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.

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.

A gang of five diverse oddball criminal types rent a two-room apartment in an old 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 an armored bank van and plan to use Mrs. Wilberforce’s naiveté and her Victorian sensibilities to their advantage.

P.C. George Dixon (Warner) is a long-serving traditional copper who is due to retire shortly. He takes a new recruit under his aegis and introduces him to the easy-going night beat. Dixon is a classic ordinary hero but also anachronistic, unprepared and unable to answer the violence of the 1950s.

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