Michel Duran

1940: Taking over French Cinema

Paris, 1940. German occupation forces create a new film production company, Continental, and put Alfred Greven – producer, cinephile, and opportunistic businessman – in charge. During the occupation, under Joseph Goebbels’s orders, Greven hires the best artists and technicians of French cinema to produce successful, highly entertaining films, which are also strategically devoid of propaganda. Simultaneously, he takes advantage of the confiscation of Jewish property to purchase film theaters, studios and laboratories, in order to control the whole production line. His goal: to create a European Hollywood. Among the thirty feature films thus produced under the auspices of Continental, several are, to this day, considered classics of French cinema.

The Gallery of Monsters

The whimsical Riquet's has kidnapped and married a well-born young girl, Ralda. They travel around Spain performing their act in a circus but Ralda's beauty arouses the director's lust. Furious at being rejected, he opens a lion's cage during Ralda's act, leaving her seriously injured. With Ralda's family on their trail, the young people set off to find a better life elsewhere.

El Dorado

In Granada in Spain, Sibilla works as a dancer in a squalid cabaret called El Dorado, struggling to earn enough to care for her sick child. The boy's father Estiria, a prominent citizen, refuses them both help and recognition, fearful of jeopardising the engagement of his adult daughter Iliana to a wealthy nobleman. Iliana however slips away from her engagement party to meet her real lover Hedwick, a Swedish painter. Sibilla, in desperation after a further rejection by Estiria, sees an opportunity to blackmail him by locking the lovers overnight in their meeting-place in the Alhambra.

Twisted Mistress

Guy Carbonnel, a rich industrialist, has more eyes for rugby than for his wife Hélène. René Rivals, his long-time pal, takes advantage of it to court her but Guy is becoming suspicious so René has to find a way to deflect his friend's suspicion. He finally has an idea: he asks Lilian, a circus acrobat, to pose as his mistress. Lilian accepts and they embark on a series of eventful moments.

Night at the Crossroads

Inspector Maigret investigates the mysterious murder of a Dutch diamond dealer, found dead in a stolen car. The car belongs to an insurance agent, Michonnet, and has been abandoned in the garage belonging to Carl Andersen.

Bad Seed

A young man-about-Paris, cut off from his father's money, falls in with a picaresque gang of car thieves.

The Woman from Nowhere

A fifty year old woman, scarred by a life of disillusionment and regret, returns to the place where she lived twenty years before, to rekindle happier memories. She meets a young woman, the daughter of the current owners of the property, who is on the point of abandoning her home – just as she did, all those years ago...

Mam'zelle Nitouche

Célestin, the organist of a convent, has written and composed a light operetta under the name of Floridor. One day, the Mother Superior asks him to chaperone one of the boarders, Denise de Flavigny, who is returning home to get married. Now, Denise, for all her goody goody looks, soon proves as saucy as can be. Things get even more complicated when Célestin starts courting Corinne, the star of his operetta, to the great displeasure of a commander of dragons, the young woman's lover. Worse, the latter is none other than the Mother Superior's brother... To say nothing of Lieutenant Fernand de Champlatreux, who happens to fall in love with Denise, his fiancée that he has never seen before...!

To the Polls, Citizens

Le Chemin du bonheur

Three friends, Fred, singer, Claude, painter and André, extra, live in the same studio and share everything, even their girlfriend. Fred falls in love with a young girl but leaves her when he learns that she is rich. The two friends will try to fix this problem.