Germany, around the turn of the century. When sailor Poldi returns to his Bavarian home village after many years at sea he falls for his childhood friend Dorle. But Dorle is already promised to the village blacksmith Domini. A bitter rivalry between the two ensues.
Cinematographer turned director (Xaver Schwarzenberger) has filmed a small, wintry story of epic human proportions. A young doctor (Hanno Poeschi) exiles himself to a remote Austrian village when he accidentally causes a death. Once at the village, winter sets in and against that harsh and poetic backdrop a rabies epidemic sweeps through the population. The doctor convinces people he is a biologist but then he treats someone bitten and gives his real profession away. As the epidemic raises questions of life and death, the doctor's mind is brought back to the death that caused his exile and he considers suicide for awhile. The same issues come up again when an enraged villager goes on a killing spree and in turn, is hunted by the citizens. Faced with the prevalence of death all around him, the doctor starts to gain some perspective on the personal experience that brought him here in the first place.
A woman (Maria Emo) cares for her older husband (Hugo Gottschlich) who makes his living smuggling things across the Tyrolian Mountains in this tragic drama. The police know the husband is up to no good but have been unable to catch him in the act. A young policeman (Sieghardt Rupp) is assigned in hopes of cracking the case, and the wife falls in love with the cop. When the husband discovers the two are in love, he picks up a knife and goes to fight the policeman for the woman he loves.
Richard Basehart stars as one of the most influential and one of the most reviled men in history in this probing psychological study of a man who nearly gained dominance over the entire western world--at the cost of millions of lives--Hitler.
Beautiful young Helga gets publicly shamed because a rich land owner seduced and impregnated her but refuses to take responsibility in a story of love and death in Sweden.
In the 1880s, Georges Duroy, back from the Colonies, arrives in Paris with the firm intention of conquering the capital through his power of seduction, his selfishness and cynicism. Entering into journalism through the back door he will soon rise to the top with the support of several women: Madeleine Forestier, the wife of his journalist friend Charles; Clothilde de Marelle, his first mistress; Virginie Walter, the wife of a newspaper owner; Suzanne Walter, her daughter who eventually marries Duroy.
