A writer returns home to his estate after service in World War I. He has developed a very bad case of depression due to a war wound concerning his genitalia. He contemplates suicide, but recovers after becoming interested in his caretaker's 12 year-old war orphan niece, who now lives in the manor.

An idealistic first-time director lives for his art — until he meets a wife of an Italian producer at the Cannes Film Festival. A passionate affair begins, but the couple's romance is tested as they face the temptations of fame and fortune.

In Zola's Paris, an ingenue arrives at a tony bordello: she's Nana, guileless, but quickly learning to use her erotic innocence to get what she wants. She's an actress for a soft-core filmmaker and soon is the most popular courtesan in Paris, parlaying this into a house, bought for her by a wealthy banker. She tosses him and takes up with her neighbor, a count of impeccable rectitude, and with the count's impressionable son. The count is soon fetching sticks like a dog and mortgaging his lands to satisfy her whims.

A dockworker seeking revenge on the killer of his sister finds himself the object of desire for two women.

A priest-doctor chasing a man with supernatural regenerative abilities, who has recently escaped from a medical lab, reaches a small town where the mutant goes on a killing spree.

Poet/lecturer Charles Serking awakens from his alcoholic haze long enough to take a bus back to L.A. and plunge into an orgy of drink and sexual depravity.