Acting
Commander d'Espinac is found murdered. Having argued the day before the murder with Captain Bruchot, he is accused. The captain will have to conduct his own investigation if he wants to clear himself. His suspicions will fall on one of the three officers attached to his unit.
This murder mystery is set in a Parisian cafe and examines the mysterious murder of a famed journalist and extortionist who is killed at his table in the cafe. Though the prime suspects are gathered together( including his wife and her lover, the gun-runner, the creditor, and a playboy) and all of them have motives, none of them did it. So whodunit?
Ruined by his competitor, the banker Saccard decides to set up a new business.
At the urging of her childhood friend Brémontier, Lucie de Kéradec, a wealthy widowed countess who wishes to remarry, invites all of her seven suitors to her mansion. Her untold intention is to test them by claiming to be ruined. The experience is a success in that each of the potential husbands reveals his inner nature but a failure when it comes to finding a new life partner. None of the guests passes the test except - the eighth man, namely Brémontier who loved Lucie in secret but, being penniless, had not dared declare his flame to her.
Captain Benoît manages to take possession of the plans of a new German airplane. The German counter-espionage assigns one of their agents, beautiful Erna Fiedler, to seduce Benoît and to eliminate him. But the two spies fall in love.
A man, enthralled by a peasant woman he encounters in Siberia, forgets his fiancee, turns to crime, and brings about ruin.
The duel between a Czarist general and a lieutenant, over the general's wife, is postponed with war approaching. Years later, the rivals meet again but the general realizes his wife has been faithful to him after all.
Tania, a young girl from Central Europe, leaves her home because of her abusive father. Trained, in spite of herself, in the nets of the secret services, she becomes a renowned dancer who travels the major capitals, in search of military information. In 1917, in Paris, she was arrested and sentenced to death. She will be executed despite the fervent defense of her lawyer who has fallen in love with her.
The singer Saltore is accused of the murder of his wife's lover, and is sentenced to ten years' hard labour. His daughter proves his innocence when she discovers the culprit to be his wife, who wanted to end an embarrassing love affair.
At the turn of the last century, a beautiful spy takes advantage of a handsome officer to get across the Russian border without her passport. They fall in love. But the Grand Duke also falls in love with the young woman, who has in fact been assigned to kill him. A jealous mistress kills the spy before she can commit the crime.
In 1912, a Russian officer is wrongly accused of having stolen important papers. His only alibi being to have spent the night with the wife of a colonel, he allows himself to be condemned so as not to compromise the latter. He manages to escape and hides in the guise of a poor boatman. One day, the truth comes out, the colonel commits suicide and the lovers are finally reunited.
Based on a play by Pierre Wolff, about a wronged husband’s revenge on his wife and her lover, La belle de nuit is a major find, a work of uninhibited stylistic imagination that ranges from Sirkian stylization (an elaborate play of mirrors and doubles) to brutal realism (a tour of the bordellos of Marseille suggests the contemporary photographs of Brassaï).
