A young maid from the country looses her job as maid in k.u.k. Budapest, when she stays out too long with her beau, a soldier, who's saving money to buy a horse to open a transport company. After being unemployed for quite a while and her rent is long overdue, the landlady offers her a better job in a nightclub. Meanwhile the soldiers family has decided that her son should marry the daughter of a rich farmer. The soldier finds out about his girl friends profession, and accepts after struggling with himself the match his parents have made. At the day of his engagement his girl friend comes to his hometown with enough money to buy a horse, which leads to a conflict between her, the fiancee, her family, himself and his parents.

Marianne Jannetier, a well-to-do Parisian, engaged to Andre Benoit, a high-ranking government official, flees the city when the goose-stepping Nazi storm-troopers arrive. When her mother dies on the road to Bordeaux as a result of Nazi bombing, she returns to Paris and joins the underground movement. Nicholas Jordan, an American member of the RAF, stranded in Paris after the evacuation is also working with the Paris underground. Marianne kills her former fiancée, a pro-Nazi informant, for the traitorous state papers he is carrying, and she and Jordan try to flee over a French seaport...

Nina Petrovna is a Russian beauty claimed by two Austrian officers.

This silent-screen classic, like many others produced near the end of the silent era, was both a theatrical extravaganza boasting an original orchestral score and an item which languished in obscurity for many years. When Carlo Piccardi took what was left of the score by Maurice Jaubert and re-created it, the existing footage was restored and paired with a new orchestral performance which was shown in Paris in 1988. The film's story concerns the travails of a woman who has been living quite comfortably as the mistress of a colonel in the Tsar's army in Russia. However, she eventually encounters a penniless young lieutenant and falls madly in love with him, as he does with her. Despite her best intentions of remaining with the colonel, and his intention to avoid trouble with his fellow soldiers, they cannot forswear this relationship, and tragedy is the inevitable result. The title refers to a moving incident in the story, and translates as "the wonderful lie of Nina Petrovna."