In the early 1900s, as the Panama Canal is being built, a group of doctors try to discover a cure for yellow fever, a disease that is decimating the workers constructing the canal.

A spoiled boy sent to the country to grow-up. He has to deal with life, friends and crooks.

Director Karl Brown's 1938 circus drama stars Marjorie Main as a tough, fur-coat-wearing circus boss who raises her orphaned niece to be a trapeze star.

Nightclub singer Della Mason witnesses a murder and is forced by the killer to flee with him from the scene of the crime. Escaping from the gangster, she secretly boards the ship of Captain Josiah Storm, a woman-hater, and the ship sails from San Francisco headed for China. Della is discovered by Jim Benton, the ship's first mate and he pleads her case to the captain. He leaves her in under the protection of Minnie at "Minnie's Joint in Shanghai, until her innocence can be established.