Erie Canal, N.Y., 1850: Molly Larkins, cook on Jotham Klore’s canal boat, has a love-hate relationship with her boss. She hires handsome new haul-horse driver Dan Harrow and the inevitable triangle develops (complicated by Dan’s desire to farm and Molly’s to boat) against a background of the canalmen’s fight against the encroaching railroad.
Category: Comedy
Danielle Darrieux plays an impoverished reform-school escapee who finds a new lease on life when she enrolls in a school for pickpockets run by Fagin-like Saturnin-Fabre. Before long, Darrieux is the school’s prize pupil, though she intends to abandon her life of crime should the right man come along. But Saturnin-Fabre has other ideas, and grooms Darrieux for her entree into High Society, the better to divest foreign ambassador Andre Luguet of his valuables..
Léon, a humble civil servant, has the unusual ability to walk through walls, however thick they are. One day, he falls madly in love with a charming hotel thief by the name of Suzan. In order to impress her he poses as Garou-Garou, a dangerous gangster. Mistaken for him, he is arrested and sent to jail but he, of course, leaves his cell (and comes back to it) just as he likes, infuriating the prison warden. But, despite this wonderful gift, he remains shy in the presence of Suzan.
A writer for a radio program needs some fresh ideas to juice up his show. For inspiration, he rents a room with a typical American family and begins to secretly write about their true life antics. The show becomes a big hit, but he begins to feel guilty about his charade when he falls in love with the family’s pretty older daughter.
Suzanne, a waitress, comes up with a sure-fire method for winning at the racetrack and, later, when she inherits a fortune from a customer of the restaurant, she use the same system for investing her money. Her stuff broker tries to dissuade her, but she persists and her investments increases her wealth.
Right after she moves in with him, Frederico’s new girlfriend Francesca sends him back to her former boyfriend’s apartment to fetch her something she forgot – but he’s surprised to find him lying there – dead. Assuming that Francesca killed him and sent him for cleaning up, he cuts him up in pieces, puts him in a suitcase and tries to get rid of it… but he has a hard time finding a suitably quiet place.
Fed up with an escalating crime rate and an increasingly ineffective police force, blue-collar New Yorkers Willie and Cy join a citizen’s vigilante group. Their efforts to act as an auxiliary police force are comically inept, but director Ivan Passer lulls us into laughter only to catch us unprepared when he wants to play things in dead seriousness.