Love in the ruins. Six men disarm bombs in the post-war rubble of Berlin, the scars of a city echoing the past in the present, to make an inhospitable place a city again. Blueprints line the walls of their office and they can precisely identify bombs from a distance, but these men can never be truly prepared. There are too many variables. Every day is a "gamble with death” — but men with something to rebuild have the most to live for. Architects and murderers. Morality and greed. “What will rise from these ashes?”
A Texan sheriff hunts a man accused of murder across the border into Mexico. He has no jurisdiction here, so the two men team up for a lucrative, mutually beneficial cattle drive back across the border, along with a disgraced Civil War deserter and his wife and daughter: a chance to escape, a chance for justice. Romances blossom and relationships fray as these men cagily push on to their inevitable endgame, prowling around each other in the post-war ruins of country fraught with danger. A yellow dress to reawaken ghosts, unverifiable revelations weaponised as punishment. "I've loved you all my life."
"What the hell happened to justice?" The death of a young woman, ruled as a suicide but treated as a murder by her angry father, a veteran struggling to readjust to civilian life. There's too many murders in Los Angeles to reopen the case, so the girl's father, firm in his belief that the police are covering something up, investigates alone, while an embattled, whiskey-swigging homicide detective, planning a new life in Europe with his French lover, tries to help as much as he can out of a sense of moral obligation. A furious film about the ugliness of post-Korea, post-Vietnam America, how there's no escape from it, and how it may be too far gone to fix it. "We lost her a long time ago."
From darkness into light. A life on the road in a struggling industry, driving from town to town, motel to motel, to wrestle in dingy venues to small audiences for low pay. Smoke billows into the atmosphere from factory chimneys everywhere they go. "You think we've got it tough? How'd you like to work in there?" Pills and cigarettes to cope with the cold, the pain, the loneliness, but the struggle pays off in the ring. Out of it, a new set of problems: the higher the stakes, the higher the costs. Loaded dice and bribery, violence and sleaze, power games with powerful people. In Aldrich's America, wherever there's money there are people trying to steal it. But the determination to win, to right a wrong, to reclaim one's dignity, always shines through in the end. "Win or lose, I love you both. But we've come too far to lose". Work hard, win big. Maybe the future is yours, after all.