Acting
A fledgling ballerina falls in love with a brilliant composer, but the jealous head of the ballet company plots to drive them apart.
Somerset Maugham introduces four of his tales in this anthology film: "The Facts of Life," "The Alien Corn," "The Kite," and "The Colonel's Lady."
A woman is torn between the love of her life, who's married to someone else, and her older husband.
An archaeologist stumbles into the territory of an evil crime syndicate and struggles to set things right.
Vicky Barton and her brother Johnny travel from Naples to visit the 1889 Paris Exhibition. They both sleep in seperate rooms in their hotel. When the she gets up in the morning she finds her brother and his room have disappeared and no one will even acknowledge that he was ever there. Now Vicky must find out what exactly happened to her brother.
James Stewart plays aeronautical engineer Theodore Honey, the quintessential absent-minded professor: eccentric, forgetful, but brilliant. His studies show that the aircraft being manufactured by his employer has a subtle but deadly design flaw that manifests itself only after the aircraft has flown a certain number of hours. En route to a crash site to prove his theory, Honey discovers that he is aboard a plane rapidly approaching his predicted deadline.
Bedelia Carrington is living happily, it appears, in Monte Carlo with her husband Charlie Carrington. But a cultivated young artist, Ben Chaney, begins probing into her past with curious concern. Chaney, who is really a detective, learns that Bedelia's obsession for money has led her, in the past, to husband-poisoning for the insurance money.
Rex Allerton is a top Hollywood star and an idol of the female population. To get away from the pressure of the fans who won't leave him alone, he relocates to a remote Italian village where unanticipated trouble arises when unwittingly he becomes the prize for an international lottery.
Lilli Marlene, a French girl working as a bar maid in her uncle's café in Benghazi, Libya, turns out to be the girl that the popular German wartime song Lili Marleen had been written for before the war, so both the British and the Germans try to use her for propaganda purposes - especially as it turns out that she can sing as well. When the Germans kidnap her in Cairo and she starts appearing in radio broadcasts from Berlin, her British soldier friends think that she's joined the enemy. They couldn't be more wrong, because after the war it turns out that her songs over the radio contained secret messages to London from British agents in Berlin.
Set in a German theatre after the Second World War, two British soldiers are holding a disparate and hostile band of refugees in this theatre, prior to returning them to their homelands. The soldiers have difficulty dealing with the rivalries between Serb and Croat, resistance fighter and collaborator, Pole and Russian, etc. The threat of plague briefly unites them, but eventually even this wears off and the refugees unite in their hostility to the British.
A blind Englishwoman weds a French nobleman and moves into his family's chateau, but she quickly realizes someone there wants her out of the way.
Saadia is a wild, strange Arab girl whose life has been dominated by a local sorceress, a vengeful outcast in the community, who has convinced her she has the "evil eye" and brings disaster to all who love her. French doctor Henrik takes her to his clinic, for rehabilitation purposes, and falls in love with her as does his friend, Si Lahssen, the reigning prince of this small Moroccan state. When a plague falls on the town, Saadia is convinced she is responsible, and rides alone into the mountain country to retrieve the plague serum being held for ransom by bandits. The love triangle dominates most of the rest of the film.
Rural Australian Nellie Melba becomes an opera star in 1900s Europe and the United States.
An archetypal Englishman returns from a jaunt abroad to face a dastardly foreign count in a screwball duel for the hand of a beautiful mademoiselle.
A group of men from a London pub are going on a darts team outing to Boulogne. Various members of the party have different reasons for going and get involved in various adventures.
Life is not going well for the Huggetts. Father has lost his job. Jimmy and his wife cannot get to South Africa where he has a new job. So the family decide that they should go to South Africa by truck. With their travelling companion they travel across the desert which includes a brush with the law.
Justice, the poets have it, is a blind goddess. Eric Portman stars as the lawyer defending a lord, Hugh Williams, accused by his secretary Michael Dennison of having diverted public funds for his own use.
The fisherman from a Cornish village have a friendly rivalry with the fishermen (and one formidable woman) from a French port. Then war comes and they must all rethink their petty differences.
A partially blind Englishman retires to the French Riviera. He meets and falls for the Widow of a French Resistance fighter but is horrified when he discovers she is involved with smugglers and murderers.
A group of very strange men, refugees and casualties of the war, rally round when one of their number is framed by a drug racketeer. Co-opting a well-known journalist to their cause, they scheme to bring the racketeer to justice in a home-made "trial" in the crypt of a ruined church.
