Silvia Jost
It is difficult these days to imagine that elementary school education was instituted by anyone at all. In fact, Swiss experimental educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) laid the groundwork for universal elementary school education and developed many of the educational theories and techniques in use even in the present day. This film focuses on a critical period in Pestalozzi's development of his educational theories, when he was running a boarding school in a disused convent for impoverished village children in the French part of Switzerland. At the time, Pestalozzi (Gian Maria Volonte) was regarded as a strange renegade, and it had only been with great difficulty that he was able to persuade even the poorest parents that his efforts to feed, clothe, and educate their children might be beneficial to them. Most of the story is told in flashbacks, narrated by one of his friends and supporters.
A girl returns from a trip out of the country and is given a strip-search for drugs when she re-enters Switzerland. Lacking a place to stay, she looks up an old friend of hers and stays with him, working to pay for food for both of them. In the casual manner of such arrangements, several more people enter the scene to stay: a rich kid who has been disinherited and a girl who is an escaped convict. The working girl has been hiding some of her wages in her clothes, and the two young men steal the money, buy a car, and hare off looking for excitement.
This romantic drama follows two policemen whose job is to investigate the lives of foreigners who have applied for Swiss citizenship. Among the applicants they must screen are a French psychiatrist and his wife, and a ballet dancer. The married couple are quickly accepted, but the dancer's life offers some objections. However, since the younger policeman has fallen in love with her, there is a chance that she, too, will win Swiss citizenship.
Throughout the late 19th century and in the early part of the 20th, Russians of a wide variety of political persuasions contemplated various forms of revolution. Throughout the same period, they often had to seek asylum in other countries. This movie concerns Sergei (Roger Jendly), a revolutionary who kills a student in Russia and flees to Switzerland. Though he has the gifts and abilities to unify various revolutionary groups within Russia, once he has been forced to flee, they have no interest in him. When his presence in Switzerland threatens a trade agreement with the Tsar, he is tracked down and expelled.
