Christiane Ribes

Jeune Filles en Detresse (Young Girls in Distress) was director G. W. Pabst's last French production before his (ill-timed) return to Nazi-occupied Austria in 1941. Somewhat reminiscent of Maedchen in Uniform, the story is set in a private girl's school, populated almost exclusively by children from broken homes. Among the few students who can claim family stability is Micheline Presle, but even her happiness is threatened when her lawyer father Andre Luguet inaugurates an affair with stage actress Jacqueline Debulac. With the help of Debulac's daughter Louisa Carletti, Presle is able to break up her father's romance and deliver him into the open arms of her mother Marcelle Chantal. On the whole, the performance by the younger cast members are more convincing than those rendered by the film's so-called adults.

A small town postal official allows a military officer to sweep his lovely daughter away to St. Petersburg, assuming the man will do the right thing and marry her.Instead, a future of scandal and tragedy awaits her.

A young man comes back to his hometown to be confronted with a bourgeois obnoxious family who has always despised his -now dead - parents because they were music hall artists, "entertainers". But because he's the sole legatee of an uncle's fortune, his relatives become friendly with him.. at least for a while.

In 1913, in Russia, a widower hides from his daughter that he is a butler in a meeting restaurant. She meets a banker who is trying to seduce her and takes her to this restaurant. The father, knowing the decadent life of this client, immediately sends his daughter home. The pure love that her piano teacher devotes to her will allow the young girl to console herself for her disappointments...

Rudolf, the only heir to Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary, is trapped in a loveless marriage to a Belgian princess. As he seeks to flee his stifling environment, he meets the beautiful Maria, and the two enter into a scandalous affair. Despite the interference of the Emperor, the couple refuse to give each other up.

Eve is to marry Jacques, the son of a general. But the general does not want a fatherless girl as a daughter-in-law. To remedy the problem Eve, who is the resourceful kind, sets about finding herself a father. She finds one in the person of a charming forty-five- year-old man. The brooding fiancé remains reluctant though and Eve is about to get engaged with her pseudo father when the latter suddenly remembers that he is ...Eve's real father!

The film depicts events between the Fashoda crisis in 1898 and the 1904 signing of the Entente Cordiale creating an alliance between Britain and France and ending their historic rivalry. It was based on the book King Edward VII and His Times by André Maurois. It was made with an eye to its propaganda value, following the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and in anticipation of the outbreak of a Second World War which would test the bonds between Britain and France in a conflict with Nazi Germany.

Caprices tells the story of two young rich people. A famous actress poses as a poor florist, and a distinguished society man camouflages himself as forger and swindler. This game leads them to make close relations in a series of adventures.