Plot

While awaiting a delayed flight, a lawyer who has left his unfaithful wife, befriends three fellow passengers. After the plane crashes and he is among the few to survive, he feels compelled to contact the families of his dead friends.

On a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles, lawyer David Trask befriends three of his fellow passengers while one technical issue after another lead to unscheduled stops and delays. The other three are physician Dr. Robert Fortness, a struggling actress with the stage name Binky Gay, and loud-mouthed salesman Eddie Hoke, who is both quick with a joke and quick to show off a photograph of his beautiful wife, Marie. Two of them confess to David having painful reckonings waiting for them in Los Angeles. Dr. Fortness, an alcoholic, is returning to own up to his responsibility for a car accident in which his friend and two others were killed, and his guilt over letting his wife Claire lie for him, which destroyed their marriage and alienated his son. Binky, who has tried and failed to realize success on the New York stage for the past year, is returning to her husband, Mike Carr, hoping to keep his affection despite his overbearing mother, former vaudeville star Sally Carr, who still basks in her former but no longer shining glory, and who resents Binky as competition on and off stage. David feels compelled to help their families come to terms with their losses, especially in the case of Dr. Fortness, who hired David as his attorney. Each case is different. The doctor's wife and son need to face the truth. Binky's mother-in-law thinks she knows everything and won't let David get a word in edgewise, so he fools her into thinking that Binky had been successful in New York, only discussing the truth with her husband. Meeting Eddie's widow, David finds that she has more comfort to give him than he has for her. Marie's reminiscence about her marriage to Eddie causes David to reflect on his own marriage, leading him to make a decision.—Huggo

A Midwestern lawyer named David Trask (Gary Merrill) leaves his wife. At the airport he buys a ticket for Los Angeles, but the only available flight is delayed. He calls his wife and tells her he can't forgive her and is going away to think. He ignores her pleas to come home and won't say where he is or where he is headed.

Because of delays and an unscheduled stop due to weather, David, despite himself, befriends three other travelers: Binky Gay, a failed actress (Shelley Winters); Robert Fortness, an alcoholic doctor (Michael Rennie); and Eddie Hoke, a clownish traveling salesman (Keenan Wynn). Eddie shows off a photo of Marie, his wife, in a swimsuit, which puzzles his companions: They think Marie could do better than Eddie and think it odd that he shows her picture to other men. While talking to his companions individually, David learns from the doctor that he plans to confess to his culpability in a car accident in which he not only killed three people, but lied that his dead friend was driving. The doctor hires David for some legal advice. Binky tells David about her year in New York, trying to succeed on the stage to prove to Sally Carr, her mother-in-law, and something of a show-business legend, that Binky didn't marry Sally's son, Mike, to steal the glory of the Carr name. She dreads returning home, with nothing to show for her year away, and face more of Sally's abuse. Eddie persuades them to exchange names, addresses and phone numbers, and he insists that they all promise to meet again.

After the plane crashes, and David is the only survivor of the four of them, he feels obligated to contact the family of each friend to help them deal with the tragedy. His first visit is to Dr. Fortness's family. He finds that he must not only help the wife but the teenage son who has run away from home. David locates the boy and brings him home. He then reveals what really happened the night of the accident, which the parents had kept from the son. The wife had perjured herself by backing up her husband's claim that he was not behind the wheel, but afterward she lost respect for him and their marriage suffered. The son had believed that his mother was being unfair to his father. David further tells them that Dr. Fortness fully intended to make things right by confessing what he had done.

David tries to reach Binky's husband, Mike, at the club owned by his mother, Sally, but Sally gets in the way. She assumes that David is there to contest Mike's divorce proceeding against Binky. She won't let David explain that, as far as he knows, Binky never knew about the divorce, and she won't even stop talking long enough for him to tell her that Binky is dead. Sally paints herself as having been very kind and tolerant toward Binky, despite ongoing displays of her lack of either quality toward her underlings at the club. Finally, David tells her a tall tale about how successful her daughter-in-law was in New York and how Binky even told a Broadway producer that Sally would be perfect as Bloody Mary in the hit musical "South Pacific". Meanwhile, Mike has received the news that Binky died. Privately, David discusses the truth with Mike, who seems to agreeable to letting his mother think that Binky was a success a while longer.

Finally, David visits Eddie's widow, Marie, whom he finds paralyzed and confined to her bed. He tries to tell her that Eddie was a great guy who was liked by everyone, but Marie will have none of it. She knows that nearly everyone thought Eddie was a bore and a clown, but she tells David that, years ago, she left Eddie for another man, but when she had the accident that left her paralyzed, the other man left her flat, and Eddie took her back. Marie says that Eddie was an exceptional man - "a rock". Despite what others thought of him, Eddie's willingness to forgive and love unconditionally set him above most other men.

David is moved to call his wife and tell her that he forgives her and has decided to come home.