retro

In Paris, wealthy Charles Bonnet is well known in the art world as a collector of rare pieces, mostly of the impressionist masters. He will on occasion sell paintings from his collection at auction. In reality, he is an art forger, he only reproducing those pieces known to have gone missing. His daughter, Nicole Bonnet, wants him to stop this business fearing that some day soon he will get caught. She is most concerned about he loaning out his Cellini Venus statue to the Kléber-Lafayette Museum, as she knows that technology can now test for things such as material age which would prove that the statue and by association he is a fraud. He ends up causing a problem for himself when he signs a $1 million insurance policy for the statue for the museum, which unwittingly allows them to test the piece for its authenticity. To save her father from jail, Nicole feels the only thing she can do is try to steal the statue from the gallery which may not be the easiest thing to do especially as the museum has installed an electronic security system around the piece to protect it above and beyond the regular security. She contacts the only person she knows who she believes can help her, namely a burglar named Simon Dermott. Nicole and Simon had only recently met when he broke into the Bonnet mansion to steal a Van Gogh painting, Nicole catching him in the process. Nicole could not call the police to report him for fear that her father's fraudulent life would be uncovered. Nicole not only has to convince Simon to help her without actually divulging the reason why she wants to steal her own statue, but they also have to come up with a plan to steal it. Complicating matters is an American art collector named Davis Leland who is not only wooing Nicole, but wants to add many of M. Bonnet's pieces to his own collection, most specifically the Venus. Within this collective, not all is as it appears on the surface.

With his family away for their annual summer holiday, New Yorker Richard Sherman decides he has the opportunity to live a bachelor's life - to eat and drink what he wants and basically to enjoy life without wife and son. The beautiful but ditsy blond from the apartment above his catches his eye and they soon start spending time together. It's all innocent though there is little doubt that Sherman is attracted to her. Any lust he may be feeling is played out in his own imagination however.

Jean is a clerk in a bank. His colleague Caron is a gambler and gives him the virus. In the casinos, Jean meets Jackie. Their love affair will follow their luck at the roulette.

Three New York models, Shatze, Pola and Loco set up in an exclusive apartment with a plan....tired of cheap men and a lack of money, they intend to use all their talents to trap and marry three millionaires. The trouble is that it's not so easy to tell the rich men from the hucksters - and even when they can, is the money really worth it?

The education of a princess wrapped in a love story. A king and queen live happily until her sudden death. The king decides to marry his lovely daughter. She's willing, but the Lily Fairy serves as a social conscience, intent on thwarting incest. She instructs the princess to request a series of dresses impossible to make; however, the king's tailor succeeds. So the fairy plots the princess's escape, wearing the skin of the king's prize donkey. She's spirited away to be a scullery maid dressed in the noisome skin. A wandering prince sees her in the woods and is smitten. Can love find its course, and does the princess learn a lesson of life's hardships?

16-year-old Genevieve and 20-year-old Guy are very much in love. Her kind mother, who runs an umbrella shop, won't hear of her marrying, particularly as Guy has yet to complete his compulsory military service. Genevieve is heartbroken when he leaves for his army service in colonial Algeria and is upset to have received only one letter from him in two months. Her mother's solution to this situation is kind diamond-merchant Roland Cassard, who has helped them in the past.

Philadelphia socialites Tracy Lord and C.K. Dexter Haven married impulsively, with their marriage and subsequent divorce being equally passionate. They broke up when Dexter's drinking became excessive, it a mechanism to cope with Tracy's unforgiving manner to the imperfect, imperfections which Dexter admits he readily has. Two years after their break-up, Tracy is about to remarry, the ceremony to take place at the Lord mansion. Tracy's bridegroom is nouveau riche businessman and aspiring politician George Kittredge, who is otherwise a rather ordinary man and who idolizes Tracy. The day before the wedding, three unexpected guests show up at the Lord mansion: Macaulay Connor (Mike to his friends), Elizabeth Imbrie - the two who are friends of Tracy's absent brother, Junius- and Dexter himself. Dexter, an employee of the tabloid Spy magazine, made a deal with its publisher and editor Sidney Kidd to get a story on Tracy's wedding - the wedding of the year - in return for Kidd not publishing a salacious story with accompanying photographs of Tracy's father, Seth Lord, with a New York showgirl named Tina Marra. In reality, Mike and Liz are the reporter and photographer respectively for Spy. Mike and Liz don't particularly like this assignment or working for Kidd, but they need to make a living as their chosen other fields as serious writer and painter don't pay the bills. A suspicious Tracy is onto them, the entire truth which Dexter admits to her. Tracy decides to turn the tables on Mike and Liz. However, hours before the wedding, as the more self-assured Dexter and Liz get to work on how to get the Lords out from under Spy's threats, Tracy and Mike, both inebriated, go on a journey of self-discovery with Tracy ultimately coming to her realizations a little faster than Mike.

