Ernst Lubitsch
Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realising that they are falling in love through the post as each other’s anonymous pen pal.
Two Americans sharing a flat in Paris, playwright Tom Chambers and painter George Curtis, fall for free-spirited Gilda Farrell. When she can’t make up her mind which one of them she prefers, she proposes a “gentleman’s agreement”: She will move in with them as a friend and critic of their work, but they will never have sex. But when Tom goes to London to supervise a production of one of his plays, leaving Gilda alone with George, how long will their gentleman’s agreement last?
Circa 1861, Angelina, ruling countess of an Italian principality, is at a loss when invaded by a Hungarian army. Her lookalike ancestress Francesca, who saved a similar situation 300 years before, comes to life from a portrait to help her descendant. Complicating factor: the newlywed countess feels strangely drawn to the handsome invader…
Henry Van Cleve presents himself at the gates of Hell only to find he is closely vetted on his qualifications for entry. Surprised there is any question on his suitability, he recounts his lively life and the women he has known from his mother onwards, but mainly concentrating on his happy but sometimes difficult twenty-five years of marriage to Martha.
Andre and Colette Bertier are happily married. When Colette introduces her husband to her flirtatious best friend, Mitzi, he does his best to resist her advances. But she is persistent, and very cute, and he succumbs. Mitzi’s husband wants to divorce her, and has been having her tailed. Andre gets caught, and must confess to his wife. But Colette has had problems resisting the attentions of another man herself, and they forgive each other.
US multi-millionaire Michael Barndon marries his eight wife, Nicole, the daughter of a broken French Marquis. But she doesn’t want to be only a number in the row of his ex-wives and starts her own strategy to “tame” him.
An elderly business tycoon, believed to be dying, decides to give a million dollars each to 8 strangers chosen at random from the phone directory. The various segents of this 1932 film were directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Norman Taurog, Stephen Roberts, Norman Z. McLeod, James Cruze, William A. Seiter, and H. Bruce Humberstone. The huge cast includes Richard Bennett, Gary Cooper, W. C. Fields, May Robson, George Raft, Charles Ruggles, Alison Skipworth, Charles Laughton, Mary Boland, Gene Raymond, Frances Dee, Wynne Gibson, Jack Pennick, Jack Oakie, Roscoe Karns, Cecil Cunningham, Grant Mitchell, Clarence Muse, Joyce Compton, Dewey Robinson and Margaret Seddon.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, an acting troupe becomes embroiled in a Polish soldier’s efforts to track down a German spy.