In the wake of a career-ending scandal, disgraced lawyer Lawson Russell moves to Key West, where he befriends aging novelist Christopher Marlowe. After letting Russell borrow his latest manuscript, Marlowe dies of a heart attack. When Russell publishes the dead man's manuscript under his own name, he makes the best-seller list—and unwittingly becomes the prime suspect in the investigation of a grisly multiple homicide.
In 19th century New Orleans, creole Henriette must choose between love and devotion to the church. Neither choice is going to be easy, as there is great opposition to her ideas of breaking traditions.
Bob Lessing is a successful businessman who becomes amorously entangled with a dangerous and mysterious woman. What Lessing doesn't realize is that she has been sent by her powerful criminal boyfriend Vic Haddock to collect a large sum of drug money owed to him by Bob's murdered brother.
A child is born. We see underwater swimmers representing this. He is young, in a jungle setting, with two fanciful "instincts" guiding him as swooping bird-like acrobats initially menace, then delight. As an adolescent, he enters a desert, where a man spins a large cube of metal tubing. He leaves his instinct-guides behind, and enters a garden where two statues dance in a pond. As he watches their sensual acrobatics of love, he becomes a man. He is offered wealth (represented by a golden hat) by a devil figure. In a richly decorated room, a scruffy troupe of a dozen acrobats and a little girl reawaken the old man's youthful nature and love.
When a man faces surmounting bills for his dying son's hospital stay, he enters into an agreement to sell his body for organ transplants to pay the bills. However, when he is advised that the doctors want to claim his organs immediately, he goes on the run