Sometimes, solemn but somehow empty vows of love and devotion are just not good enough, and a simple "I love you" may prove to be insufficient. As a result, Angela, a tall, slender, and graceful exotic dancer, has set her sights on talking her unwilling lover, Émile, into starting a family; however, he seems absorbed with his other passion: cycling. But, Angela wants a child, and she takes no for an answer. Could Alfred Lubitsch, a handsome neighbour and Émile's bosom friend, lend a hand? And, what happens when a pressing demand turns into a misunderstanding, and love transforms into jealousy?

A film musical in which every line is sung. The frame is about workers during a strike. They also prepare and perform a demonstration. Two personal relations develop against this background. François abandons his pregnant girlfriend Violette. She feels treated even more unjust when he tries to defend and excuse his behaviour. He had met a very beautiful over-class girl, Edith, and both were immediately overwhelmed by genuine and reciprocal passion. Edith lived in a very unsatisfactory marriage. She was the daughter of the widow from which François rented his room. Nevertheless, he met her in the street, where she just opened her fur coat and was starch naked under it. They will be together in great passion for just one night and day. At the demonstration François is shot by the police and dies in Edith's arms. - The music is closer to opera than in any other film musical by Jacques Demy. But the greatest difference is that he has devoted much more effort to the task of instructing the singers to reveal the psychic emotions of the text and events.

Basing himself in Paris for the purpose, American hack writer Richard Benson, with advance in hand, has been hired by movie producer Alexander Meyerheim to write the screenplay for his latest movie, Benson selling him only on the title, The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower. Meyerheim, who knows about his drinking problem, has been assured by Benson that he is on the wagon. Benson hires Gabrielle Simpson through a secretarial service to be his typist. At the time she arrives for the job, Gabrielle learns that Benson has squandered away almost twenty weeks, with several drinks passing his lips over the course, without having written a word. With nary a story idea, Benson has only two days, on Bastille Day, until Meyerheim will be arriving from Cannes expecting a final product in Benson having continually implied he is near completion. Upon learning that Gabrielle originally came to Paris to experience life, Benson comes up with a brainchild to imagine the movie being a day, Bastille Day, in the life of someone like Gabrielle. As Benson and Gabrielle work through the screenplay, an espionage caper, they imagine themselves in the lead roles of "Rick" and "Gaby", they subconsciously and sometimes consciously steering the story in the direction of what they hope will happen between "Richard Benson" and "Gabrielle Simpson", both to the screenplay's benefit and detriment.

Young adult Harold Chasen, solitary and friendless by choice, is obsessed with death, this fascination manifesting itself in he staging his own fake suicides, driving a hearse and attending funerals, even of people he doesn't know, all to the chagrin of his exasperated wealthy mother with whom he lives. Mrs. Chasen is determined for Harold to be "normal", including her sending him into therapy to deal with his issues and finding him a girlfriend through a computer dating service. It is at a series of funerals that Harold meets Maude, on the cusp of her eightieth birthday, she who too attends funerals of strangers. Unlike Harold, Maude is obsessed with life - her own life to be more precise - she does whatever she wants to please herself, damned what others may think or how they may be affected. Since she can't take material possessions with her, she is more interested in experiences, with whatever material possessions she has - often "borrowed" without asking - only to further those experiences. Their friendship is initially based on how the other can further their own priority. But as Maude shows Harold how to truly live, Harold falls in love with her. Their relationship, already limited in time by the sheer math, is curtailed even more as Maude shows him only not how to live well, but die well.

Maggie Prescott, the Editor-in-Chief of New York based Quality, a fashion magazine that sets trends i.e. leads instead of follows, has come up with her latest brainchild: to feature a model to be the Quality Woman, complete with successful Paris-based designer Paul Duval to devise a new collection inspired by her. The Quality Woman is not only to embody beauty, but also intellect. Against Maggie's initial judgment, she relents to the vision of her head photographer Dick Avery in choosing Jo Stockton rather than one of their in-house models as the Quality Woman, Jo the clerk they met in an impromptu photo shoot they did against her will in the Greenwich Village bookstore where she works. The marks against Jo are not only that she isn't a professional, but that she has what she even considers a funny looking face, something that Dick instead calls interesting. Jo, who abhors all that the world of fashion represents in she being an intellectual, ultimately agrees as the job would take her to Paris where she hopes to meet her idol, Professor Émile Flostre, the leading philosopher on the concept of empathicalism. But in Paris, the two worlds for Jo begin to collide in more ways than one, arguably the most important in she falling for Dick, his actions solely to get her to exude the emotions he wants for the photos.

