Breaking Up

Change comes slowly to a small New Hampshire town in the early 20th century. People grow up, get married, live, and die. Milk and the newspaper get delivered every morning, and nobody locks their front doors. This musicalization of Thornton Wilder's classic play stars Frank Sinatra who introduces the song, "Love and Marriage," which would go on to be immortalized as the theme song to the sitcom Married with Children.

Lily and her son John live alone in a small town as her husband has been killed fighting the war in France. Or at least that is what she told John, but the arrival of Frank back in the town leads him to find out that she not only has been lying about that but also about the fact that she never married him. When Frank tussles with Lily in her yard she applies for a restraining order, calling on the help of her father (the esteemed judge Stoddard Bell) and his partner (lawyer Harmon Cobb). The case fails and when Frank is found murdered later that night Stoddard is arrested and Cobb has a defence case on his hands.

At the start of World War I, Paul Baumer is a young German patriot, eager to fight. Indoctrinated with propaganda at school, he and his friends eagerly sign up for the army soon after graduation. But when the horrors of war soon become too much to bear, and as his friends die or become gravely wounded, Paul questions the sanity of fighting over a few hundreds yards of war-torn countryside.

A teenager grows up during the onset of the American revolution.

A young girl in the hills of Indiana, who had been abandoned by her family and raised by a bootlegging old woman, is taken by the authorities and made the ward of a childless couple.

The story of Francis Gary Powers, a U-2 pilot for the CIA who was shot down in his spy plane over Russia, captured and imprisoned.

The curse of the legendary blue Hope Diamond on all its owners is dramatized from the gem's discovery in 17th Century India until its donation to the Smithsonian Institute.

Marty Pilletti is a 34 year-old butcher who lives with his mother. His brothers and sisters are all married and his dear mother - along with several other of her friends - is always asking him why he doesn't find a nice girl and get married. The truth is Marty is lonely and would like nothing better. He has very low self-esteem however and admits to his mother that he's ugly and no one wants him. He's tired of going to the Saturday night dance with his buddies and then going home more depressed than he was when the evening started. At one of those dances he meets Clara. They have a great deal in common but Marty will have to overcome peer pressure if he and Clara are to have a relationship.

A Beverly Hills socialite embarks on a love/hate relationship with a psychotic businessman who murdered her fiance and then raped and terrorized her which leads to a bizarre trial.

The wife of a paralytic becomes involved in an extra-marital affair, with his permission.