Jacques Denoël

Julien Couturier and his wife Louise, a young couple from Auvergne who have come to Paris to try their luck for the first time in their lives, become the owners of the "Café du Cadran" ("Clockface Cafe"). On opening day, they meet the people who will become their clientele. It's a busy place, with regular customers served by two waiters, Jules and Victor. While Julien is comfortable in his role as boss, Louise doesn't quite get used to this urban world, where everything moves faster, especially human feelings. She often misses Marcenait, the village in Auvergne where she and her husband ran the "Café du Commerce". Mr. Luigi, a café customer and violinist who performs at the "Café de Paris", has undertaken Louise's cultural education. He teaches her how to dress and do her hair, while recounting his musical successes and travels, skilfully playing on his undeniable seductiveness...

Marcel, a simple-minded factory worker, is tricked into buying a high-priced American convertable car by a widow determined not to let it fall into the hands of her late husband's secretary/secret lover. Once in pocession of the car, Marcel only encounters one bad luck episode after another with the excessive gasoline consumtion, his wife trying to sell it to make ammends meet, getting into traffic jams, accidently riding into a car wash with the top down, and more.

The Secret Service abducts a "rocket scientist" to better protect him against gangsters acting for Chinese agents.

Bad financial conditions compel an aristocratic family to do strange work.

Hopes and love and ambitions and friendship in a group of young jazz-loving Parisians.

Micheline Chevassu is a young, naive woman living in an orphanage. Through classified ads, she has a date with an unknown man. She escapes from the orphanage to go to it, dreaming of the Prince Charming. But comes Nicolas Rougemont, an unattractive middle-aged man... He pretends not to be the author of the letters, who could not come...

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.

Loursat, a lawyer, lives with his daughter Nicole in a sinister and vast bourgeois residence. Abandoned for nearly twenty years by his wife, the brilliant lawyer has sunk into alcoholism and his relationship with his daughter is virtually non-existent. However, one day the corpse of a stranger is discovered in the residence of Loursat. Nicole, who frequents a gang of young people who escape boredom by stealing cars and other objects, is immediately suspected.