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...

The western as myth; hill's story of the James/Younger gang and the violent hunt for them revels in it's connections with the genre as passed down from Ford, Hawks and Ray. The gangsters are revealed as representing a wider community, the defeated Confederacy, small farmers and their extended families in general, with their victims being some combination of class enemies, uncaring, urban and Northern, and hence how they became folk heroes in their home state of Missouri... and all with a great s find out more...