A beautiful woman is the catalyst for catastrophe, when rival wartime black market gangs battle for dominance in the deserts of the Southwest. Restless young Julie Bronson drops out of college and returns to her father's run-down diner with hopes of settling down with her boyfriend, Army Lt. Bob Lord. She quickly realizes that the family business has been dragged into corruption by gangsters. A local nightclub owner and mob boss known as "The Ghost" has blackmailed Julie's father into stashing contraband rubber tires at his diner. When Julie confronts the blackmailer, she becomes the object of his obsessive desires. Before long the diner erupts in a firestorm of lust, bullets and blood.

Anticipating his later successes, Club Havana (1945) and The Naked Dawn (1955), Edgar G. Ulmer's Tomorrow We Live is a parable of the personal tragedies suffered during wartime. Jean Parker, best remembered as Katherine Hepburn's younger sister in the 1933 production of Little Women, worked with Ulmer again two years later in Bluebeard (1944) opposite John Carradine.

French provincials help a British spy get back to England.