Rick Mason is the no-good lowdown rat who tries to capitalize on postwar patriotism and grief. He finagles a war widow into giving up her savings for a nonexistent memorial. When Mason falls in love with the widow he has pangs of conscience, but he reckons without his con-artist boss, who tends to bolster his arguments with muscle and bullets.

Burglar Nat Harbin and his two associates set their sights on wealthy spiritualist Sister Sarah, who has inherited a fortune -- including a renowned emerald necklace -- from a Philadelphia financier. Using Nat's female ward, Gladden, to pose as an admirer and case the mansion where the woman lives, they set up a perfect break-in. Things get complicated afterwards.

Shrimpers and oilmen clash when an ambitious wildcatter begins constructing an off-shore oilrig.

A beautiful but unscrupulous female performer manipulates all the men in her life in order to achieve her aims.

While travelling through Hong Kong, Bob Mitchell accidentally stumbles into the middle of criminal negotiations between a mean gang, the Five Golden Dragons and the local mobsters.

In Libya, an American tank commander, along with a handful of Allied soldiers, tries to defend an isolated well with a limited supply of water from a German Afrika Korps battalion during the Western Desert Campaign of World War II.

A cargo aircraft crashes in a sandstorm in the Sahara with less than a dozen men on board. One of the passengers is an airplane designer who comes up with the idea of ripping off the undamaged wing and using it as the basis for a replacement aircraft they need to build before their food and water run out.