An industrialist is urged to run for President, but this requires uncomfortable compromises on both political and marital levels.

Daisy Kenyon (Crawford) is a Manhattan commercial artist having an affair with an arrogant and overbearing but successful lawyer named Dan O’Mara (Andrews). O’Mara is married and has children. Daisy meets a single man, a war veteran named Peter Lapham (Fonda), and after a brief and hesitant courtship decides to marry him, although she is still in love with Dan.

When Dr. Anthony Edwardes arrives at a Vermont mental hospital to replace the outgoing hospital director, Dr. Constance Peterson, a psychoanalyst, discovers Edwardes is actually an impostor. The man confesses that the real Dr. Edwardes is dead and fears he may have killed him, but cannot recall anything. Dr. Peterson, however is convinced his impostor is innocent of the man’s murder, and joins him on a quest to unravel his amnesia through psychoanalysis.