the leading man is my tpye

Truly Dreadful Film

Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

"Cottage to let" borrows heavily from the works of such popular British novelists of the 1930s as John Buchan,Dornford Yates and "Sapper".Kidnapped scientists,plucky schoolboys,cold -eyed detectives,dastardly German spies and pretty girls with summer dresses and wide-brimmed hats filled their pages.Now considered "Fascist",racist","imperialist"and probably several other "ists" I've never heard of,in more sensible times they were thought of as "good reads",nothing more,nothing less. In the movie the inventor of a secret bombsight is kidnapped by dastardly German spies and saved by the intervention of a plucky schoolboy and a cold - eyed detective. There is a splendidly Hitchcockian Auction scene where Mr John Mills as an injured RAF pilot picks up a warming pan by the handle and asks "What's this - a banjolele?"thus encapsulating in one word the whole era. Mr Alistair Sim is a sardonic Scottish detective,Miss Jeanne de Casalis (on the wireless as Mrs Shufflewick/Pennyfeather) splendidly dotty as the spooneristic posh lady. Young master George Cole is a role model for schoolboys carving Spitfires from bits of firewood during the blackout. Thoroughly enjoyable wartime entertainment at the expense of the dastardly Germans(sorry,our European partners - oops!I now await the midnight knock on the door)

Wordy? A little. But this British home-front spy mystery from 1941 is also fine entertainment, reasonably exciting and features two first-rate performances by Alastair Sim as the suspicious Charles Dimble and 16-year-old George Cole as the 15-year-old London kid, Ronald, resourceful and energetic. Ronald thinks Sherlock Holmes is "the greatest man whatever lived" and is pretty good at deducing things. Bear in mind that Sim and his wife took Cole into their household when he was a boy and became Cole's foster parents. Sim saw to Cole's education. When Cole wanted to become an actor like Sim, Sim also saw to Cole's training. They appeared together in more than a dozen movies, not as a team but as two skilled comic actors. John Barrington (Leslie Banks) is a brilliant, eccentric British inventor. He works at his grand manor house in Scotland and has almost developed a revolutionary bomb sight. The Nazis want his secrets, preferably with Barrington as well. Barrington has a flighty, well-meaning wife (at one point she kindly tells Ronald, who has nearly destroyed a suit of armor, "Never mind, never mind. Just forget what a nuisance you are.") and a good-looking daughter. He also has an assistant who longs for the daughter. Suddenly the cottage on their grounds, which had been up for rent, is taken over as a military hospital. In it goes Flight Lieutenant Perry (John Mills), a Spitfire pilot who had to bail out and landed in a nearby loch with a bad arm. Then there's Dimble, who says he had arranged to rent the cottage and now has nowhere to stay. He's put up in a room next to Perry. There's young, confident Norman, sent up from London because of the blitz and lodged in the manor house. There's the butler, a bull-necked, taciturn man who was recently hired and a housekeeper who leaves with little notice. And before long we see Dimble has a revolver, Perry makes odd phone calls, Barrington seems over-confident, his assistant seems unduly interested in the bombsight and we learn Scotland Yard and MI-something have each sent a man up there. They have learned a Nazi spy ring has targeted Barrington and now has an agent in place. But who are the spies and who are Barrington's protectors? Well, one of the Nazi agents is not hard to figure out and one of the protectors is. The fun is in seeing how the game is played. Cottage to Let has serious themes and clever characterizations. Bannister's well-bred wife comes from the Billie Burke school of thespianism, well-meaning and ditzy. Addressing the townsfolk who have come to the manor for the annual pageant, she quotes Churchill in honoring all the volunteers, "Never," she says, "has so much owed so many to so little." There's snappy dialogue, plenty of skullduggery, a shoot-up escape and death by rolling millstone. It's always fun to listen to the careful, well-bred diction of the upper-class coming from actors of assorted backgrounds who had to learn how to speak "properly" if they were to get leading roles. So many "girls" to be turned into "gels," so many a "here" and a "dear" to be turned into a nasal "heah" and a nasal "deah." The main actors all do fine jobs, but once again it's Alastair Sim who captures the movie. He was a superb actor with a unique style, and he is just about impossible not to watch. With Cottage to Let, however, his foster son, George Cole, just about gives him a run for his money. Cole turns in a supremely assured job as the supremely assured Norman, no one's fool yet still a very likable young man.

Puffin Asquith turned out three films in 1941 and one of the others was Quiet Wedding which was, like this one, an adaptation of a stage play - in fact Puffin made something of a speciality of this and adapted several Rattigan plays for the screen most notably the masterpiece The Browning Version - and here the origins definitely show. It's the kind of play that no one writes any more - like Esther McCracken's Quiet Wedding - the typical 'Home Counties' romantic comedy with mandatory French Windows and parlour maids but now tarted up with a 'topical' plot reflecting the war, then in its third year. Sixteen year old George Cole reprised his stage role to good effect and worked well with mentor Alistair Sim, Leslie Banks and John Mills. As in the play - which I haven't seen but it is a reasonable assumption - most of the cast are doubling as Red Herrings (it's the one about the inventor working on vital war work as several Nazi 'agents' prepare to kidnap him) and now we know where James Bond acquired his taste for excruciating puns as Leslie Banks remarks - after seeing off two villains by unleashing, with the help of Cole, a huge millstone, which crushes them 'killed two birds with one stone'. On the whole it's fairly harmless though I doubt anyone will be dashing out to buy the DVD should one exist.

I've just watched Cottage to Let for the first time and found it quite enjoyable.A motley collection of people come to stay at a cottage in Scotland including a scientist, pilot, a boy who is an evacuee from London and a new tenant. Soem of the people staying here are actually spies who plan to kidnap the scientist. The evacuee becomes suspicious and the butler is actually an undercover copper. The scientist is kidnapped towards the end and the evacuee gets caught up in all this and all are locked up in a room. The kidnappers get arrested and the pilot, who is one of them is shot dead at the end.Cottage to Let is worth having just for the excellent cast, mostly British: Leslie Banks (Jamaica Inn), Alastair Sim (Scrooge), the late, great Sir John Mills (Scott of the Antarctic, Tiger Bay), a young George Cole (Minder)in his movie debut as the evacuee Ronald and one of Liz Talyor's many husbands, Michael Wilding.This is worth watching, especially if you are into old movies. Great fun.Rating: 3 stars out of 5.