A scientist, Professor Jakob ten Brinken, interested in the laws of heredity, impregnates a prostitute in a laboratory with the semen of a hanged murderer. The prostitute conceives a female child who has no concept of love, whom the professor adopts. The girl, Alraune, suffers from obsessive sexuality and perverse relationships throughout her life. She learns of her unnatural origins and she avenges herself against the professor.

After the brutal massacre of a peaceful demonstration of the working people on their way to the Tsar, Lenin and other Party members in exile call for an armed uprising of the workers. At Presnya build barricades. The people are arming themselves. But the heroic armed uprising of the workers of Presnya is brutally suppressed by the tsarist troops. However, the struggle of the workers under the leadership of Lenin continued.

This story of the Nazi prison camps in the 1930s deals with the attempts of the Nazi guards to break the spirit of the Communists in concentration camps.

A Moscow hat shop girl chances upon a penniless young man who has arrived from the countryside for university and takes pity on him.

An impoverished nobleman would rather chase after the local milkmaid than seek a wealthy match, to the chagrin of his family.

With an international chess tournament in progress, a young man becomes completely obsessed with the game. His fiancée has no interest in it, and becomes frustrated and depressed by his neglect of her, but wherever she goes she finds that she cannot escape chess. On the brink of giving up, she meets the world champion, Capablanca himself, with interesting results.

Ilf and Petrov's only work in cinema is a comedy about the adventures of two passionate car enthusiasts during a road trip. On their way to Moscow in a car assembled from scrap materials, they meet a charlatan—a "professor" with a pretty niece. Convinced that the "professor" is a common swindler, the friends turn him in to the police, while they themselves continue on their way with the girl and are the first to reach one of Moscow's squares—the finish line of the road trip.

An impression of the state of the world in 1929, contrasting similarities and differences in religion, customs, art and entertainment from all over the world. The film is constructed like a symphony.

Jacob, a farmer, returns from the war to his wife Marie and begs the landlord baron for a plot of land to rent. The Baron grants the request, but only for a barren, rocky, useless acreage. The pair struggle to make do on this land, but then the Baron demands that Maria leave her husband to serve as wet nurse to his married daughter Anya's new baby, on threat of eviction. While nursing the daughter's baby, Maria receives unwelcome attentions from the daughter's husband, and a scandal erupts, ruining Maria in her husband's eyes. When she escapes from her employers and seeks to return home, the police give her the yellow passport signifying a prostitute, further degrading her. She approaches home, unsure of the reception that awaits her.

Three reporters and an office girl are trying to stop a bacteriological strike by some powerful western business leaders against the USSR.