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 master of cinematic naturalism goes to America! Jean Renoir's tale of a family hitting hard times in the dustbowl of the US is beautifully realised. Zachary Scott plays a sharecropper who decides that, if his family is to survive the depression, he needs to go it alone. Buying his own land and tools he sets to work, but is soon faced with the obstinate fact that nature is at best indifferent, at worst devastatingly cruel. Crisis follows catastrophe as, with a proud ethic that is constantly u find out more...