If you can get over a title which suggests a celluloid accident involving Hinge & Bracket then there's something in this romantic drama for great-auntie Ethel.

Ursula (Dench) and Janet (Smith) play two dippy spinsters with a proclivity for floral prints who live in a stone house perched over the Atlantic on the Cornish coast.

Days are spent kneeling on a trug weeding the borders until Polish émigré Andrea (Goodbye Lenin!'s Daniel Bruhl) is washed up on the shingle beach.

Taking him in, he makes a quick recovery thanks to urns-full of strong tea and pilchard pie provided by draconian housekeeper Dorcas (Margolyes).

However, it's the nervous months before World War Two and foreigners - particularly Eastern European ones - are treated if not with curiosity then downright suspicion.

What makes the village ever more watchful is the presence of bo-ho fraulein Natascha McElhone who's on holiday brushing up her watercolour skills.

Ursula, who has never married, begins to find herself irresistibly attracted to the young stranger. He views her as a mother…she regards him as something more than a son.

However, this being 1940s provincial England the nearest she gets to a period take on one of Harry Enfield's randy old ladies is a sneaky peak when he's slipping on his jim-jams.

You can't blame director Charles Dance for a lack of ambition - this is his first feature - but this shambles along like a wet weekend in Newquay.

Spicing things up with some acid dialogue is the widowed Janet - who lost her man in the Great War and has an unsurprising downer on anything Teutonic.

"I know it's not frightfully Christian of me but I don't like her," she says of McElhone's German artist. "Is she German?" "Probably."

Sport is also made of the British conviction that shouting at an uncomprehending foreigner will knock down the language barrier.

However, while there's nothing to actively dislike, this has the feel of a well-crafted TV movie with the talents of Dench, Smith and David Warner merely ticking over.

Tim Evans