about a song plugger who vows to turn an opera composer's music into popular hits.
Kenneth Seeley, member of the U. S. State Department's Foreign Service Bureau, and Marge Weldon, a morale worker with the bureau, are assigned to an area in Mongolia dominated by an outlaw warlord. The latter captures the village where they reside and when escape is clearly impossible, Seeley blows up the outlaw's headquarters, losing his own life in doing so.
In this 12 Chapter serial the UN enlists trader Tom Rogers and Vivian Wells, to lead the effort to prevent the natives from starting a revolution in Burmatra and its neighbors.
Eight strangers meet in Shanghai to stake claims to the fortune of a late shipping magnate, then must evade a murderer in their midst.
Suspecting that her husband might be having an affair, a wife plots to catch him in the act.
An American Merchant Marine captain, rescued from a Chinese Communist jail by local villagers, is "shanghaied" into transporting the entire village to Hong Kong on an ancient paddle steamer.
Josephine Little, an expatriate American importer-exporter of sometimes unscrupulous dealings, is recruited by Central Intellegence Agency operatives in Hong Kong to help recover an American born scientist away from the communists, holding him him in North Viet Nam. She goes through with the dangerous mission, in hopes of securing a scrap metal deal with the U.S. government.
A true story, it follows a pastor and his wife through forties beginning with one biological child, Donny. But the upheaval of the war years results in a number of mixed raced children that the Doss family adopt until they have 12 children.