A best-selling author of women's issues and a medical academic find it is to their mutual advantage to falsely claim that they are married.
Shirley Ross plays an innocent young girl convicted for complicity in a crime committed by her boy friend (Lloyd Nolan). The male crook is sentence to six months on a prison farm populated by both men and women (segregated, of course). Ross is also incarcerated, suffering the cruelties of the sadistic male and female guards (including J. Carroll Naish and future "Ma Kettle" Marjorie Main!)
After a roustabout sailor avoids being shanghaied in 1850s San Francisco, his audacity helps him rise to a position of power in the vice industry of the infamous Barbary Coast.
Henry Williams, out in Arizona looking for a cure for his imaginary ills, stops at the ranch of Jud Morgan, and decides to stay. Jud's daughter, Sally, attracts his attention, although she is engaged to be married to Sheriff Bob Wells. Henry rides with her to town, where she wants to go shopping for her wedding clothes, but they run out of gas. No, problem' Henry holds up a passing motorist, with a monkey-wrench, and takes gasoline out of his car. They stop at a ranch where the foreman makes them become the cook and dishwasher. Then Jerome Underwood and his daughter, Harriet, arrive and they recognize Henry and Sally as the ones who held them up for gas. The jealous sheriff adds to the complications.
Robert Castleback is in possession of secret papers which could bring a certain prince to power under conditions which would make Castleback a ruling force in Europe. Master crook Arsene Lupin becomes aware of Castleback's bid for power and, in the interests of France, begins a search for the plans.