Anything to Declare?

It is rather surprising to find John Loder in this rather cheap looking quota quickie.He had recently appeared in a number of British A pictures and soon enough he would be off to America where he would appear in a number of prestigious films.The plot revolves around Elliott Markham who has invented an anti gas formula.He is tricked into accepting a peace activist who is a spy for a foreign country into his home.Markham and his daughter then have to be rescued by secret service agent Loder.So all pretty formulaic stuff.The action is rather perfunctory and the fights are poorly staged in what looks like a very small studio,

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? is a British pre-war thriller made at the cheap Nettlefold Studios, a couple of decades before they would become well-known for making dozens if not hundreds of B-movies during the 1950s. Although there's the ever-present historical interest of watching films made just before WW2 dealing with the (never spoken) Nazi threat, this isn't a very good film at all really.

It's a staged and rather melodramatic production, about a foreign scientist and his allies who arrive in the UK but have a secret plan involving an anti-gas formula. The hero is one of the biggest dopes in all of cinema, forever getting ambushed and knocked out by the various bad guys, to a degree that becomes laughable.

The scheme and acting of the villains is straight out of a pantomime and the heroes are little better. This is one of those films where you know exactly what's going to happen and when and it never surprises you for a moment. A lacklustre cast (no familiar faces here) doesn't help much, either.

A placid espionage drama historically interesting as a reminder that as the possibility of war loomed so did worries about the use of poison gas (which had been used to devastating effect in the trenches). Hence the rather spooky footage of a civil defence exercise rehearsing a gas attack and a scene involving an intruder wearing a gas mask.