This is the story of a wealthy bourgeois who marries his only child, a daughter, to a penniless nobleman because he hopes to use his son-in-law to get a title. The son-in-law is a lazy, affected stereotype; but M. Poirier is also a stereotype, of the obnoxious big businessman. The poor daughter, who falls in love with her husband, lets him walk all over her.

Seventeen-year-old Des Grieux, studying philosophy at Amiens, comes from a noble and landed family, but forfeits his hereditary wealth and incurs the disappointment of his father by running away with Manon on her way to a convent. In Paris, the young lovers enjoy a blissful cohabitation, while Des Grieux struggles to satisfy Manon's taste for luxury. He acquires money by borrowing from his unwaveringly loyal friend Tiberge and by cheating gamblers.

Based on Emile Zola's novel, an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s.

Directed by Albert Capellani.

French silent film.

Bernard Jeansoulet supports his brother Louis and his mother through his work. Louis finds a job in Paris, where he gets carried away by the intoxicating atmosphere, and ends up in prison... An adaptation of Alphonse Daudet's work by one of the pioneers of cinema.

In Imperial Russia, Anna, wife of the officer Karenin, goes to Moscow to visit her brother. On the way, she meets charming cavalry officer Vronsky, to whom she's immediately attracted. But in St. Petersburg’s high society, a relationship like this could destroy a woman’s reputation.

At trial the prosecuting attorney makes a startling confession: the defendant is his son whose pitiful fate led him to murder. The attorney left the young man's pregnant mother, and the unwed poor thing had to fight against a hostile world.

The works of Marcel Pagnol are a veritable monument of French cultural heritage. Based on previously unseen archive material, film extracts, novels, plays, interviews and letters, the film pays tribute to the major author and popular filmmaker, who made his life a work and his work a life's project.