Aiming to defeat the Man of Steel, wealthy executive Ross Webster hires bumbling but brilliant Gus Gorman to develop synthetic kryptonite, which yields some unexpected psychological effects. Between rekindling romance with his high school sweetheart and saving himself, Superman must contend with a powerful supercomputer.
In Alexandria, in 1938, Darley, a young British schoolmaster and poet, makes friends through Pursewarden, the British consular officer, with Justine, the beautiful and mysterious wife of a Coptic banker. He observes the affairs of her heart and incidentally discovers that she is involved in a plot against the British, meant to arm the Jewish underground in Palestine. The plot finally fails, Justine is sent to jail and Darley decides to return to England.
The life of famed 1930s comedienne Fanny Brice, from her early days in the Jewish slums of New York, to the height of her career with the Ziegfeld Follies, as well as her marriage to the rakish gambler Nick Arnstein.
Gertrude Lawrence rises to stage stardom at the cost of happiness.
A snobbish phonetics professor agrees to a wager that he can take a flower girl and make her presentable in high society.
In Victorian England, literary siblings Emily and Charlotte Brontë vie for the affection of the Rev. Arthur Nicholls. Along with their sister Anne, Emily and Charlotte also try to help their tormented brother Branwell, a gifted artist whose life is being destroyed by alcohol.
Holmes and Watson board a passenger train bound from London to Edinburgh, to guard the Star of Rhodesia, an enormous diamond worth a fortune belonging to an elderly woman of wealth; but within the first hour of the trip, the woman's son is murdered and the diamond stolen and any of the passengers in their car could be the killer thief.
During the Spanish Civil War, an agent on a mission to purchase coal meets with murder and counterspies.
The daughter of a musical mentor adores a promising composer, who is quite fond of the adolescent. When her father dies, an uncle arrives with his own grown daughter, who begins a romance with the composer which culminates in marriage but creates an emotional rivalry that affects the three.
In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.