Acting
Marcel Delaître was a French film actor.
In pre-World Ward I in Paris, a budding artist, Pierre LeBlanc, falls in love and marries Janine, a dressmaker's assistant. Pierre has a flair for designing clothes, and he and his bride live in a blissful paradise, until the war breaks out and he becomes a soldier. Janine dies in childbirth and, no longer desiring to live, Pierre volunteers for a dangerous patrol behind German lines. While recuperating in the hospital from a wound he received on the mission, Pierre spends his time drawing sketches of dresses. He becomes rich and famous after the war. Years later, after devoting himself to his daughter, Pierre seeks a marriage with a girl no older than his daughter. A conflict develops and to ensure his daughter's happiness, Pierre sacrifices his own plans.
The exploits of Chief Police Inspector Chabrier, first before the invasion of France in May 1940 as he fights against spies preparing the coming the Germans, particularly Emmy de Welder, the alleged manager of the Rouen hospital. Later, Chabrier and his men go underground and resist the occupiers whatever the price to pay. When the Liberation comes Chabrier resumes his activities at the French National Police.
Mammy has a grandson she adores even though he is a good for nothing. One day Maurice disappears and Mammy becomes blind. When Maurice finally announces his return the fond old lady is overjoyed. Unfortunately, Maurice's plane crashes and catches fire. The young man is reported missing, presumably dead. Pierre, Mammy's husband, can't bring himself to announce such a shocking news. Desperate, he finds no other solution than subterfuge : he will ask a young couple to pass themselves off as Maurice and his girlfriend.
Mme Beaudrier, the wife of a Parliamentary Senator, hurls a pastry at visiting King Joan IV of Cerdagne, sparking off a series of farcical events involving all levels of the government and their mistresses.
Remy Germain is a doctor in a French town who becomes the focus of a vicious smear campaign, as letters accusing him of having an affair and performing unlawful abortions are mailed to village leaders. The mysterious writer, who signs each letter as "Le Corbeau" (The Raven) soon targets the whole town, exposing everyone's dark secrets.
As Dominique Marceau is being tried for the murder of Gilbert Tellier, accounts by different witnesses paint a picture of the kind of relationship the two used to share.
The adventures of a pompous jeweler who refuses to listen to the advice of his level-headed employees. In due time, the jeweler is robbed, but his sharp-eyed subordinate manages to prevent the villains from getting very far. Wising up in a hurry, the jeweler finally proves himself worthy of the love of the heroine.
Luc Froment, a reform-minded engineer, starts working at a steel mill in a small town. There he founds small groups of workers (and their families) under miserable conditions. Under the influence of Fourier's ideas, Froment tries to turn the mill into a workers' co-operative.
The inhabitants of the windswept island of Sein, in the 19th-century Brittany, follow their own religion without need for clergy, but as strangers arrive, their faith and beliefs face a deep crisis.
In a slum set to be demolished, dramas are played out among the picturesque slum dwellers, including a young couple who, denounced by the police, are forced to leave home.
In the 19th century, a thug from the slums of Paris pretends to be a young aristocrat, but is unmasked by a demi-mondaine, from the same background as him.
In Paris, in the middle of the 19th century, the Comte de Chamery died of poisoning, leaving a considerable fortune to his long-dead son. Sir William, the count's murderer, hires a young rogue, Rocambole, to pretend to be the deceased's son. The two accomplices have the Count's fortune handed over to them. But their trickery is discovered by an intriguer, Baccarat, who finds the real Count of Chamery, a young painter without fortune, in love with Carmen de Montevecchio. Rocambole, who stops at nothing, kills Sir William, gets rid of Armand and makes Carmen love him. But Baccarat is determined not to let him continue his villainies.
After serving in the trenches of World War I, Jean Diaz recoils with such horror that he renounces love and personal pleasure to immerse himself in scientific research, seeking a machine to prevent war. He thinks he has succeeded, but the government subverts his discovery, and Europe slides with seeming inevitability toward World War II. In desperation, Diaz summons the ghosts of the war dead from the graves and fields of France to give silent, accusing protest.
The young and patriotic student Demachy joins the French army in 1914 to defend his country. But he and his comrades soon experience the terrifying, endless trench war in Champagne, where more and more wooden crosses have to be erected for this cannon fodder.
Former student Raskolnikov is pushed to murder when struggling to pay the rent on his apartment. When the murder is being investigated by the police, Raskolnikov struggles between trying to hide his guilt and the pressure to confess.
Also known as Lilac, this early Anatole Litvak-directed talkie was based on a play by Tristan Bernard and Charles Henry Hirsch. The story bears traces of the Bertold Brecht-Weill piece The Threepenny Opera, with heroine Lilac (Marcelle Romeo) consorting with the criminal scum of Paris. Lilac falls in love with a handsome detective (Andre Luguet), but he doesn't let his emotions stand in the way of his duty, and in the end he reluctantly turns her over to the authorities. At $120,000, Coeur de Lilas was one of the most expensive movies to come out of France in 1931, but it more than made back its cost at the box-office.
The romantic relationship between a sports journalist and a cyclist during the Tour de France.
A gang of drug pushers is rampant on the French Riviera. The police has been informed and arrests an accomplice who is about to collect the drugs dropped off from a yacht. This person happens to be a public figure of a nearby village...
In order not to compromise the great music hall star with whom he spent the night, a man is accused of a murder he did not commit.
In the Charente, during the Nazi occupation, 51-year-old apparent pacifist Edouard Martin is in fact the leader of a resistance network, using his hobby of orchid growing to hide radio equipment.