Paradoxically, it was conceived at a desperate time in Giraudoux's life the German occupation of France. Its premise is that the "little people" can make a difference and that the pure in heart will inherit the earth, if only for a moment in time. Thought Giraudoux's world was devastated by the malignancy of World War II, he did not give up hope that sanity or at least a benign madness would ultimately prevail.

This satirical comedy has the inimitable Katherine Hepburn leading a parade of stars. 

Countess Aurelia may be a woman of the world but she's defiantly 
not living in it. The Paris-dwelling Countess remains lost in a fantasy 
world where reveries of a happy past keep her content.  Countess Aurelia's eccentric crew of confidantes roam the Chaillot district of Paris in similarly bemused states of mind. But when Aurelia's friends learn that oil drillers are planning to ruin Paris as they know it, they jar the Countess out of her fog, hoping she will save their beloved city. 

It's a mad, mad, mad world in which they live and out of this madness, 
some order is to be found.  (Of course, the real madness lies in the real world!) 

The movie convinces that sometimes it takes a madwoman 
to “cure” us of our sanity! "  Most of the time it is an amusement, or at least a diversion,  to watch the over-enthusiastic elements in our society attempt  to set the world "right." 

Indeed, for many of us, this is what the political process has become, 
a comical song-and-dance routine in which the crusaders are elephants
and donkeys and where the wrongs are rights for one animal and vice versa. 
However, sometimes this whole idea of "fixing things the way they ought to be" gets to be just a pain, a broken record of societal proportions. 

This, unfortunately, is where The Madwoman of Chaillot, picks up the torch. Diagnosing the ills of French society, Giradoux sets out to tackle the difficult issues of class distinction, individual verses societal will and even modern-day financial planning in his all-too-complicated Madwoman. 

A story about battling conformity and greed,  about honor and doing the right thing. 

And it is about love. ................