It has an all-star cast, including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Louis Jourdan, Elsa Martinelli, Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor, Orson Welles, and Margaret Rutherford, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture.

As flights are delayed, the VIPs (very important people) of the title play out the drama of their lives in a number of slightly interconnected stories.

Meanwhile, film producer Max Buda needs to leave London, taking his newest protégée Gloria Gritti with him, by midnight if he is to avoid paying a hefty tax bill.

It being a matter of great urgency, she decides to approach Paul Andros and ask him to advance a sum of money that will save Mangrum's company.

According to a biography of Rattigan, the idea of the film originated with the writer's experience of a flight delay due to fog at London Airport; and one of the story lines is drawn from the true story of actress Vivien Leigh's attempt to leave her husband, actor Laurence Olivier, for the actor Peter Finch, but Leigh got trapped in the VIP lounge at Heathrow due to fog.

[15] Alexander Walker of London's Evening Standard was critical of the film, and said: "It is an entire British museum of prehistoric cliches and burial mound characters.

"[8] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised The V.I.P.s as "a lively, engrossing romantic film cut to the always serviceable pattern of the old multi-character Grand Hotel, and some of the other people in it are even more exciting than the top two stars.

It has suspense, conflict, romance, comedy and drama ... Its main fault is that some of the characters and by-plots are not developed enough though they and their problems are interesting enough to warrant separate pix.

"[17] Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "They can say it's in the tradition of MGM's Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight all they want; to me it's a grounded High and Mighty.

Robert Murphy disapproved of both films, remarking that "Asquith spent his last years making increasingly banal prestige productions like The V.I.P.s and The Yellow Rolls-Royce".

He seems to have been the most prolific screenplay novelizer of the late '50s through mid '60s, and, during that time, the preeminent specialist at light comedy, though he adapted a few drama scripts as well.

Whether this omission was an editorial error, or a marketing ploy to make Albert's novel seem to be the film's source material (with or without the complicity of Rattigan) is unknown.