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...

An ambitious journalist wants to get to the top of his profession. In order to get the inside scoop on a murder, he feigns mental illness and goes undercover in the county hospital's psychiatric unit, where the murder was witnessed by three of the inmates. Immersed into the world of the mentally unsound and subject to intense shock treatment, he soon tips the balance of sanity and pays the ultimate price for his "rehearsed nightmare". More harrowing than "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", Shock find out more...