Pugnacious Min (Marie Dressler) has three passions in life: running her seedy harbor hotel, raising a girl abandoned from infancy and bickering with good-natured wharf rat Bill (Wallace Beery). Then the girl's happiness is threatened by her drunken mother's reappearance and Min's world is turned upside down. Min and Bill earned Dressler a 1930-31 Best Actress Academy Award and launched her reign as filmdom's #1 box-office draw until her death four years later.