Film about Dutch society at the beginning of the 1960s.
Three families are preparing for an evening of Saint Nicholas cheer. Each of the families is having problems. One couple, an ad agency man and his wife are growing apart. Another, intensely respectable couple is having trouble coping with their wayward son. The husband in the third couple is an incorrigible womaniser who nevertheless tries to patch things up with his wife.
Jonkheer Axel van Hoogveld is a medical student who hopes that, as doctor, he can devote his life to the benefit of mankind.
Fiction film by Alfred Machin about a miller and a drifter.
Melodrama about a woman whose father forbids her to marry the man she loves.
Jess Newton, expecting to spend her holidays alone at her boarding school in England, receives a letter from her father asking her to come to him. Since the death of his wife, Mr Newton has been prospecting in Africa, where the discovery of a diamond mine has made him a wealthy man. At the railway station Jess is pestered by Hubert Clave, but protected by his cousin Bruce, the son of Lord Ravenhurst. It is next to the Ravenhurst estate that Newton has bought a mansion.
When the composer Pietro Cignoni meets Sylvia and Lyda, the daughters of barrister Gio Romano, he and Sylvia fall in love and eventually marry. Sylvia is unaware of how jealous her younger sister is. Even more jealous is the organist Rosni who for years has adored Sylvia in silence, not daring to ask her to marry him because he is a hunchback. Together Sylvia and Pietro enjoy five years of wedded bliss and are happy with their darling daughter, Renée. Then Sylvia notices that her eyesight is gradually failing and learns that only an operation can perhaps save her from total blindness.
In the prologue, a boat with some shipwrecked persons is drifting at sea. Among them is Baron van Waldheim, who, before he dies of exhaustion, entrusts his little son Alfred to the care of his butler Hendrik. The evil Jan van Oort persuades Hendrik to give him the Baron's papers. When they put the boy ashore, he wounds himself on a nail (leaving a scar that will later prove his identity). For years Van Oort manages to pass himself off as Baron van Waldheim; he is married and has a daughter and a son.
Suddenly left a legacy of 500 pounds, Rachel Higgins, maid-of-all-work in the Palfrey household, desires to become a "lady".
When Joy, the daughter of the actress Gloria Grey, is six years old, her mother realises that the theatrical life is contaminating the child. She confides in Mark Halliday, an actor who has helped her in the past and who proposes marriage. She tells him that she is still married and - in a series of flash-backs - relates her story. As a chorus girl, she meets Tom, the impulsive, hot-headed, younger son of Sir John Chelmsford, and falls in love with him. When Tom marries her, in defiance of his father, he is disowned.