During the American Civil War, Captain Robert Shaw is injured in the Battle of Antietam and sent home to Boston on medical leave. He visits his family there, where he meets the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a former slave. Shaw is offered a promotion to the rank of Colonel to command the first all-black regiment in the Union Army, the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He accepts and asks his childhood friend, 2nd Lieutenant Cabot Forbes, to serve as his second in command, with the rank of major. Their first volunteer is another friend, Thomas Searles, a bookish free African American. Other recruits soon follow, including gravedigger John Rawlins, timid freeman Jupiter Sharts and Silas Trip, an escaped slave who does not trust Shaw. Trip instantly clashes with Searles and Rawlins must keep the peace.
The film begins in March 1836 in the Mexican State of Coahuila y Tejas town of San Antonio de Bexar (now Downtown San Antonio in the U.S. state of Texas), site of the Alamo, where bodies of Texan defenders and Mexican attackers are strewn over the Alamo. The film then flashes back to a year earlier. Sam Houston (Dennis Quaid) attends a party where he tries to persuade people to migrate to Texas. He meets with David Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton), recently defeated for reelection to Congress. Houston explains to Crockett that as an immigrant to Texas, Crockett will receive 640 acres (2.6 km) [a square mile] of his own choosing. Crockett, with a grin, pointedly asks Houston whether this new republic is going to need a president.
On the border between the U.S. and Mexico, Miguel Ramirez (Michael Peña) crosses the border illegally for work. Upon entering the United States, he meets Olivia (Amy Madigan), the wife of Roy (Ed Harris), a former sheriff and the owner of the land Miguel is currently passing through. Olivia gives him and his companion Carl water and a blanket, and departs after telling them there is a highway not too far away where they can try to stop a ride.
At the Tarasco bar in Mexico, an American man tells the story of how he witnessed a massacre in another bar committed by a Mexican with a guitar case full of guns. The bar's patrons are uninterested until the American mentions the name "Bucho." Meanwhile, El Mariachi has a dream of his encounter with Moco that left his lover dead and his hand shot. He is awakened by the American, who tells him to continue his search for Bucho at the bar. El Mariachi travels to the town and meets a child to whom he gives some guitar playing tips. At the Tarasco bar, El Mariachi engages in a tense standoff with Bucho's goons before a massive gunfight erupts. He kills everyone in the bar, but is followed outside by a man named Tavo. On the street, Tavo shoots El Mariachi twice before being killed himself. El Mariachi is then sheltered in the local bookstore by Carolina, the owner. Bucho arrives at the bar to survey the carnage and hears the kid from earlier playing his guitar by the door. A paranoid Bucho orders his men to hunt down the man with a guitar case full of guns.
The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) and Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon) are competing daredevils at the turn of the 20th century. Leslie is the classic hero – always dressed in white, handsome, ever-courteous, enormously talented and successful. Leslie's nemesis, Fate, is the traditional melodramatic villain – usually dressed in black, sporting a black moustache and top hat, glowering at most everyone, maniacal evil laugh, grandiose plans to thwart the hero, and dogged by failure. Leslie proposes an automobile race from New York to Paris, to prove the ability of a new car named after him. Fate builds his own race vehicle, the Hannibal Twin-8, complete with hidden devices of sabotage. Others enter cars in the race, including New York City's most prominent newspaper. Driving the newspaper's car is beautiful photojournalist Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood), a vocal suffragette.
A teenage Wyatt Earp lives on the family farm. His older brothers, Virgil and James, are away at war serving with the Union Army. Wyatt dreams of war, and packs some belongings, bids his younger brothers & sisters goodbye, and attempts to run away, intending to lie about his age and join the Union Army. He doesn't make it off the farm before his father catches him and forces him to return home. A short while later, both brothers return home at the war's end, with James gravely wounded. Shortly afterwards, the family moves west. It is during this move that Wyatt first sees a man killed, shot during a gunfight. He gets sick at the sight, and vomits.
