Traveling through an unnamed European country on the brink of war, sickly, intellectual Ester, her sister Anna and Anna's young son, Johan, check into a near-empty hotel. A basic inability to communicate among the three seems only to worsen during their stay. Anna provokes her sister by enjoying a dalliance with a local man, while the boy, left to himself, has a series of enigmatic encounters that heighten the growing air of isolation.

A young idealistic civil servant, Arvid Falk, leaves the drudgery of bureaucracy to become a journalist and author. As he explores various social activities—politics, publishing, theatre, philanthropy, and business—he finds more hypocrisy and political corruption than he thought possible. He takes refuge with a group of "bohemians", who meet in a red dining room in Berns Salonger to discuss these matters.

The year is 1941 and Nazi Germany is at its peak. Hitler's army is storming into Russia. Sweden stands lonely and isolated while the air force is training intensely due to a coming attack. The squadron leader pushes his men at its hardest. It's a constant game with death where death unfortunately often wins.

On a tourist trip abroad the passengers on the coach witness an assassination attempt on the President Hurkas. One of the tourists has evidence against the perpetrators, and is killed when the coach reaches Sweden. Another passenger observes how one of the perpetrators is picked up by a yellow car. She is kidnapped and locked up in a mental hospital.

16 -year-old Mari has just been released from a juvenile detention school after one year of treatment. To prevent her from making contact with her old gang, she is sent to Skåne in southern Sweden, where she will work in a dairy shop. She doesn't like being there so she decides to run away and hitchhike her way up to Stockholm. She makes contact with her old gang but realizes that she's not welcome anymore and her boyfriend has even hooked up with a new girl.

The married detective couple John and Kajsa Hillman goes on a vacation to Holmfors mill where a friend of Kajsa's lives with her husband. When a young woman is found murdered it is clear that this is another case for the Hillmans.

Jan Froman is a young man with great plans for the future. He gets a job as an assistant janitor at a bank, but with inherited money he starts to buy and sell real estate which eventually increases in value. He falls in love with Margareta, whose father is a naval officer. Margareta is slighted by her fiance and follows Froman on a sailing trip in the archipelago. Plot by Mattias Thuresson.

Arvid and Lilli Ekman is a senior couple with one single adult son, Arne. They find out that the son is secretly engaged with the young Margit Berg - and that they already have a three-year-old son together.

The ladies man Georg is finally about to get married, but a misunderstanding lead to his new wife break up the wedding.

A comedy about the shunned office worker Fridolf who gets into trouble when a rationalization expert audits the colonial goods company. It doesn't get any better when Fridolf invites the clerk Lisa, who is newly employed and feels lonely, to his home, a visit that his jealous wife Selma does not appreciate.

Georg Hammar works at the General Hospital and is engaged to the famous professor Berg's daughter Inga. But he is also drawn to the nurse Maria.

When private eye John Hillman is on assignment in London his wife Kajsa visits the Army's riding school at Strömsholm, Sweden. She gets involved in the strange murder of the Blue Rider. Unknown to everyone at Strömsholm.

A model is murdered at a famous fashion house and the Hillmans start to investigate. Kajsa Hillman is employed as a model and discovers that several people had motives to kill her.

The American boat is on its way to Gothenburg. On board are the Swedish-American millionaire Fridolf F. Johnson from Detroit (Håkan Westergren) and his male secretary of the same name (Fridolf Rhudin). The millionaire stays hidden in his cabin with the secretary and does not appear on deck. A journalist arrives out at sea by airplane and asks for an interview, which the millionaire refuses to agree to. The journalist disguises himself as a steward, puts on a hidden camera (a spy camera) in the buttonhole, enters with a tea tray and photographs the wrong person - the secretary.

Ludvig and Sussi Battwyhl, Louis and Katja Brenner and Julia and Kurt Balzar are upper class millionaires. They don't seem to do any real work but still need a vacation in the mountains. Everybody seems to be romantically involved with everybody. A rich American woman joins them.

Spoiled upper class girl must join a home defense unit to learn military drill and fall in love with a lieutenant.

Proud Katrina falls in love with Johan, who's a sailor, and follows him home to the island of Åland. She has been promised a paradise with blooming apple trees but are greeted by poverty and hard work.

A newspaper misprints Pontus Blom's (Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt) yearly income as being much more than it is; this leads to various comical situations of exceeding hilarity.

In 1803 the Swedish inventor John Ericsson is born. After a military career he went to England and became one of the first builders of locomotives. Despite large debts, he invents the propeller. In 1839 he crosses the Atlantic and builds ships for the US Navy. When the US civil war breaks out, the Federation needs a ship to match the Confederate 'Merrimac' and preventing the Confederation from exporting cotton to Europe. Ericsson builds the 'Monitor', a ship the Federation needs to win the war.

This film depicts every noteworthy event (in the eyes of the film-makers) in Sweden from the death of King Oscar II, in 1907, to the celebration of the 80th birthday of King Gustave V in Stockholm in June of 1938. This film is comprised largely of newsreel clips intermixed with the fictional story of the family lives of a working man and a well-to-do newspaper editor through two generations, with a special significance in the showing of the development of the social-democratic form of government in Sweden.