An ambitious farmer becomes a pioneer in the meat-packing business, finding financial success but private disappointment over the course of many decades.

A three-generation saga over many decades in which Orin Nordholm Jr. (Paul Muni), an ambitious Dakota farm boy of immigrant parents, moves to Chicago and into the meat-packing business, where he makes a fortune by inventing the refrigerated-railway-freight car or iceboxes-on-wheels but is unhappy in his marriage to Virginia Clafflin (Mary Astor), a snobbish socialite who is willing to accept his money but not his method of making it.—Les Adams <[email protected]>