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.
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.