This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.

A criminal organization has obtained two nuclear bombs and are asking for a 100 million pound ransom in the form of diamonds in seven days or they will use the weapons. The secret service sends James Bond to the Bahamas to once again save the world.

Charlton Heston stars as Renaissance artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), who begrudgingly paints the Sistine Chapel for imperious Pope Julius II in this epic adaptation of Irvine Stone’s novel directed by Carol Reed. While the novel covers Michelangelo’s life from birth to death, the film focuses on the battle of wills between the perfectionist artist and the impatient Pope who commissions (and eventually commands) him to paint the famed chapel.

In Venice, the millionaire benefactor Cecil Fox watches a Seventeenth Century play ‘Volpone’ and plots a practical joke to play on his three former greedy mistresses. He hires the unemployed actor William McFly to act as his butler and stage manager and sends letters telling the mistresses he is terminally ill. The prime intention of Rex is to see the reaction of the women after the reading of his will but things do not go as planned.

The story involves a series of murders in Charron’s performing company, murders caused by various members getting doused with vitriolic acid. Turns out all the people killed have a common denominator in their past, one which has recently re-surfaced, and is out for their blood. Will the past be uncovered before it kills again? What awful secret has came back to haunt the living?

Julie (Rosemary Dexter) is disturbed by the disappearance of her psychiatrist boyfriend Luca (Horst Frank) following a bizarre dream where she witnessed him murdered. She travels to a seaside village where he might be and encounters Frank (Adolfo Celi), who tells her Luca has indeed been there. Julie’s investigation leads her the house of Gerta (Alida Valli), where the mystery deepens among the odd characters residing at this artists enclave.

Grand Prix driver Pete Aron is fired by his team after a crash at Monaco that injures his teammate, Scott Stoddard. While Stoddard struggles to recover, Aron begins to drive for another team, and starts dating Stoddard’s wife.

Von Ryan’s Express stars Frank Sinatra as a POW colonel who leads a daring escape from Nazi Germany by taking over a freight train, but he has to win over the British soldiers he finds himself commanding.

An ornithologist mistaken for an explosives expert is sent alone into a small French town during WWI to investigate a garbled report from the resistance about a bomb which the departing Germans have set to blow up a weapons cache.