Nine Bachelors is a 1939 French comedy film directed by Sacha Guitry and starring Guitry, Max Dearly and Elvire Popesco.[1] An opportunist dreams up a new scheme to make money when the French government passes a law forbidding foreigners from living in France. It's French title is Ils étaient neuf célibataires.
The battle of the sexes as drawing room social satire. Philippe, a middle-aged newspaper editor, has lived for six years with Paulette, a successful stage actress. He tells her friend Claudine, a realistic and enterprising reporter, that he's thinking of proposing. Into the mix steps Carl Erickson, a charming Hollywood matinée idol in Paris briefly. He meets Paulette, sees her act (his box seat compliments of Philippe), and sets out to seduce her. The next two days bring talk, tears, separation, despair, surprises, and, perhaps, reconciliation as characters speak "exactly half the truth." It's a quadrille of changing partners.
A young journalist who has gone reporting with the papers of a friend gets caught up in an arms smuggling operation. It is in this context that he meets Draguicha, a Serbian student who, misled by a group of greedy financiers, is planning a terrorist attack on the Orient Express...
Three "spinsters" focus their attention very narrowly on their nephew, in his first phase of adulthood. Éloi, handicapped by his shyness, behaves a bit awkwardly. He falls under the unfortunate influence of a couple of haddocks. The love of a pretty blonde woman will save him from this embarrassment.
A man and a woman arrive in a cafe-hotel near the Belgian frontier. The customers recognize the man from the police's description: his name is Amedee Lange, and he murdered somebody in Paris. Lange was an employee in a printing works. His boss was a real bastard, swindling every one, seducing female workers... One day he fled to avoid facing his creditors, and the workers set up a cooperative to go on working. What then made Lange a killer?
A scandalised Frenchman returns from Africa where he has been involved in illegal trading of mines (resulting in the deaths of many African miners). His bourgeois family are wary of the shame that he will bring so he must try to redeem himself and his family's name.