Watch FilmoFlix. The film is set in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. Alfréd Gontrán is a bar dancer and silk boy who, in the course of his adventurous and dubious life, tries out many different ways of making a living and earning a living, until he is finally found to be a reliable gentleman in a country drifting towards fascism, and is given the honour of representing the new order.