In 1951, Myrtle "Tilly" Dunnage returns to her hometown of Dungatar, to take care of her ill mother, Molly. Tilly was sent out of town at the age of ten because of false accusations of murder. Tilly, an expert dressmaker trained by Madeleine Vionnet in Paris, transforms the locals with her couture creations and in the process, exacts revenge on the people who wrongly accused her of murder all those years ago.
Five years after avenging his wife and child, with supplies of petroleum having become nearly exhausted following a major energy crisis and a global war, ex-Main Force Patrol officer "Mad" Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) roams the now depopulated and desolate desert in his scarred, black supercharged V-8 Pursuit Special, scavenging for food, water, and fuel. His only companions are an Australian Cattle Dog and a rare functioning firearm–a sawed-off shotgun–for which ammunition is very scarce.
"Bronco Billy's Wild West Show" is a rundown traveling circus, the star of which is Bronco Billy McCoy (Clint Eastwood), the "fastest gun in the West." For the show's finale, a blindfolded Bronco Billy shoots balloons around a female assistant on a revolving wooden disc, and for the last balloon, he throws a knife. However, the assistant's leg is nicked, so she quits. The show is not making any money, and nobody has been paid for months.
Un jeune adolescent est témoin d'un meurtre sauvage. Recevant une nouvelle identité, il est transféré au sein d'un programme de formation en milieu difficile pour jeunes en difficulté où il est pris en charge par Hannah Faber, une experte en survie. Mais les assassins sont à sa recherche et ils sont prêts à tous les moyens pour le retrouver quitte à causer un véritable massacre. A travers le Montana, il va tenter de leur échapper, aidé par Hannah.
During the early 1970s, FBI agent Ray Levoi is assigned to aid in the investigation of a political murder; that of Leo Fast Elk (Allan R.J. Joseph), on a Native American reservation in South Dakota. Agent William Dawes, Ray's superior, has chosen him for the task due to his mixed Sioux heritage which might assist in the inquiry as they interview local townspeople. Ray is partnered with agent Frank "Cooch" Coutelle, who has diligently worked on the probe looking to apprehend a prime suspect: Aboriginal Rights Movement radical Jimmy Looks Twice. While helping Cooch track down the suspect, Ray gradually becomes sensitized to Indian issues, partially from his attraction to Maggie Eagle Bear, a political Native American activist and schoolteacher.
Matthew Quigley (Tom Selleck) is a cowboy and sharpshooter from America with a keen eye and a specially modified rifle with which he can shoot accurately at extraordinary distances. Quigley's weapon of choice is a customized 1874 Sharps Buffalo Rifle. He answers a newspaper advertisement that asks for men with a special talent in long-distance shooting with four words, "M. Quigley 900 yards," written on a copy of the advertisement, punctuated by several closely spaced bullet holes.
Amos Tucker (Conway) and Theodore Ogelvie (Knotts), a pair of bumbling holdup men now going straight, arrive in the "boom town" of Junction City to start anew. But the duo end up causing havoc while getting cheated out of their money by two bank robbers named Wes Hardin (Osmond) and Hank Starrett (Gehring). Things worsen when Amos and Theodore end up being suspected of the robbery and end up on the run from the town's feared lawman Marshal Wooly Bill Hitchcock (Mars), who developed a personal vendetta toward Amos and Theodore after they accidentally humiliated and injured the marshal on two occasions. To escape Hitchcock's vengeance, ditching their donkey Clarise as she was used by the robbers, the Amos and Theodore enlist in the US Cavalry at Fort Concho. But the duo's bunglings and a run-in with a now insane marshal, who found them by following Clarise, result in the fort being burned to the ground. The following day, the fort commander Major Gaskill (Morgan) is relieved of his position while Amos and Theodore are placed in a military jail.
Catherine Ballou (Jane Fonda), who wants to be a schoolteacher, is returning home by train to Wolf City, Wyoming, to the ranch of her father, Frankie Ballou (John Marley). On the way, she unwittingly helps accused cattle rustler Clay Boone (Michael Callan) elude his captor, Sheriff Maledon (Bruce Cabot), when Boone's Uncle Jed (Dwayne Hickman), a drunkard disguised as a preacher, distracts the lawman.