Marcelle Géniat

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.

An ambitious and perverse adventurer sows dissension and ruin in a wealthy family of industrialists.

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.

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.

After his girlfriend is murdered, an art critic realizes that a wealthy heiress is falling in love with him.

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 ...

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.

The daughter of a notorious smuggler is raised as a boy by her foster mother.

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.

A woman who has a terrible secret to conceal takes refuge on a barge.

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.

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.

Outwardly, Monsieur Victor would appear to be the model citizen. A respectable Toulon shopkeeper, he has a devoted wife and is courteous and considerate to all who know him. However, beneath this veneer of respectability hides a notorious receiver of stolen goods, who trades with hardened criminals. Victor manages to keep up his double life without any difficulty until the fateful day when one of his partners in crime threatens to expose him. Fearing a scandal, Victor kills the crook in a moment of panic, using a shoemaker's tool. Naturally, the murder is blamed on a local shoemaker, who is sentenced to ten years' hard labour. Seven years later, the former shoemaker reappears in Toulon, having escaped from prison. The first person to recognise him is Monsieur Victor...

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.

Robert Bernier murdered his brother with the complicity of a worker. The only witness to the tragedy, Veronique was injured while rescuing her boss and remains blind. Later, cured by an operation, she denounces the criminal whose voice she recognized and who had taken over the factory.

Pietro Ponz lives a happy life in the mountains on the Swiss-Italian border with his mother Lamberta. No one but his mother knows that Pietro is a girl, a deception that Lamberta was forced into by a series of tragedies almost twenty years previously. Not long after her husband Joseph Ponz died, Lamberta also lost her fragile infant son, Pietro. Whilst mourning this double loss, she began an affair with Bolzano, a notorious smuggler. After Bolzano was killed by the customs men, Lamberta gave birth to his child, a little girl that she decided to pass off as her son Pietro, in the hope of securing an inheritance from her husband's wealthy parents. Now that Pietro is fast coming of age, his tutor and grandmother are adamant that he should be sent to a religious school. Pietro escapes from the school and joins a gang of smugglers...

Jules Leroy, an industrial shoe polish manufacturer, on his deathbed reveals to his son Achille that the family fortune originates from an inheritance stolen 23 years earlier. The one who should have inherited is one of the factory employees, Hyacinthe Camusset. The latter is also one of the lovers of Lucienne Leroy, the daughter of the family, who has a penchant for Jean Bernon, a boy who dedicates verses to her. Hyacinthe is unaware that he has been robbed but the Leroy family, who are not sure, try to woo him. The family, Hyacinthe, Jean and Lucienne meet at the castle.

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.

A legend about the Malveneur family tells of how their ancestor sold his soul to the devil and was cursed: man by day, wolf by night. The last of the Malveneurs is a scientist who carries out strange experiments on... nobody knows exactly what the does in the underground. The wife has a heart condition, her sister-in-law is a authoritarian lady. And nights in the old castle are not exactly peaceful.

A Parisian reporter tries to exonerate a fugitive neighbor of charges he murdered his wife.

Marcel Pagnol's adaptation of his own novel Manon des sources, the story of a shepherdess who exacts her revenge on the townsfolk she blames for killing her father, in two parts: Manon des sources and Ugolin.

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.

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.