On a small island off the west coast of France a couple leads a degradingly harsh life, together with their servants. During all seasons they have to survive by collecting sea-weed along the shoreline and selling it to the few captains mooring on the island. They live like prisoners on the island, their earnings depend on fate.
Luis Aguilar is a talented piano student who struggles to make ends meet. At the conservatory he meets the beautiful, rich, and also talented piano student Marta Reyes and romance ensues.
Jimmy and his pal Cannonball are hired by a rancher and horse breeder to capture Midnight, a wild stallion that has been interfering with local herds and has a reputation as a killer.
Childhood friends move up the economic ladder from slumrat to middle class comfort, but the marriage between two of them is threatened by a bad woman from a nightclub.
Around 1750, in the Dauphiné not far from the Swiss border, a cooper, tired of the injustices affecting the peasants crushed by taxes, went into revolt.