The wife of a greedy man comes back to haunt him after he scares her to death.

A gang of five diverse oddball criminal types rent a two room apartment in an isolated house on a London cul-de-sac from an octogenarian widow with three pet parrots. The group’s mastermind, Professor Marcus, tells her a cover story that they are members of an amateur string quintet and would like to use the rooms to hone their musical skills. In reality, they’re plotting to rob a bank and plan to use Mrs. Wilberforce’s naiveté and her Victorian sensibilities to their advantage.

Professor Bernard Quatermass is in charge of a rocket mission that has gone awry. They lose contact with the spaceship and have no idea how far into space it may have traveled. When the rocket crash lands they find that only one of the three occupants, Victor Carroon, is on board; the others have simply vanished. Slowly, the surviving astronaut begins to transform into a deadly creature.

P.C. George Dixon (Warner) a long-serving traditional “copper” who is due to retire shortly, takes a new recruit, Andy Mitchell (Hanley), under his aegis, introducing him to the easy-going night beat. Dixon is a classic Ealing ‘ordinary’ hero, but also anachronistic, unprepared and unable to answer the violence of Tom Riley (Bogarde). Called to the scene of a robbery at a local cinema, Dixon finds himself face-to-face with Riley, a desperate youth armed with a revolver. Dixon initially tries to talk Riley into surrendering the weapon, but Riley panics and fires. Dixon walks to his own death almost uncomprehending. Dixon is taken to hospital, but dies some hours later. The ending is another Ealing quirk, with ordinary decent society, including ‘professional’ criminals used to violence, banding together to track down and catch the murderer, who is trapped in the crowd at White City greyhound track in west London. To Andy Mitchell falls the honour of arresting Riley.

A series of stories about the lives and loves of nine men in a Prisoner of War Camp over five years. Location shooting in the British occupied part of Germany adds believability. The main story is of Hasek (Redgrave) a Czech soldier who needs to keep his identity a secret from the Nazis, to do this he poses as a dead English Officer and corresponds with the man’s wife. Upon liberation they meet and decide to continue their lives together. The other inmates’ stories are revealed episodically.