Usually cast as secret agent/private eye Lemmy Caution, Eddie Constantine plays "Eddie" in The Empire of Night. This time, Constantine is a cabaret singer at odds with a criminal gang. When the villains try to take over every nightclub in town for their own nefarious purposes, Eddie sings a new tune with his fists. The story takes several unexpected turns, but Constantine remains in charge throughout.

During World War One, in a small rural French village far away from the front, a gamekeeper and his wife take in children displaced by the war.

Turner, a black American soldier, is given three days leave in Paris. Not knowing what to do with himself, he goes to a nightclub where he meets a French girl named Miriam. Their romance blossoms, but their love affair is darkened by Turner's impending departure and the specter of racial prejudice.

At a gathering of would-be society debauchees, the Baron Plessis de Regard and the attractive young Nathalie hatch their individual plans to use sex to respectively ruin and punish their selected enemies. The Baron's plan is to scupper the political ambitions of right-wing parliamentary candidate Colonel Montvilliers by setting him up with a female companion and publicly exposing his new-found vices. Nathalie's quest is of a more personal nature, to destroy her estranged father Charles Leroy-Merville by corrupting his innocent 17-year-old daughter Sophie, a task she intends to achieve by securing employ as the girl's summer tutor.

Professor Meier has stolen the plans of his own infernal machine, the T-14, and intends to sell to the highest bidder in a transaction organized in an Avoriaz hotel belonging to "Pasha", a mob boss who acts as go between. To retrieve the famous case, the SDECEE release Peter Finshh, a professional gentleman thief, from prison to return to the plans. Peter is ordered to recover the T-14 from the possession of a group of spies in Avoriaz.