Acting
Pierre Fresnay plays the title character in Le Defroque (The Defrocked One). Cast out by his church, former priest Maurice (Fresnay) delights in mocking the traditions and credos of Catholicism. Even so, young Gerard (Pierre Trabaud) becomes convinced that Maurice has never truly lost his calling. Becoming a priest himself, Gerard devotes his life to bringing Maurice back into the fold. Things don't turn out quite as Gerard hopes, however; he has not reckoned with the possibility that Maurice may have been driven into insanity by his raging self-hatred.
The rise of a canning maker and then his abandonment of the factory because his ideal of social progress for his workers is undermined by the Board of Directors.
Jeannou lives in a castle in Périgord with his father, the last man of aristocratic lineage landowners, very attached to traditions. She meets Peter, a young engineer, she joined in Paris, decided to marry her. A few months later, pregnant, she returned to the area where the wedding will be celebrated.
Leaving the station after having caught the last Paris Metro, a man comes to the rescue of a woman who is being assaulted and finds himself drawn into her affairs.
When he finds a package in the metro, given this period of restrictions, Mr. Truche thinks it may be a good deal, he takes it home but discovers a woman's head inside. A friend of Mr. Truche having just disappeared, the superintendent accuses her of having murdered her and discovers the head buried in his cellar. But the girlfriend, whom Mr. Truche loves platonically, returns from the countryside and at the same time we spot the assassin of the unknown woman.
A wealthy industrialist, Roger de Vetheuil, married, feels assured of aging in peace. Then appears a blackmailer who accuses him of being a usurper, actually called Jean Pelletier, a mobster well known to police. Vetheuil, judging himself slandered, refuses to listen to his tormentor and goes to the police. The man speaks. The scandal is public soon ...
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.
The eponymous garçonne or flapper is Monique Lerbier, an emancipated French woman who leaves home to escape a marriage of convenience to a man she does not love which her parents have forced on her. She then falls into all sorts of carnal temptations and artificial pleasures previously unknown to her. These include her being seduced into a lesbian love affair by a chanteuse.
A man who has made a pact with death must designate the member of a family who must die the next day. After many hesitations, he will sacrifice the innocent young girl so that she does not know the infamy of her family.
Melodrama of two struggling artists whose love for each other is thwarted.She has some success as a ballerina despite being wounded by him in a fit of jealousy. His career as a sculptor is stymied when he is arrested.
An ambitious and perverse adventurer sows dissension and ruin in a wealthy family of industrialists.
A woman who has a terrible secret to conceal takes refuge on a barge.
Five unemployed workers win 100,000 Francs in the national lottery. Instead of sharing the money, they buy a ruin and build an open-air cafe. But difficulties come to split their friendly group apart.
During Christmas night, two police officers make their nocturnal rounds, in their round they meet tramps, brawlers in a café, a naked man, a concierge, a sexton, revelers in a nightclub, and end by signing in their report to the police station.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the Duke of Gerolstein traveled to Paris. Sixteen years earlier he had a daughter who was taken from him by her mother who was chased out of the palace. After many dramatic adventures, the Duke finds his daughter in the person of Fleur de Marie, martyred throughout her childhood by the Owl and the schoolmaster.
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.
Taking advantage of their uncle's absence, André and Raymond Rafet organize a New Year's Eve party at his house. The uncle returns unexpectedly, disturbs the party, threatens his nephews to disinherit them and then locks himself in his office. A few minutes later, he is found dead, poisoned.
In the eighteenth century, during a revolution in Karelia, an aristocrat, Armas de Murnau, fought alongside the revolutionaries. Captured, sentenced to death, he will try everything to see the woman he loves.
In 1914, in the first months of World War I, Louise Jarraud loses her husband, killed on the front. Shortly after, she gives birth to a baby, who soon dies. Devastated by this double misfortune, Louise decides to dedicate her life to caring for the children of others. She becomes a nurse with several employers, giving her affection to little boys or girls. A widower and another man propose to her but she refuses twice determined as she is to live only for the children in her charge.
After his girlfriend is murdered, an art critic realizes that a wealthy heiress is falling in love with him.
