It's the off-season at the lonely Beauregard Hotel in Bournemoth, and only the long-term tenants are still in residence. Life is stirred up, however, when the beautiful Ann Shankland arrives to see her alcoholic ex-husband, John Malcolm, who is secretly engaged to Pat Cooper, the woman who runs the hotel. Meanwhile, snobbish Mrs Railton-Bell discovers that the kindly if rather doddering Major Pollock, played by David Niven, who won an Oscar for his performance, a retired officer who likes to find out more...

Thomas Fowler is a British journalist reporting from 1950's Vietnam (just as the troubles there escalate from France's colonial desperation to America's genocidal idealism), and a man who has lost his passion for the world. Into this cynical and complacent western community arrives young Pyle, a naive and optimistic American medical worker, whose motives are more convoluted than they at first appear. These two men are drawn together by a shared passion for Thomas's mistress, Phoung, a beautiful find out more...