Protraph Lack of good storyline.

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Freaktana A Major Disappointment

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

clanciai Charming idylls at the heart of legendary romantic Scotland gradually evolves into a stage of complicated and advanced espionage business. Leslie Banks is a nutty professor, very distracted, who gradually emerges as a leading inventor of the nation, whom everyone is nosily interested in, especially Alastair Sim in one of his early roles, who even here already proves himself amazingly superior as an actor and threatens to dominate the film. However, there is enough competition to put even him at bay when the moment comes. Most brilliant of all is perhaps George Cole as a the boy sent away from bombed London and housed with this lot of eccentrics. He is a Sherlock Holmes expert and gradually gets very busy, helping the inventor with his hobby planes, to begin with. John Mills is fished out of the water as an RAF man, but there is something fishy about him as well. This steadily more complex duck soup of intrigues that you can only guess at culminates in the great bazaar of festivities with fish ponds and other local glories, where the action suddenly gets frenzied with fisticuffs and gunshots, manhunts and all you need to have a nice local rustic espionage thriller for a real titbit of a film.

paxveritas Two bad-guy Nazi guards with guns return to the entry room of a mill where Banks, Cole and the Scotland Yard detective/butler are being held in the inner room. Check. It's all over for these two Nazi agents. The handwriting is on the mill wall. Militia is outside, surrounding them, shooting through the windows. The baddies' gun ammunition is likely low, as they've been shooting a lot. I didn't notice they brought extra rounds. Check.Problem solving is no longer necessary for our hostage three. They clearly heard the rescuing ruckus. All they have to do is bide their time and enjoy their rescue. They don't have to bother to fulfill any escape plan.But no, here comes their superfluous special effect. A large, heavy millstone is lever-ready to come crashing through the door connecting the inner room to the mill entry. Only it's narrower than about a third of a man's body, and quite unlikely to remain upright for more than a foot length of travel if levered and pushed. Makes you wonder how this point was staged in the play format this film was based on. Now if you were a Nazi/bad guy, would you stand around huddled next to your pal in perfect line with the approaching stone, or would you have good enough reflexes to just hop aside? A second or two of warning is all you'd need to get out of the way, as the stone improbably lumbers along its slow, inexplicably upright gravitational path. The baddies stare at it and get in line for the impact. Well this film still gets 9 stars from me out of 10, mainly for the entertaining interplay between comedy and intrigue, and for the excellent cast and script, and overall sweetness, despite credulity-bending here and there. Enjoyable movie for a rainy afternoon.

secondtake Cottage to Let (1941)There are so many characters, so many tinges of British accent, and such a parade of turncoats and double agents it's difficult to quite follow everything here. But stick it out. Or, in the extreme case (which I admit taking) see it twice. It's "quite worth it, I dare say."A comedy on the surface, and quite funny all through, it's also a serious war movie, shot and released in the thick of World War II. The key theme is actually not the bomb sight design and the attempt by the government to protect its secret from spies. It's about loose lips. And looking for traitors among us.So, here at this cottage near where a top scientist is working on a secret weapon idea, there is a parade of suspicious characters, and I mean characters, including the redoubtable Alastair Sim. There is a nutty family running the place, a couple of love affairs in the air, a bunch of secret messages sent by various messengers. I count rough twelve characters who matter, and if some are very minor, they are critical in some small way to the outcome. Allegiances are everything.What makes the movie actually remarkable is that it holds to together so well. And it has a tight economy to the editing, and a fluidity to the filming, that keeps it really going. For some reason the lighting in the first half, and the interior scenes in general, is bright and flat (no Warner Bros. influence here I guess) but then there are some scenes later that are extraordinary in their dramatic atmosphere.In fact, there are some ideas that prefigure famous later ones, like the auction that is interrupted by spies and good guys by bidding incorrectly, stolen by Hitchcock in "North by Northwest." Or even the ending which is a slim version of the mirror shootout by Welles in "Lady from Shanghai." It's quite an exciting finish (never mind the goofy millstone moment, which you'll see). Anthony Asquith, the director, went on to make some mainstays of post-war British cinema, and that's yet another reason to appreciate this, as a precursor to his own work. But it also reveals a real intelligence for the movies. Evident and appreciated.In the big view, it isn't the plot, which is necessarily contrived to give a message to the nation, but the many pieces, and the writing and acting in those pieces, that make the movie really strong. The one version out there (streaming on Netflix) is a weak print (and there is no DVD release, apparently) so the sound and even the richness of the visuals will hamper a good appreciation. Even so, give it a look. Alertly.

writers_reign 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.