Jean-Roger Milo

During the Second Napoleonic Empire, Etienne Lantier finds employment as a coal miner in the northern French town of Montsou. He immediately encounters misery and degradation in the apalling conditions of the mine. There he meets men as unscrupulous as Chaval and, conversely, as generous as Maheu. In fact a whole range of suffering humanity, labouring under the curse of capitalism.

Philippe Noiret portrays a French major who is supervising the gruesome task of counting and identifying the corpses still strewn over the battlefield post-World War I. Noiret is obsessed with the notion that, by doing his job above and beyond the call of duty, he can somehow make up for the carnage in which he participated a few years earlier.