László Kemény

1944. A band of runaways and orphans of the war scour the countryside in search of food and shelter. They invade and then taken in by a musician and former concert pianist who’s hiding out in a ruined castle. After the initial altercation between them the gang accepts his guidance and he wins their respect by protecting them from the elements.

The old, sickly Demeter Lapussa is a tyrant in the family. He forces his granddaughter, the beautiful Henriette, to marry baron Hátszegi, although the girl loves the penniless Vámhidy Szilárd. The two lovers attempt to commit suicide, then are torn away from each other.

An ambitious theatre director arrives in Gyulaháza from the capital. The aim of the young Debrődy is to shake up the locals and turn the life of the town upside down.

Iván Berend works with all his skills in the coal mine he inherited from his father. Fate brings him to fall in love with the beautiful Evila, the daughter of one of the miners. A wealthy Viennese banker, Félix Kaulmann, then buys up the Bondavölgy coalfield for money, but he cannot acquire Iván Berend's mine for the time being. To defeat his opponent, he comes up with a cunning plan. He takes Evila with him to the Austrian capital, then opens the new mine, luring Berend's best colleagues to him with a little more money. But he doesn't count on one thing.

Merry soldiers arrive in the sleepy Transdanubian town. The cynical woman-hunter, Ferdinándy, learns to know doctor Barlay's beautiful wife at a carnival. She lives a happy married life, and the attentions of the lieutenant are all in vain.

Count János Buttler rushes home to his parents and his beloved for the school holidays. On the way, they stop at Baron Dőry's house, where János is deviously trapped. In the presence of false witnesses, he is forcibly married to Baron Dőry's pregnant daughter. The swearing priest is the father of the unborn child. Although Buttler, his family and friends do their utmost to have the marriage annulled, the Church and the court, fearing for his authority, will not allow it. John Buttler and his lover therefore choose another way to divorce.

Mrs. Fazekas and her three sons live in a tenement house in the outskirts. The eldest son, Fecó, is saving money in order to buy a washing machine for his mother, while her other two sons spend time by hanging around and playing tricks.

In Gerolstein, those girls who were born the same year as the princess, cannot marry until she remains maiden. An attractive and very rich husband is needed for Antónia in order to fill the treasures up. The wonderful reigning princess meets her selected bridegroom, the emperor of the neighbouring Pecunia in disguise and by accident.

Blondie and Árpi love each other very much. She is a hairdresser, he is a confectioner. Blondie's parents are divorced and she lives with her grandmother. Árpi loves her parents, but has long been angry with her brother-in-law, whom she knows to be keeping a mistress. Pista turns the parents against Árpi, and after a quarrel, the boy decides to leave home. Then he has an even better idea: marry Blondie. She is just as much of a hebrensch, so she insists on marriage. It's summer, and the Árpi's move to their summer cottage on the top of the hill. But they are unprepared for independence, and so they have a series of conflicts. They quarrel badly, and Blondie moves back home. To Arpi's surprise, her father persuades her to make up with him. Blondie sulks at first, but her lover overcomes her resentment. They try again, together.

March 15, 1848; the revolution breaks out in the town of Pest. Yet at café Pilvax, in among he revolutionary youth, there is the informer of the imperial court as well. Hearing the news of the attack led by Jellasics, the inhabitants of the villages pour into the national army, and Hajdú Gyurka also escapes from his landlord. Petőfi is there at the camp of the revolutionaries, raising them to enthusiasm with his poetry.

Mihai Toth worked for forty years as a watchman in a timber warehouse. On his last watch, there was a fire: the warehouse burned to the ground. The damage amounted to one and a half million forints. It was a terrible blow to Mihai, who had worked honestly all his life. Suddenly it turns out that Mihai has won one and a half million forints in a lottery. Wanting to save his good name, he wants to deposit this sum in the state treasury. But it turned out to be not so easy: the cause of the fire has not been established and Mihai's guilt has not been proved. That's why nobody had the right to take money from him. For a long time Mihai wandered from one institution to another with a request to accept money from him, but everything was in vain. Then the old man tried a trick...

After a 15-year absence, the famous actress' expatriate husband returns to Hungary to settle their divorce. The actress is rehearsing the role of a young boy back home when her husband walks in. Seeing the little boy, the husband thinks that Janika is his child, but the actress fails to inform him of the mistake.

Baracs Pista, engineer at the construction site of a railway line near the Korláthy estate, falls in love with Rolla, a countess disguised as a peasant girl. The count is giving a party as he wants the railway line to go across his lands.

Prof. Laurent Akush from the Institute of Geophysics is working on a device that can be used to locate coal underground. For successful work he needs a tube XCX13, it is available in the West, but foreign firms sabotage the supply of the device. In his institute there is an enemy engaged in sabotage, but the professor does not believe in enemies. He believes that this is propaganda, science is above ideology, and that "scientists are made of a different dough." Laurent Akush receives an invitation to the international geological congress in Berlin, there he hopes to meet an old American friend, the scientist McLane. He takes with him his assistant Ferenc Ervish and a young Stakhanovite worker, Ishvan Kadosh. The professor does not yet know that in Berlin, Colonel Thompson of American intelligence is preparing a trap for him.

The story is about a woman who is waiting for the return from the war of her front-line soldier husband. Ilonka and her two children return from the village to their apartment in Budapest. Her husband is held captive by the Americans and awaits the first opportunity to return home, but he does not yet know that his fellow soldiers suspect him of complicity in crimes. In the meantime, Ilonka takes a job in a factory to make a living...