[2] Where Renoir's previous film, The Golden Coach (1952), had celebrated the 18th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, this work is a homage to the Parisian café-concert of the 19th century, with its popular singers and dancers.

[3] In Paris in the late 1880s, Henri Danglard owns a fashionable, but not very profitable, night club called Le Paravent Chinois, where the main attraction is a solo belly dance by his mistress Lola.

One night, he accompanies a group of friends to La Reine Blanche, a simple dance hall in Montmartre, where he sees people doing the old-fashioned, but high-energy, cancan.

He sells Le Paravent Chinois and, with additional funds from Baron Walter, a banker who is infatuated with Lola, buys and tears down La Reine Blanche, intending to replace it with a new venue—the Moulin Rouge—at which a troupe of glamorous girls will perform the cancan.

Tryouts, rehearsals, and demolition progress fairly smoothly, until Danglard is injured at the construction site in a fight with Paulo, Nini's jealous boyfriend.

In a review in Arts magazine in May 1955, François Truffaut called the film a milestone in the history of colour of cinema, saying: "Every scene is a cartoon in movement [...] Madame Guibole's dance class reminds us of a Degas sketch."

Writing in Positif, Bernard Chardère did not receive the film so positively, however, criticising the music, the sets, and even the final cancan scene.