Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Charles Crichton
Starring: Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway, Sid James, Alfie Bass, Marjorie Fielding, Edie Martin, Audrey Hepburn
Ealing Studios' most beloved caper returns in a new restoration as
shiny as the golden Eiffel Tower miniatures at the centre of its
criminal plot. That plot was devised, rather unbelievably, when
screenwriter TEB Clarke, hot off the success of seminal police
drama
The Blue Lamp, approached the management of the Bank of England and asked how
someone might pull off a robbery of their gold bullion. Rather than
dismissing Clarke and calling the cops, the bank assembled a committee
and figured out how such a feat might be accomplished, such was the draw
of collaborating with Ealing.
Directed by Charles Crichton, the film features
Alec Guinness in one of his classic chameleon roles as mild
mannered bank clerk Henry Holland. Having served 19 years with little to
show for his time, Holland dreams of stealing the gold he accompanies on
weekly runs where he is accompanied by a pair of armed guards. He sees a
chance at pulling off the perfect crime when he makes the acquaintance
of Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), a new tenant at his
boarding house.
Pendlebury runs a smelting operation that manufactures souvenirs sold
at tourist spots around Europe. One of the products is a miniature
replica of the Eiffel Tower, sold at a kiosk at the summit of the
Parisian structure. Working together, Holland and Pendlebury comes up
with an ingenious plot to melt down the stolen gold bullion and forge it
into the form of the miniature Eiffel Towers. Requiring the assistance
of someone with the sort of criminal expertise they lack, they lure in
small time crooks Lackery (Sid James) and Shorty (Alfie Bass), and set their plan in motion.
The comedies of Ealing have endured in a way later British comedies
like the Carry On series haven't, largely because they were never
interested in generating cheap laughs, and the lack of smutty innuendo
means they haven't dated in the same manner as comedies made as recently
as the 2000s. The Lavender Hill Mob is a classic example
of Ealing's preference for telling a compelling story with interesting
characters over slapstick and sex gags. Watching Crichton's film, you
don’t find yourself laughing out loud all that often, but it's only when
the end credits roll that you realise you've had a grin stretched across
your face for the past 80 minutes. It's a movie not so much of comic
moments but of an overall comic scenario, and much of it is played
relatively straight.
The criminal subplot is so tightly rendered that the movie functions just
as much as a suspense thriller as a comedy. Clarke's script details the
minutiae of the heist in a way that was rare at the time; this was four
years before Rififi after all. Remove its distinctively
British eccentric characters and
The Lavender Hill Mob might be mistaken for the
existential French crime thrillers that would follow in subsequent
decades. Crichton's direction and Clarke's clever script suck us into
the finer points of Holland's plot, and part of what makes us want the
protagonists to get away with their crime is how clearly ingenious they
are, and how that ingenuity has gone unrecognised outside criminal
circles. At his job, Holland is condescended to, but in his criminal
enterprise he earns the respect of his partners in crime.
It's not hard to imagine the average British cinemagoer of 1951
identifying with Holland's malaise. This was a nation still enduring the
after-effects of the war. With rationing still in place, the average
British worker must have questioned the point of putting in their 40
hours. Guinness's Holland represents one of the first examples of what
would become a staple of British comedy in the following years, the
"little man" who strikes back against a class system that was gradually
beginning to show cracks.
Ealing is best known for comedy, but their films of this period were
also packed with action set-pieces that were quite ahead of their time.
The last half hour of The Lavender Hill Mob is essentially
one extended chase sequence that begins in Paris and ends up on the
streets of London. A dizzying chase down the steps of the Eiffel Tower
is remarkably constructed, and though shot entirely in a studio, it's as
vertiginous as watching Tom Cruise hanging off the Burj Khalifa. The
sequence's influence can be seen in everything from
A View to a Kill to the work of Wes Anderson. This
set-piece is quickly followed by a devilishly ironic scene that sees
Holland and Pendelbury attempt to retrieve one of their miniature towers
from a police exhibition, a setup that must have had Hitchcock kicking
himself for not coming up with the idea. It all ends with a car chase
through the streets of London that riffs on silent era comedies while
laying the tropes that would become popular in the wave of rednecks vs
cops comedies of the '70s.
The movie is bookended by a flash forward to Holland living the high
life in Rio, featuring an early appearance by Audrey Hepburn. It
ends with a delightfully comic twist that could be read as something of
a downbeat ending were it not for the glint in Guinness's eye. The
gesture suggests Holland never cared so much about the financial gains
of his exploits, but was rather more invested in getting one over the
powers that be, an idea that endures with anyone who feels similarly
under-appreciated today.
