Anthony Asquith (1941)

‘Allied spies and Nazi agents insinuate themselves at a Scottish cottage (converted to a wartime hospital) with interests on an inventor’s nearly perfected bombsight’ (IMDB).  Cottage to Let is among the British films made during World War II with historical interest as propaganda but rather little to recommend it as screen drama.  (It’s not a patch on Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well?, made a year later, with which it shares some themes.)  Anthony Asquith’s cautionary tale about trust in wartime – the script by J O C Orton and Anatole de Grunwald is based on a play by Geoffrey Kerr – exploits audience assumptions about both social-military types and particular actors:  the ringleader of the Nazi agents is not only a Spitfire pilot; he’s also John Mills.  The nifty idea of casting Mills as the chief villain is wasted, though, because it’s so quickly revealed to the viewer that he’s up to no good.   He gives a decent performance but his death in the final showdown has more visual and aural impact than anything that’s gone before:  Asquith shoots this shoot-out among distorting mirrors and Mills’s dying scream is eerie.  In the don’t-be-fooled-by-appearances scheme of the film, we’re encouraged to suspect Alastair Sim, as the furtively inquisitive tenant of the titular cottage, of being an enemy agent too but it turns out he’s a British counterintelligence officer (with a splendid full-bodied laugh).  Leslie Banks is the eccentric inventor and Michael Wilding his dubious assistant.  Stagy Jeanne de Casalis is the posh woman who owns the cottage and more besides, and who’s prone to wearyingly frequent semi-spoonerisms.   The standout is a fifteen-year-old George Cole, making his screen debut.  As Ronald, a cockney teenage evacuee from London, Cole has vim and variety:  Ronald’s betrayed admiration for the Spitfire pilot is the one emotionally powerful element of Cottage to Let.

11 July 2017