Harriet Frank Jr.
An illiterate cook at a company cafeteria tries for the attention of a newly widowed woman. As they get to know one another, she discovers his inability to read. When he is fired, she takes on trying to teach him to read in her kitchen each night.
Emma is a divorced woman with a teen aged boy who moves into a small town and tries to make a go of a horse ranch. Murphy is the town druggist who steers business her way. Things are going along predictably until her ex husband shows up, needing a place to stay. The three of them form an intricate circle, Emma's son liking Murphy, but desperately wanting his father back.
Norma Rae is a southern textile worker employed in a factory with intolerable working conditions. This concern about the situation gives her the gumption to be the key associate to a visiting labor union organizer. Together, they undertake the difficult, and possibly dangerous, struggle to unionize her factory.
After escaping home, three young friends form a dynamic alliance of untamed youth. They meet an old man named Spikes with the experience only a master gunfighter can offer. The gang of men go on a crime spree and are converted to outlaws with a price on their heads.
Dr. Peter Carey is a pathologist at a Boston hospital. The daughter of the hospital's Chief of Staff dies after an illegal abortion goes wrong, and Carey's friend and colleague Dr. David Tao is accused of performing the abortion. Carey doesn't buy it, and so he digs deeper, angering the girl's father in the process. Questions abound: Who performed the abortion? Was the girl really pregnant? And what does it have to do with stolen morphine, blackmail attempts, and a mysterious and dangerous masseur?
When his cattlemen abandon him for the gold fields, rancher Wil Andersen is forced to take on a collection of young boys as his cowboys in order to get his herd to market in time to avoid financial disaster. The boys learn to do a man's job under Andersen's tutelage; however, neither Andersen nor the boys know that a gang of cattle thieves is stalking them.
In turn-of-the-century Mississippi, an 11-year-old boy comes of age as two mischievous adult friends talk him into sneaking the family car out for a trip to Memphis and a series of adventures.
Hud Bannon is a ruthless young man who tarnishes everything and everyone he touches. Hud represents the perfect embodiment of alienated youth, out for kicks with no regard for the consequences. There is bitter conflict between the callous Hud and his stern and highly principled father, Homer. Hud's nephew Lon admires Hud's cheating ways, though he soon becomes too aware of Hud's reckless amorality to bear him anymore. In the world of the takers and the taken, Hud is a winner. He's a cheat, but, he explains, "I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner."
Robert Preston plays the flip side of his eternally ebullient Professor Harold Hill in Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Preston portrays an early 20th-century harness salesman, fully aware that his product is rapidly becoming obsolete. He tries to compensate for his own lack of self-esteem by cheating on his patient wife Dorothy McGuire; Preston's "other woman" is played by Angela Lansbury. Meanwhile, daughter Shirley Knight falls in love with Jewish boy Lee Kinsolving, who kills himself in the face of relentless bigotry.
Captain Wade Hunnicutt is the wealthiest and most powerful citizen in his Texan town; he is also a notorious womanizer, which has turned his wife Hannah against him. She has brought up their son Theron to be dependent upon her; but as he reaches adulthood, Hunnicutt insists on taking over his upbringing, initiating him in hunting and other masculine pursuits, under the watchful eye of Rafe, Hunnicutt's loyal employee. But Theron's new lifestyle leads him into a love-affair with a local girl, and thence to his learning things about his parents that were previously hidden from him.
Drama focusing on a family of Southern aristocrats who are trying to deal with the dissolution of their clan and the loss of its reputation, faith, fortunes and respect.
Ben Quick arrives in Frenchman's Bend, MS after being kicked out of another town for allegedly burning a barn for revenge. Will Varner owns just about everything in Frenchman's Bend and he hires Ben to work in his store. Will thinks his own son, Jody, who manages the store, lacks ambition and despairs of him getting his wife, Eula, pregnant. Will thinks his daughter, Clara, a schoolteacher, will never get married. He decides that Ben Quick might make a good husband for Clara to bring some new blood into the family
Western that starts when a man (Matt Dow) is mistaken as a train robber. After the town's sheriff shoots the kid he's riding with, Dow clears his name and ends up as the new sheriff. He romances a Swedish woman and settles in to a peaceful life only to find that the boy has a few secrets of his own.
When his ward seeks protection with rival cattleman John Stewart, embittered, jealous rancher Wick Campbell hires ten outlaws to help him seize power in the territory.
Unjustly booted out of the cavalry, Mike McComb strikes out for Nevada, and deciding never to be used again, ruthlessly works his way up to becoming one of the most powerful silver magnates in the west. His empire begins to fall apart as the other mining combines rise against him and his stubbornness loses him the support of his wife and old friends.
A policeman's son searches for a suitable subject for an essay about an important person.
