In this family comedy, the wealthy executive of a steel company must endure life with a strict, teetotaling wife, a wild daughter, and a deadbeat son. To gain some much needed attention, the lonesome fellow hires a hitman to kill him. Instead, the gunman kidnaps him to frighten the family into appreciating their devoted father.
Four "Picture Brides", from New Orleans, arrive in the Brazilian jungle on a riverboat, brought there to marry workers at Lottagrasso, a remote mining site of the Standard Diamond Mines. Also on the boat with the four "mail-order" brides (Americans Mame Smith, Flo Lane, and Gwen from England and Lena from Europe) is Mary Lee, a frightened and innocent girl, who has come to see the mine's brutal supervisor, Von Luden, about a job.
After being convicted of stealing some jewels, Annette Eldrige is sent to a reformatory administered by a sadistic and corrupt female warder. However, one of the board of trustees takes an interest in the new arrival and begins to investigate the management of the institution.
A man is convicted of killing his boss, whom he suspected of having an affair with his wife. On board the train taking him to prison for his execution are a reporter, who is dying of lung cancer and wants to interview the condemned man--and who also has some inside knowledge of the circumstances of the man's case. Also aboard is the prisoner's wife, who doesn't believe her husband is a killer and desperately wants to talk to him about it but he refuses to speak to her.
A cowboy on the run from a posse finds the clothes and ID of a preacher on the trail. He assumes the man's identity, but when he arrives at the nearest town, he rides into the middle of a hanging--and the man who is being hanged knows his real identity.