Lorelei and Dorothy are just "Two Little Girls from Little Rock", lounge singers on a transatlantic cruise, working their way to Paris, and enjoying the company of any eligible men they might meet along the way, even though "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." Based on the Broadway musical based on the novel.

C.K. Dexter-Haven, a successful popular jazz musician, lives in a mansion near his ex-wife's Tracy Lord's family estate. She is on the verge of marrying a man blander and safer than Dex, who tries to win Tracy's heart again. Mike Connor, an undercover tabloid reporter, also falls for Tracy while covering the nuptials for Spy magazine. Tracy must choose between the three men as she discovers that "safe" can mean "deadly dull" when it comes to husbands and life.

Benjamin Braddock returns home to California after successfully completing college. He gets a hero's welcome from his parents but Ben isn't quite sure what to do with the rest of his life. He is soon seduced by Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's partner, who methodically pursues the inexperienced young man. Soon, they are meeting regularly in hotel rooms. Warned by her to stay away from her daughter Elaine, his father goads him into taking her out on a date. He finds he quite likes Elaine but when she learns he's been having an affair with her own mother, she'll have nothing to do with him. He's smitten however and pursues her.

Tony Hunter, a famous singer/dancer movie star, is feeling washed up and old hat (old top hat, tie and tails to be exact). The reporters are out for Ava Gardner, not him. But his old friends Lily and Les Martin have an idea for a funny little Broadway show and he agrees to do it. But things begin to get out of hand, when bigshot "artistic" director/producer/star Jeffrey Cordova joins the production, proclaims it's a modernistic Faust and insists on hiring a prima ballerina, Gabrielle Gerard, to star opposite Tony, and it's hate at first sight. And her jealous choreographer isn't helping to ease the tension. The show is doomed by pretentiousness. But romance, a "let's put on a show" epiphany, and a triumphant opening are waiting in the wings. After all, this is a musical comedy!

Joe Bradley is a reporter for the American News Service in Rome, a job he doesn't much like as he would rather work for what he considers a real news agency back in the States. He is on the verge of getting fired when he, sleeping in and getting caught in a lie by his boss Hennessy, misses an interview with HRH Princess Ann, who is on a goodwill tour of Europe, Rome only her latest stop. However, he thinks he may have stumbled upon a huge scoop. Princess Ann has officially called off all her Rome engagements due to illness. In reality, he recognizes the photograph of her as being the young well but simply dressed drunk woman he rescued off the street last night (as he didn't want to turn her into the police for being a vagrant), and who is still in his small studio apartment sleeping off her hangover. What Joe doesn't know is that she is really sleeping off the effects of a sedative given to her by her doctor to calm her down after an anxiety attack, that anxiety because she hates her regimented life where she has no freedom and must always do and say the politically correct things, not what is truly on her mind or in her heart. In wanting just a little freedom, she seized upon a chance opportunity to escape from the royal palace where she was staying, albeit with no money in her pockets. Joe believes he can get an exclusive interview with her without she even knowing that he's a reporter or that he's interviewing her. As Joe accompanies "Anya Smith" - her name as she tells him in trying to hide her true identity - around Rome on her incognito day of freedom somewhat unaware that the secret service is searching for her, along for the ride is Joe's photographer friend, Irving Radovich, who Joe has tasked with clandestinely taking photographs of her, those photos to accompany the story. As the day progresses, Joe and Ann slowly start to fall for each other. Their feelings for each other affect what both decide to do, Ann with regard to her royal duties, Joe with regard to the story, and both with regard to if there is a future for them together.

Roland Cassard is a young man with no job and seemingly no prospects. By chance, he runs into his former girlfriend Cecile, who works as a dancer at a cabaret under the stage name Lola. She is now a single mom and works hard to provide her young son with all of the necessities of life. Lola still hopes that her son's father Michel, the true love of her life, will someday return to them. Seeing Lola again confirms to Roland that he's still in love with her, but she doesn't return his feelings. He has also met Madame Desnoyer and her 14-year-old daughter, also called Cecile. Madame Desnoyer, a widow, is quite taken with Roland but he has little interest in her. Roland sees no future if he stays in France.