A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
Through the childhood and adolescence of Signor Giacomo Casanova (from his memoirs), this is a description of how people lived in 18th-century Venice: their customs, habits, medicine, religion, and--most of all--the omnipresence of hypocrisy.
A range war between cattlemen and farmers comes to a head with the arrival of a Deputy Marshal and "Mule" a famous gunfighter in the town of Houstonville, Texas.
