Ladislaus Vajda

The rise and inevitable fall of an amoral but naive young woman whose insouciant eroticism inspires lust and violence in those around her.

Exposed to bad influences since childhood, Mary, a young girl is pushed by her mother to approach an elderly banker by the name of Harber. After almost driving her fiancee to suicide and seducing his mentally-ill son, she realizes through a metaphorical dream the scope of her negligence. Sentenced to prison for incitement to murder Harber, she sees herself as a parallel figure to Lea, Lot's wife in Sodom, where the Angel of the Lord warns the sinful citizens of the city of their impending doom. Lea oppresses the angel and eventually turns it over to the pagan priests when her sexual advances to it are rejected. In another dream sequence, Mary becomes the Queen of Syria, whose oppressed people turn against her and who, in turn, condemns a young man who loves her to death. Finally, her dream returns to the present time and when she awakens, she runs back to her former lover.

A group of German infantrymen of the First World War live out their lives in the trenches of France. They find brief entertainment and relief in a village behind the lines, but primarily terror fills their lives as the attacks on and from the French army ebb and flow. One of the men, Karl, goes home on leave only to discover the degradation forced on his family by wartime poverty. He returns to the lines in time to face an enormous attack by French tanks.

At a mine on the shared edge of France and Germany, an underground explosion leads to the entrapment of a group of French miners. In an effort to save the trapped Frenchmen, German miners Wittkopp and Kasper take it upon themselves to traverse a crumbling war tunnel leading down into the mines. Yet, though the workers harbor no political biases against one another, their callous, less tolerant bosses hope to halt this cross-cultural rescue mission.

In London at the turn of the century, underworld kingpin Mack the Knife marries Polly Peachum without the knowledge of her father, the equally enterprising 'king of the beggars'.

In the Crimea, the Reds and the Whites aren't done fighting, and Jeanne discovers that the man she loves is a Bolshevik (when he kills her father). Penniless, she returns to Paris where she works for her uncle. Soon after, her lover Andreas is in France to organize the sailors in Toulon. So also is a thief, traitor, and libertine, Khalibiev, who wants to seduce Jeanne. His schemes, Jeanne and Andreas's naivete, and a lost diamond bring the lovers to the brink of tragedy.

Dr. Johannes Krafft climbs a 12,000-foot mountain over and over again to search for his wife, who was lost on their honeymoon. Another couple makes the dangerous climb with him.

Antinea, the Queen of Atlantis, rules her secret kingdom hidden beneath the Sahara Desert. One day two lost explorers stumble into her kingdom, and soon realize that they haven't really been saved-- Antinea has a habit of taking men as lovers, then when she's done with them, she kills them and keeps them mummified.

A Jewish slave girl falls in love with the Pharaoh's son during the Exodus.

In this mythical fantasy, the evil queen of Atlantis lives in a magnificent palace, the halls of which are filled with the mummified remains of former lovers.

Neglected by her husband, an ambitious lawyer, Irene seeks variety in Berlin's nightlife-- An evening of dancing, dolls, cocaine and immoral passion. Irene takes the "devious path" as she seeks to make her husband jealous.

Patriotic Austrian costume drama, about the martyr Medardus who opposed Napoleon's occupation of Vienna in 1809. The plot proceeds in a series of confrontations with Medardus, his mother and sister, the blind exiled Count of Valois, his ambitious daughter, and Napoleon himself (portrayed as a cool strategist), including several brief flashbacks.

After a chance meeting at a train station, Henry and Stascha, unhappy with their circumstances, are determined to leave and be together.

The French-language version of the The Threepenny Opera with a different cast from the German version.

After winning a cash prize in a contest a young woman decides to visit Venice. She hires a secretary, a wealthy young man in disguise, to accompany her on the holiday. Once in Italy she attracts several suitors but her real love is her secretary. When she discovers he has deceived her she returns to Berlin on the express and he pursues her to try and declare his love. Loosely based on the 1883 operetta Eine Nacht in Venedig (A Night in Venice) by Johann Strauss II, it was a French-language version of the 1931 German film The Love Express.

Two young officers, Saint-Avit and Morhange, get lost in the desert and find themselves prisoners of the beautiful Antinéa, queen of the city of Atlantis. Saint-Avit, blinded by his love for her, obeys her when she orders him to kill his comrade... With L’Atlantide, Pabst offers a psychoanalytic reading of Benoit’s novel, with a dominant female figure who enslaves her lovers before destroying them. The film’s fantasy dimension is disturbing, L’Atlantide bathes in a humid nightmare atmosphere, between the desperate search for a missing friend and the apparitions of an underworld lost in the desert. A long, discursive flashback suggests the Parisian origins of Antinéa, born from the marriage between Clémentine, a pretty, light-thighed French Cancan dancer, and an Arab prince seduced during a theatrical performance. But again, it's impossible to know whether these are the ramblings of an old alcoholic or the strange truth.

Heli's misfortune begins when her mother, the landlady, marries for the second time. The man is bossy and brutal. In an argument between stepfather and brother, Heli intervenes: She throws a hatchet, the stepfather falls and is killed.

Faithful to his word, Michael Tímar, captain of the St. Barbara, becomes the guardian of Kondya, daughter of a Turkish aristocrat on the run. Later, he weds the grateful young Turkish girl whom he saved from the waters of the Danube. While skillfully managing his wife's fortune, entrepreneur Tímar becomes an important wholesaler of wheat and exports his products to Brazil. But his marriage of convenience proves a failure. He is torn between the demands of bourgeois civilization, governed by money, and the ideal of freedom, consisting of living simply within nature. He then takes refuge by the side of the sweet Noemi on an island on the Danube.

Kernett is a destitute gentleman who tries to kill himself. He is saved by lord Harding who hires him as his personal secretary.

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