"The Family," an album with a velvet cover, is meant to touch the extended family of man. Formal portraits, bookends in this 80-year saga, enclose the central story, which opens with the baptism of Carlo, a baby in his grandfather's lap, and ends with Carlo as a grandfather with a baby in his arms. And never once do we get out of the house, whose rooms provide the film's structure. Comfort or passion? Carlo couldn't really decide until it was too late.

Eddy is the detective of a general store. His girl is Barbara who works in the same store. Barbara receives a gift, a bottle of scent, and later she dies burned. Police detective Turoni begins to investigate and Eddy, wanting to revenge Barbara, does the same. Another girl, Porzia, is murdered in the same way and Eddy finds out that the motive of the crimes dates back some fifteen years.

After robbing a jewelry store, Charles is found dead by Marcel Mauriac, the fence he had turned to in order to sell the goods. The rest of the gang, certain that he killed him to get hold of the jewels, set a trap for him.

Marilyne, a young French girl, is studying in Paris, where she lives a quiet and peaceful life in the company of Herve, a young faculty member. Her life is altered by the behavior of her mother Paula, a woman immersed in vice and corruption, dominated by an easy disposition to love the young people who come to her. Arrangement that leads her to feel a deep passion for her daughter's boyfriend, thus breaking the tranquility of the two young people.

Four stories about unfaithful wives and jealous husbands.

A rude Roman policeman Nico Giraldi and an English detective team up in search of a gang that has carried out an enormous fraud against the Lloyd's of London.

A judge on crusade to take down the Italian Mafia uses a gangster turned state's witness (a so-called "repenter") and a New York banker to do it. But things aren't quite what they seem.

Two members of the fascist legion GOD WANTS IT, Michele and Luigi, both from Sicily, met in Malaga and became friends in the course of the 1936-39 counter revolution. Based upon the short story by Leonardo Sciascia.