Prim professor Immanuel Rath finds some of his students ogling racy photos of cabaret performer Lola Lola and visits a local club, The Blue Angel, in an attempt to catch them there. Seeing Lola perform, the teacher is filled with lust, eventually resigning his position at the school to marry the young woman. However, his marriage to a coquette -- whose job is to entice men -- proves to be more difficult than Rath imagined.

Against a background of war breaking out in Europe and the Mexican fiesta Day of Death, we are taken through one day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a British consul living in alcoholic disrepair and obscurity in a small southern Mexican town in 1939. The consul's self-destructive behaviour, perhaps a metaphor for a menaced civilization, is a source of perplexity and sadness to his nomadic, idealistic half-brother, Hugh, and his ex-wife, Yvonne, who has returned with hopes of healing Geoffrey and their broken marriage.

In 1940s Venice, after twenty years' marriage, retired art critic Nino Rolfe and his younger wife Teresa feel their passion waning. To help her shed her inhibitions and rekindle their relationship, the professor records his sexual fantasies in a diary.

Indolent aristocrat Tony employs competent Barrett as his manservant and all seems to be going well until Barrett persuades Tony to hire his sister as a live-in maid.

A cop and his sexually frustrated wife are struggling to keep their failing marriage intact, when by chance she finds that he is at heart a voyeuristic peeping tom. To satisfy him and herself, his wife has numerous affairs, which her husband watches on closed-circuit televison. However, the pair soon learn that when you play with fire, you'll always get burned.

A devoted wife helps her husband achieve success as a radio comic, but stardom comes at a price.

A history professor and his wife entertain a young couple who are new to the university's faculty. As the drinks flow, secrets come to light, and the middle-aged couple unload onto their guests the full force of the bitterness, dysfunction, and animosity that defines their marriage.

A well-to-do husband who allows his wife to have affairs in order to avoid a divorce becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of her lovers.

In a Canadian mountain resort, Vixen Palmer resides with her naive pilot husband Tom. While he's away flying in tourists, she sleeps with practically everybody including a husband and his wife, and even her biker brother. However, the only one she won't bed is her brother's friend... who is Black.

Eva is beautiful, irresponsible, self-absorbed and emotionally disconnected. Her life is all about the right clothes, the right people and the right places. Her life is turned upside down when she loses her job and alienates her friends by cheating on her boyfriend. She soon finds herself among "common" people where she makes a surprising new acquaintance.

A group of German infantrymen of the First World War live out their lives in the trenches of France. They find brief entertainment and relief in a village behind the lines, but primarily terror fills their lives as the attacks on and from the French army ebb and flow. One of the men, Karl, goes home on leave only to discover the degradation forced on his family by wartime poverty. He returns to the lines in time to face an enormous attack by French tanks.

A con artist couple takes a young, handsome petty thief under their wing, but jealousies flare when the woman develops an interest in him.