Cottage To Let [Bombsight Stolen] **** (1941, Leslie Banks, Alastair Sim, John Mills, George Cole, Jeanne De Casalis, Michael Wilding) – Classic Movie Review 2785

Director Anthony Asquith’s 1941 British movie stars George Cole, in his film debut at 16 as Ronald, a young cockney who is evacuated to a Scottish village, always a hotbed of Nazis in the movies of this era. The London evacuee, the new tenant and a downed fighter pilot all move into a wartime cottage on a Scottish estate. 

Also scoring in this quick-witted, very entertaining comedy thriller are Cole’s real-life mentor Alastair Sim as Charles Dimble an MI5 undercover agent and John Mills as a downed German parachutist pretending to be an RAF pilot called Flight Lieutenant Perry. The landowner is a key British military inventor and the butler is a Scotland Yard copper.

And Ronald soon stops the Nazis from kidnapping his inventor foster father John Barrington (Leslie Banks).

With Anatole de Grunwald and J O C Orton’s screenplay based on Geoffrey Kerr’s play, this is good fun all round.

Also in the cast are Jeanne de Casalis, Michael Wilding, Wally Patch, Carla Lehmann, Frank Cellier, Catherine Lacey, Roddy Hughes, Rex Williams, Breffni O’Rourke, Peter Gawthorne, Hay Petrie, Muriel Aked and Muriel George.

George Cole died on August 5 2015, aged 90. Adieu, dear departed.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2785

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