In their farm house in a New York village, Ma Shelby prepares breakfast for her four children, Isaac, Tommy, Johnny and Susan, and then awakens them. The racket the boys make as they play and fight awakens their father, who spanks the eldest, Isaac. When a visitor chides Pa for not working, Ma sticks up for her husband, saying that he has a weak back and that he is waiting for a promised government job.
Jeffrey Haywood wants to marry to Virginia Embrey. However, Virginia refused to marry unless her older sister, the hard-to-please Angelica gets married first. Angelica, in turn, finds every man she knows too dull and predictable, and for this reason prefers to stay single. Jeff then tries to make Angelica interested in the mild-mannered and timid Reggie Irving passing him off as a notorious playboy to intrigue her. He asks his friend Polly to teach Reggie "how to treat a woman right", but he turns to be a disastrous learner.
Tol'able David is a 1930 sound film directed by John G. Blystone and produced and released by Columbia Pictures. It is a remake of a famous 1921 silent film Tol'able David starring Richard Barthelmess and Ernest Torrence. Young David Kinemon is a good-natured, easy-going lad in a mountain village. Circumstances force him to take his brother's place as mailman for the community, and this brings him into deadly contact with the vicious Hatburn brothers.
Young Mary Rainey takes the reins of her deceased father's failing circus. With the help of the Inimitable Smiley Johnson, she hopes to bring fortune back to her ragtag band of ragged shoeleather performers.
18-year-old Rosie Kaplan O'Grady was found as an abandoned baby by O'Grady, an Irish policeman, and Kaplan, a Jewish pawnbroker, and raised by them as their own. She is being courted by two men; prizefighter Terry Callahan and a rich socialite, Tommy Sinclair and has to choose between them.
This early example of the "backstage" musical genre tells the story of Kitty Darling, a fading burlesque star who tries to save her convent-educated daughter April from following in Mom's footsteps.