A Salvation Army lieutenant and an accordion player fall in love, only to be repeatedly separated by circumstance. Reuniting in Marseille, they build a life and have a child, but fate continues to intervene as their relationship unfolds through cycles of separation and reunion.

A serial-killer frightens Paris by phoning young ladies at night, telling them insults about their lives. Minos, as he calls himself, wants to prevent the world from free women and he targets at first these ones. Commissaire Letellier is given the investigation and he has hard work with the maniac.

The wife of an extremely jealous merchant is held hostage by a bank robber.

Once a successful Hollywood screenwriter, Stan is now a depressive alcoholic who spends most of his time mooching about his house whilst pouring out his troubles to his drinking partner. The only thing that keeps him going is his love for his teenage daughter, Charlotte, but she despises him, believing him to be responsible for the accident in which her mother died.

Sickened to see his students always sleeping in class, a teacher with a colleague and an anarchist start a war against the television. They climbed on Paris roofs to coat the T.V. antennas with a special product cutting the signal reception.

A bus conductor gets dressed for work in the morning, goes to the toilet, where he is killed by a bomb. The Commissioner and his fat, bumbling assistant, Inspector Charbonnier are put on the case. After interviewing friends, wives, colleagues, and spying on strangers who might be connected, our heroes trace the assassin down to a mental institution where, it seems, the murder victim has been an inmate for the last three years...

An Italian painter, Antonio Berti, pays a visit to Reims to his friend Robert Maurisson, a banker with political views on the town hall, who hides, under an affable air and an irreproachable dignity, a libertine and cynical temperament. Charged by the notable with the restoration of paintings exhibited in the cathedral, the artist calls on Cathy, a young girl from the choir, to serve as his model. The young girl will be found dead a few hours after their interview, near one of Robert's properties.

The short stories of Guy de Maupassant enjoyed a renaissance in the early 1950s, thanks in great part to the Max Ophuls production Le Plaisir. In Trois Femmes, three De Maupassant stories are dramatized, each conveying the central theme of women falling in love. In the first, a black female carnival entertainer causes an uproar when she falls in love with a white soldier. In the second, a young bride is pressured into having a baby to collect a huge inheritance. And in the final episode, a pregnant girl is "adopted" and protected by a small circle of friends. In standard De Maupassant fashion, each of the three stories in Trois Femmes is capped by a surprise twist.

Walter is told by his boss, Sara, to deliver an urgent letter to Henri de Corinthe. On the way he finds a beautiful woman he had been eying in a nightclub, lying in the road, bound up. He takes her to a villa to get a doctor, and ends up being locked in a bedroom with her. While she is making love to him, he has visions of surrealistic images from René Magritte's paintings. In the morning, the girl, Marie-Ange, has vanished, the villa looks derelict, and his neck is bleeding. Was it all just a nightmare?