Robert Anderson
A husband tries to keep his comatose wife alive by allowing doctors to terminate her pregnancy. Hearing about this, anti-abortion protesters start a legal campaign to gain legal custody of the fetus.
A man who wants to move on with his life by moving to California and marry his girlfriend, finds it difficult as he still lives in the towering shadow of his aging father.
Hackman plays a New York professor who wants a change in his life, and plans to get married to his girlfriend and move to California. His mother understands his need to get away, but warns him that moving so far away could be hard on his father. Just before the wedding, the mother dies. Hackman's sister (who has been disowned by their father for marrying a Jewish man) advises him to live his own life, and not let himself be controlled by their father.
Engineer Jake Holman arrives aboard the gunboat USS San Pablo, assigned to patrol a tributary of the Yangtze in the middle of exploited and revolution-torn 1926 China. His iconoclasm and cynical nature soon clash with the 'rice-bowl' system which runs the ship and the uneasy symbiosis between Chinese and foreigner on the river. Hostility towards the gunboat's presence reaches a climax when the boat must crash through a river-boom and rescue missionaries upriver at China Light Mission.
After leaving a wealthy Belgian family to become a nun, Sister Luke struggles with her devotion to her vows during crisis, disappointment, and World War II.
Four sisters in New Zealand fall for four U.S. soldiers en route to the Pacific theater in WWII.
Tom Lee is more interested in the arts than in sports, something that sits uneasily with both his father and his classmates. Tom's school housemaster Bill Reynolds even gives him a hard time for his "effeminate" interests. However, Bill's wife Laura sympathizes with Tom and tries to help him with her own overtures.
