The Devil and the Ten Commandments

The film is made of seven separate sections, each showing one of the Ten Commandments being broken. A man is warned he will lose his job if he does not stop swearing. Another finds the dancer he admires and discovers she is married. A Jesuit novice leaves the order to settle accounts over his sister's death. A young man learns that the woman he thought was his mother is not. Julien Duvivier's film gathers almost every big name in French cinema of the period: Alain Delon, Danielle Darrieux, Charles Aznavour, Jean-Claude Brialy, Françoise Arnoul, Claude Rich and more. The sections are not equal; some build a film of their own in fifteen minutes and some cannot carry the telling. What they share is a tone: none of them delivers a moral lesson, and all of them show the breaking of a rule as a plain human condition.