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MovieMail's Review
With its square-jawed Spitfire aces, duplicitous Nazi spies and plucky evacuees, Cottage To Let might be dismissed as a wartime morale booster. Revisited sixty-six years after it first opened for business, however, it stands up remarkably well; a spirited comedy thriller of considerable charm.
It starts at the Scottish cottage of the title. The foolish owner has triple booked it – it’s a billet for a Sherlock Holmes obsessed tyke from London (George Cole, barely out of short trousers), a convalescent home for injured flyer John Mills and a holiday retreat for sinister Alastair Sim. The junior sleuth soon detects trouble: the boffin who lives at the manor has invented a new bomb sight and the enemy is interested…
The budget was obviously subject to severe rationing but Anthony Asquith plays things at a lively clip and deftly deploys his meagre resources. He’s ably assisted by his cast, spearheaded by the blessed Sim on fine form.
Cottage To Let is nobody’s finest hour (and-a-half) but it deserves a higher profile. It’s still a tonic for the home front.
Includes the Anglia TV play 'The Prodigal Daughter', starring Alastair Sim and Jeremy Brett.
Film Description
A stylish and assured film adaptation, with the original stage actors, of one of the first wartime stage thrillers about an unsuspecting inventor who is in danger of being kidnapped by a Fifth Columnist organisation. Leslie Banks plays inventor John Barrington, secretly testing bomb mechanisms in a laboratory in his remote country house for the Air Ministry. He is unaware however that undercover spies are to be found amongst his own staff - who are also unaware that they are being watched.
