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.

MartinHafer During WWII, there were tons of propaganda films made in the US and Britain to bolster the war effort. Most of them were pretty good and did a good job of mustering support for the war, though quite a few of them (like this film) seem awfully far-fetched when seen today. Now this ISN'T to say that they are bad films or that they are so difficult to believe that it ruins them--it surely doesn't. You just need to suspend disbelief and sit back and enjoy them for what they were intended.COTTAGE TO LET is a dandy little film that packs some excellent stars and performances into it. It's very heavy with stars, having Leslie Banks, Alistair Sim and John Mills. However, while certainly not a star at the time or even one for many years to come, I really enjoyed young George Cole's performance as the precocious teen, Ronald. Despite all these stars, he managed to more than hold his own as a character who was almost like Sherlock Holmes and Dennis the Menace rolled into one! The story, as I said, is tough to believe. Having one or two Nazi spies in Britain during the war was indeed believable, but having so many more and such a complicated plot wasn't. Plus, while you could believe them perhaps stealing some plans or killing a scientist, having an elaborate plot where they kidnap the scientist and take him all the way back to Berlin UNDETECTED is far-fetched. However, in addition to the good acting, the plot was entertaining--so much so that you could ignore all the impossibilities and improbabilities.Overall, while not a great film, it is a fine example of wartime British cinema and is entertaining and fun.

sol- A very brisk, lightly entertaining wartime thriller with quite an exciting ensemble cast, the film is however burdened down by a strange, ill-explained plot, which borders both on being contrived and confusing. The characters are also rather run-of-the-mill, but they do interact quite well together. The picture has some interesting ideas, some neat mirror work, and it is generally amusing stuff. Overall nothing too special or highly memorable, but it has enough mystery elements and thriller elements worked into it that it is able to provide adequate entertainment, even if it is not a perfect watch as such.