A story about three women with totally different backgrounds who share a common bond in that each needs a large sum of money and each has a husband serving time at a maximum security prison. Lizzie Martin (Lauren Bacall) has been instructed by her husband Ed (Robert Alda) to deliver a $1 million bribe in order to get him an instant parole; however, when she learns he has been having an affair with his secretary, Lizzie wants to disappear but fears for her life if she doesn't carry out his instructions.
Rena Vlahopoulou plays signora Antzolina, an old-time Corfiote aristocratic lady who has fallen on hard times and is working as a piano teacher while reminiscing of her old romance with her lost fiancé. She lives in her palatial mansion in Corfu which becomes the object of desire of Sotiris Karelis, an enterpreneur, who wants to convert it into a hotel. Karelis romances the old aristocrat thinking that at a suitable price she will eventually agree to sell her mansion to him. When she resists, he tells her a story that he is friends with her lost fiancé.
Pierre Gastié-Leroy (Pierre Richard) is the son of a wealthy director of a factory of weapon manufacturing (Bernard Blier). Despite his parents, two generous uncles and a bishop godfather who try to inculcate him the rigid values of his social level, Pierre is a dreamer, antimilitaristic, social educator who dreams of saving three thugs, his "little guys" at the limit of delinquency. After several resounding failures that sent him to prison, Pierre is ordered by his father to join his factory to direct the social service. Tired of the venality of his father and the foolishness of the "little guys", Pierre hires them at the factory. They will have fun making mischief and being overzealous to convince the supervisors on increasing the working rhythms, denouncing the trade union leaders, battling a strike and finally, stealing 500 tanks to sell them back to the black market. A demonstration of new remote-controlled missiles attended by the Minister for Defence turns into fiasco. Injured in his pride, the father Gastié-Leroy wants to show the reliability of his product by pointing the fire at his own factory.