Opens with Maugham telling us it's our fault there's a sequel as Quartet was popular!
James Hayter is "The Verger" who is let go (by Michael Hordern) because he can't read or write. ("What's he doing with a newspaper?" Q asks later.) Decides to marry Kathleen Harrison and make a go of it.
Nigel Patrick gives one of his frenetic performances as "Mr Know-All" who takes an overseas voyage with fellow passengers Wilfred Hyde White, Naunton Wayne and Anne Crawford. Despite his unpopularity he proves to be a man with heart.
R,C. Sheriff and Noel Langley join Maugham as screenwriters, though who wrote what isn't attributed. Similarly the camera duties of Reginal Dwyer and Geoffrey Unsworth aren't defined.
In the most personal episode, "Sanitorium" where Maugham himself was treated for TB, the great Roland Culver is admitted as a new patient. Fellow sufferers are Jean Simmons, Raymond Huntley (with visiting wife Betty Ann Davies), rivals John Laurie and Finlay Currie, shady past Michael Rennie and Marjorie Fielding and Mary Merrall (both rather unfairly uncredited). The doctor is André Morell. It's bittersweet and rather deeper than the other two - the best segment. This is the one French directed.
It was the ladies I didn't know so well. Anne Crawford was in a ton of movies I've never even heard of, as well as Millions Like Us, so it's not surprising we're not better acquainted. Betty Ann Davies though was in Kipps, It Only Rains on Sunday, The Passionate Friends, The History of Mr Polly, The Blue Lamp, Outcast of the Islands, and we've just seen her in Grand National Night. She sadly died young following appendicitis complications.
