Sarkani, an adventurer, finds a trusted carrier pigeon, takes possession of the code message and, teaming up with the unscrupulous banker Torenthal, gets the position of secretary from Matthias Sandorff. After deciphering the message, he discovers a conspiracy against the government. By law, Thorenthal and Sarkani receive half of Sandorff's fortune. His kidnapped daughter was raised by Thorenthal as his own child, and in order to keep her share of the fortune, he tries to marry her off to Sarkani, but she is in love with the son of one of Sandorff's friends and refuses. Sandorff takes over the fisherman who betrayed him, as well as the banker who lost his fortune in Monte Carlo. Together with Sava's beloved, whom he cured, they save Sava and take Sarkani into their own hands. Sandorf surrenders them to the legitimate authorities, unites his daughter and her lover, and everyone lives happily on the island of Zord.

Bernard Lefrancois is a prosperous farmer on the River Marne, while his neighbor is impoverished. Lefrancois objects strongly to the romance between his son and the neighbor's daughter, but it continues in secret. WWI begins and the son becomes an aviator with the French army, and the unwed girl presents Lefrancois with an unexpected grandchild. The German army occupies the area, and the girl is serving France as a spy and securing information needed by the French to drive out the Germans. While his son is engaged in air-combat against the Germans, and the unwed mother of his grandchild is serving as a spy against their country's enemy, Lefrancois also joins the battle as a soldier.

Monique is an ingenue, a clueless girl who believes in true love. A marriage is the only thing a decent girl must long for. When she discovers that her future husband has a lover, she rebels against her bourgeois family.

"Taking its title from John Keats’s early 19th-century poem, this highly personal melodrama finds Dulac interrogating the archetype of the femme fatale. La belle dame sans merci follows a famous actress who was once seduced and abandoned by a rich man and subsequently resolved to become a “merciless woman,” forever scheming to hurt others (men in particular) in a ruthless yet captivating manner. Dulac challenges the Romantic archetype embodied in Keats’s poem by way of symbolist mise en scène, self-reflexive narration, and her typically associative approach to editing, locating a modern ambiguity within the stereotypical figures of 19th-century art." - Film Society of Lincoln Center

One Christmas Eve, a carefree young man, Eric, arrives in a small provincial town. Here, he meets Julien, a bar pianist who is his exact double. Julien is in love with Marinette, a pretty waitress, but he is too shy to make any romantic overtures. Eric decides to give the course of true love a helping hand by pretending to be Julien. Meanwhile, Eric’s fabulously wealthy uncle has sent his minions out to bring him back home, so that he may celebrate Christmas in the bosom of his family.

1929 film by Henri Fescourt

1924 film by Abel Gance