The singer
Émile Boulard is a props man in a Paris movie studio. He has a wife, Suzanne. Or to be more accurate, let's say he HAD a wife since she left him fifteen years before, allegedly ... to go buy a post stamp. But now that their daughter Martine , who lives with her, is old enough to marry, she resurfaces. She confesses that, in order to explain his absence, she has told Martine her father was a great explorer and lion hunter in Africa. Not to disappoint his daughter, Émile accepts to pose as the adventurer he is supposed to be. At the same time he will help Daniel, Martine's bashful fiancé, not to become a henpecked husband like him.
The story of how the people of Paris cope with the strains and struggles of war, from the siege of the city by the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 to the invasion by the Germans in World War II.
Claude is a young man whose girlfriend has just broken up with him. Feeling unable to overcome the pain, Claude has no other idea than to end his life. Back home, he finds five middle-aged or elderly men sitting at the dinner table but he refuses to join the guests and goes upstairs to his bedroom. The worst is prevented thanks to a servant who has caught sight of Claude's revolver. Claude 's uncle joins his nephew and manages to persuade him not to take action. He takes him downstairs to the dining room where each in turn, the five guests start telling their own story. For it happens that they too once had their heart broken and that they too once wanted to die for love.
(uncredited)
A would be blind hoodlum redeems himself in the Salvation Army just for a lovely lieutenant.
Joséphine Picking
The owner of an apartment building is found murdered. Two rival policemen, Boucheron and Lambert, investigate the matter and get into the private lives of the tenants: an unfaithful judge, a crippled blind man and his daughter, an eccentric knife thrower, a shoplifter (and proud of it!), a bourgeois lady who has a bone to pick with a gigolo, a mistress who cheats on her lover, not forgetting the caretaker and a soldier in love.
"Les Trois Valses" traces the love story of two people over three eras. In the first waltz (music based on Johann Strauss I), Yvonne is a sensitive Parisian ballet dancer, whose romance with a dashing officer is brought to an abrupt end by his family. She goes off to Vienna to become a big star. In the second waltz, her daughter, an even bigger star, but now of Paris music halls, has a brief flirtation with the rakish man-about-town who is the son of suitor number one. She throws him over pretty quickly for a chance to shine at a Gala performance. Finally, in the third waltz, the two get together, when she is a movie star, and he is posing as an insurance salesman.
Mistenflute, mère de la Gosseline
A film by Louis Feuillade.
