Dans le sud de la France, le cadavre d'une touriste américaine, Candice Strasberg, est découvert en pleine garrigue. L'état de décomposition du corps rend difficile l'autopsie et les mauvaises conditions météorologiques ont effacé les empreintes sur le terrain. À partir du journal intime de la victime, la police tente de reconstituer son parcours...
A small village in the Jura is split by the river Loue which creates the line of demarcation between Nazi occupied France and freedom. A French officer, Pierre (Ronet), is released by the Nazi soldiers to find his chateau converted into a German command centre. Whilst he is obliged to co-operate with the enemy, his wife Mary (Seberg) supports the resistance movement and is willing to risk her life for it. The Nazis step up their activity against the resistance, insisting that any who attempt to cross the line of demarcation will be shot. When his wife is arrested, Pierre decides to switch his allegiance. The movement is hindered by an informer and another man who pretends to help the resistance fighters but leads them to the Nazis and steals all their possessions.
NATO Officer Andrea Rossi-Colombotti (Mastroianni) is a ladies man with an unusual libido: he can only seduce women in situations where his life is in danger. The film begins with him breaking into a Corsican girlfriends house; the girl, armed and voluptuous, believes Andrea a criminal and nearly shoots him before being seduced, but she later ends their relationship in the light of such an incident. Later, while spending an afternoon with an Asian air stewardess, he tries to achieve arousal by making up a situation about a dying relative, but the stewardess learns the sham and the liaison ends disastrously.
The gendarmes of St. Tropez are invited to New York City to a law enforcement conference. They are supposed to travel alone without spouses or children but Cruchot's daughter Nicole wants to go to New York as it may be her only chance. Cruchot forbids her to go because disobeying an order may hurt his career. As Cruchot travels to Le Havre by plane and train, Nicole gets a ride from her friend and sneaks onboard SS France and travels to America as a stowaway. During the journey Cruchot sees her hiding among the lifeboats but his captain convinces him that he is imagining things.
The French It girl Marie-Chantal gets accidentally entangled in a secret war between agents and terrorists. Before she actually realises what's going on around her, the henchmen of a certain Dr.Kha consider her a dangerous witness and try to hunt her down. On the run she gets to know an agent named Paco who works for Dr. Kha's counterpart Professor Lombardi.
During World War I, a seemingly respectable middle-aged man Henri Landru has devised an ingenious means of obtaining money to supplement his dwindling income. Adopting various assumed names, he lures middle-class women to his villa at Gambais just outside Paris, where he kills them and burns their bodies. He then helps himself to his victims’ bank accounts so that he can keep his wife, his mistress and his four children in the manner to which they have grown accustomed. Having murdered ten women and one boy, Landru is finally captured and placed before a court of law. Eloquent in his protestations of innocence, he is confident that no jury will condemn a man of such intellect and breeding.
American film producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) hires respected Austrian director Fritz Lang (playing himself) to direct a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. Dissatisfied with Lang's treatment of the material as an art film, Prokosch hires Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a novelist and playwright, to rework the script. The conflict between artistic expression and commercial opportunity parallels Paul's sudden estrangement from his wife Camille Javal (Brigitte Bardot), who becomes aloof with Paul after he leaves her alone with Prokosch, a millionaire playboy.
Albin, a solitary French journalist who knows little of women or of the world, rents a house in a village outside Munich that is home to the respected and rich writer Andreas. In the shop he meets Hélène, a beautiful Frenchwoman who is married to Andreas. She and her husband befriend their new neighbour, who becomes besotted with Hélène. When she tactfully fobs him off, he reasons that she already has a lover and follows her. His hunch proves right when at the Oktoberfest he sees her with another man and later, trailing the two, he takes compromising photographs. Confronting Hélène with the photographs, she tells him that Andreas knows already and begs him to stop. But he will not stop and takes the photographs to Andreas, who is devastated. When Hélène gets home, Andreas beats and kills her.
The story centers on Cesira (Loren), a widowed Roman shopkeeper, and Rosetta (Brown), her devoutly religious twelve-year-old daughter, during World War II. To escape the Allied bombing of Rome, Cesira and her daughter flee southern Lazio for her native Ciociaria, a rural, mountainous province of central Italy.