Dirty Hands

Alexandre Dumas' romantic novel Lady of the Camelias (more popularly known as Camille) was filmed twice in 1953, first in Argentina, then in France. The Argentine film was heavily modernized, while the French version returns to Dumas' 19th-century milieu. Micheline Presle is excellent as Marguerite, the gorgeous courtesan who flits from man to man until she finds true love in the form of the much-younger Armand (Rolande Alexandre). Though he is willing to marry her despite her past, she is persuaded to forsake him, lest his reputation be ruined. The story then wends its way towards its famous tragic finale, as the consumptive Marguerite is permitted a few brief moments of happiness before her flame is permanently extinguished. Advertised as the seventh version of the Dumas classic, La Dame aux Camelias was certainly not the last.

Thanks to a bit of string-pulling by his aunt, Jean du Bois d'Ombelles, a young recruit who has blue blood in his veins, hopes to go through a nice and comfortable military service. Unfortunately he becomes Corporal Bourrache's pet aversion. Nevertheless, against all expectations, Jean ends up taking a liking for military life.

A young noblewoman regrets having to marry the village ironmaster for money reasons, but later comes to appreciate her new husband.

A vagabond arrives in a village where he works for a rich landowner, Master Pierre; he seduces one of the girls, gets her pregnant and hits the road again.

Comedy. A father whose looking for a suitable candidate for his daughter ends up having a mistress and tigers prowling all around him.

A young man is hired by an industrialist, while a secret hangs over his birth. His boss's wife turns out to be his mother, who hides the truth from him.

In 19th-century France, a little girl follows her two sisters into a Carmelite monastery with the goal of becoming a saint.

In 1914, during the First World War, the rich chatelaine de Boissière, with a sulphurous past, took in Jean le Barois, a young soldier lost in territory occupied by the Germans, who was none other than the son of the man she loved, then ruined. The young man, after having despised her, falls madly in love with the woman who pushed his father to suicide.

Monsieur Durand-Bidon's mother-in-law is decidedly cantankerous. She never ceases - she who is a duchess - to reproach the latter for his low origins. One morning, at dawn, while he comes home "well watered", he is surprised with a comrade at the bottom of a bathtub. Taken for a homosexual, overwhelmed by Step-Mom, he will never stop trying to escape her and will end up, after many adventures, by learning a somewhat embarrassing secret about the pseudo-nobility of his step-family.

Because the shiner Titin has fallen in love with a singer, he braves the latter's protector, the baron, and passes himself off as an insurer in connection with a pearl necklace that is circulating. Bitters get involved, Titin kidnaps the beauty and leaves the pearls to the baron.

Vérotchka, a vivacious theater actress touring in a provincial town, is turned out of her hotel by orders of Monsieur Tricointe, the stern president of the local law court. In a rage, the actress knocks at Tricointe's door with a view to protesting against the treatment she is given. She goes about it so well that she ends up being accommodated by the president himself. This is the moment Jean-Pierre Gaudet, the Minister of Justice, chooses to pay an unannounced visit to his friend Tricointe. There he mistakes Vérotchka for Madame Tricointe and the president does not dare to contradict Gaudet. A lot of absurd situations ensue.

1824 in Issoudun. A bourgeois, Rouget, lives as a husband and wife, La Rabouilleuse, who holds him in her power. The old man's nephew, ex-Colonel Philippe Bridau of the Imperial Guard, swears to hunt the intruder.

François and Victor sell hard candy at the fun fair. They also bring up Gisèle, a one-year-old child they found by the side of the road. Although the two men are often at each other's throats they are the best friends, getting on well with the other fairground people. But when they defend Lisa, the fortune teller's daughter against Dédé, a thug who pesters her, they provoke his anger. Dédé sets fire to the two friends' stand and they are forced to take the road.

François Cardinaud is one of the richest shipowners in the region. But this success arouses resentment and jealousy. When Marthe, his wife, leaves the home without warning, Cardinaud sees her life cracking little by little.

A girl, Marie, who got engaged to a boy who is leaving for military training (thirteen days) wins two million on the raffle, thanks to an older man, Claude, whom she calls her good luck …