Kurt Gerber is attending his final class and gets into trouble with the math professor, a frustrated self-assured petty bourgeois sadist. The duel ends in catastrophe.
The story serves as a companion piece to Renoir's 1937 film, Grand Illusion, once more bringing together men from across the broad social spectrum of French society to depict one man's Sisyphean efforts to escape captivity in a German POW camp.
Vienna, 1956. After Soviet tanks crush the Hungarian uprising, soldier-of-fortune Michael Reynolds is hired to help a threatened Hungarian scientist escape from Budapest.