Fernand Rivers

A young intellectual, Hugo, joins the Communist Party out of a sense of idealism, only to see his principles manipulated by party leaders. He is given the assignment of killing Professor Hoederer, a party deviationist. However, he grows to admire the man and begins to have doubts about morals and revolutionary politics. But jealousy - Hugo thinks Hoederer has made love to his wife, Jessica - takes matters out of the political realm.

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Thanks to a bit of string-pulling by his aunt, Jean du Bois d'Ombelles, a young recruit who has blue blood in his veins, hopes to go through a nice and comfortable military service. Unfortunately he becomes Corporal Bourrache's pet aversion. Nevertheless, against all expectations, Jean ends up taking a liking for military life.

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Arlette and her brother are penniless orphans; as the man is to leave for Africa to work for a long time, the young girl is forced to live with her cousins, four spinsters, who place virtue over everything.

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A young noblewoman regrets having to marry the village ironmaster for money reasons, but later comes to appreciate her new husband.

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Cyrano, poet and cadet from Gascony, is afflicted with an excessively long nose which makes the beauties smile. He is no less in love with his cousin Roxane.

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1824 in Issoudun. A bourgeois, Rouget, lives as a husband and wife, La Rabouilleuse, who holds him in her power. The old man's nephew, ex-Colonel Philippe Bridau of the Imperial Guard, swears to hunt the intruder.

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A young man is hired by an industrialist, while a secret hangs over his birth. His boss's wife turns out to be his mother, who hides the truth from him.

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Félix Raffut, a Périgord squire terrified by the German invasion, carries out the exodus of his family and his furniture towards supposedly hospitable places.

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Because the shiner Titin has fallen in love with a singer, he braves the latter's protector, the baron, and passes himself off as an insurer in connection with a pearl necklace that is circulating. Bitters get involved, Titin kidnaps the beauty and leaves the pearls to the baron.

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François and Victor sell hard candy at the fun fair. They also bring up Gisèle, a one-year-old child they found by the side of the road. Although the two men are often at each other's throats they are the best friends, getting on well with the other fairground people. But when they defend Lisa, the fortune teller's daughter against Dédé, a thug who pesters her, they provoke his anger. Dédé sets fire to the two friends' stand and they are forced to take the road.

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A father allows himself to be accused of the murder of a blackmailer to save his son who is the real murderer. But he is forced to confess, and commits suicide in his cell.

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Vérotchka, a vivacious theater actress touring in a provincial town, is turned out of her hotel by orders of Monsieur Tricointe, the stern president of the local law court. In a rage, the actress knocks at Tricointe's door with a view to protesting against the treatment she is given. She goes about it so well that she ends up being accommodated by the president himself. This is the moment Jean-Pierre Gaudet, the Minister of Justice, chooses to pay an unannounced visit to his friend Tricointe. There he mistakes Vérotchka for Madame Tricointe and the president does not dare to contradict Gaudet. A lot of absurd situations ensue.

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Monsieur Durand-Bidon's mother-in-law is decidedly cantankerous. She never ceases - she who is a duchess - to reproach the latter for his low origins. One morning, at dawn, while he comes home "well watered", he is surprised with a comrade at the bottom of a bathtub. Taken for a homosexual, overwhelmed by Step-Mom, he will never stop trying to escape her and will end up, after many adventures, by learning a somewhat embarrassing secret about the pseudo-nobility of his step-family.

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In 1914, during the First World War, the rich chatelaine de Boissière, with a sulphurous past, took in Jean le Barois, a young soldier lost in territory occupied by the Germans, who was none other than the son of the man she loved, then ruined. The young man, after having despised her, falls madly in love with the woman who pushed his father to suicide.

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A young man marries the daughter of a famous actress, but is visibly more attracted to his stepmother. She manages, not without difficulty, to reconnect the bonds of a vacillating household.

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The Count of Kerlor, to chastise his wife whom he believes to be unfaithful, entrusts his son to a couple of scoundrels. When he repents and wants to find the child, the carnies make their nephew sick. But the other little boy, in search of his comrade, is recognized by his reconciled parents.

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Around a baby whose paternity is disputed, the members of a bourgeois family are agitated: the irascible father, the whining mother, the modern young girl, the good-for-nothing son, a secretary in love with the young girl, an associate and the importunate old aunt who smooths things over.

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A vagabond arrives in a village where he works for a rich landowner, Master Pierre; he seduces one of the girls, gets her pregnant and hits the road again.

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A girl, Marie, who got engaged to a boy who is leaving for military training (thirteen days) wins two million on the raffle, thanks to an older man, Claude, whom she calls her good luck …

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Alexandre Dumas' romantic novel Lady of the Camelias (more popularly known as Camille) was filmed twice in 1953, first in Argentina, then in France. The Argentine film was heavily modernized, while the French version returns to Dumas' 19th-century milieu. Micheline Presle is excellent as Marguerite, the gorgeous courtesan who flits from man to man until she finds true love in the form of the much-younger Armand (Rolande Alexandre). Though he is willing to marry her despite her past, she is persuaded to forsake him, lest his reputation be ruined. The story then wends its way towards its famous tragic finale, as the consumptive Marguerite is permitted a few brief moments of happiness before her flame is permanently extinguished. Advertised as the seventh version of the Dumas classic, La Dame aux Camelias was certainly not the last.

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A young noblewoman is unhappy about needing to marry the village ironmaster for financial reasons, but later comes to appreciate her husband.

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Rigadin (Charles Prince) is having raging fits of jealousy.

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Whiffles enters a beauty contest.

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Comedy. A father whose looking for a suitable candidate for his daughter ends up having a mistress and tigers prowling all around him.

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Martyrs of the Inquisition

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A woman receives her lover at home but the husband arrives having to hide him in a trunk. They go on a trip and the porters do not treat the trunk very well.

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Patterning himself after the American gangster John Dillinger, the criminal (Robert Hossein) is tracked by the inspector (Charles Aznavour), a former childhood friend. Plenty of gunplay and psychology is used to trap the killer. His only tender moments are spent with his girlfriend Stella (Virna Lisi). Dillinger is cornered by the police and kills several innocent victims in a crowd during the shootout. The mob decides to take things into their own hands as they approach the doomed man with a noose when he runs out of bullets.

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A musician named Jacques Christens, is given a proposition by an old man. For ten million Francs he is asked to impersonate a certain Paul de Baer – a man who is supposedly exiled in the Amazone. Christens is told this scheme will save Mr. Baer from ruin. An adaptation of Boileau and Narcejac's "D'entre les Morts".

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Two friends from the last war, Pierrot, a bar owner, and Gustave, a police inspector, are in contact with a notorious gang of racketeers in Montmartre. Tired of putting up with Albert the King's demands, Pierrot kills the gangster during a bar brawl. His first instinct is to flee, but on Gustave's advice, he turns himself in to the law. All things considered, he'll be safer in prison than exposed to the reprisals of the "underworld". Pierrot goes to trial. He was acquitted as having acted in self-defense. But his release leaves him open to the vengeance of Bob, one of Albert's accomplices. Pierrot narrowly escapes an ambush, but is finally able to rid himself of the threat hanging over him, thanks to the friendship of Inspector Gustave, and finally reunites with the companion of his life, Dora, who has never stopped trembling for him.

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François Cardinaud is one of the richest shipowners in the region. But this success arouses resentment and jealousy. When Marthe, his wife, leaves the home without warning, Cardinaud sees her life cracking little by little.

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