Daisy Kenyon is a Manhattan commercial artist having an affair with an arrogant and overbearing but successful lawyer named Dan O’Mara. O’Mara is married and has children. Daisy meets a single man, a war veteran named Peter Lapham, and after a brief and hesitant courtship decides to marry him, although she is still in love with Dan.

A scientist doing experiments on a human fetus discovers a method to accelerate the fetus into a mature adult in just a few days.

On the eve of America’s entry in World War II, a colonel retired to his small Southern town, and discovers that there is a plan afoot to tear down Confederate Monument Square. He begins a campaign to rally the townspeople to save the square.