The Lavender Hill Mob

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) is regarded as one of Britain's finest comedies, made at Ealing Studios, which has come to be a kind of sub-genre. The finest I've seen from that period is The Ladykillers. The Lavender Hill Mob seemed a little half-formed to me, as if it were an abridged version of a longer story.

The film stars Alec Guinness as a bank clerk who oversees shipments of gold bullion from the refinery to the bank. He is a meek sort, thought to have no ambition by his superiors. Actually, he's been spending years figuring how to try to rob the gold. He's stuck on how to smuggle the gold out of the country, until he meets Stanley Holloway, who has a factory that makes souvenirs. The plan--to melt the gold down into Eiffel Tower statuettes.

The film, directed by Charles Crichton (years later he would direct A Fish Called Wanda) consists mostly of a couple of action sequences. Some of the statuettes are accidentally sold from a shop at the top of the Eiffel Tower to some British schoolgirls, and the two men have to chase them to get them back. Guinness and Holloway run down the spiral staircase of the Tower, and then try to get aboard the boat that will take the girls back to England, but are held up at every turn by French officials. Later they will lead the police on a long chase in a stolen police car.

Compared to other films that have manic chases, these are not really that funny, nor particularly well edited. The strength of the film is the notion that these two mild-mannered men are engaging in such an operation. They recruit two other crooks to help them, and one of them can't go to Paris because his wife won't let him.

Guinness was nominated for an Oscar (his first) and the film won for Best Screenplay. Holloway is famous for playing Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady-- I think it's the first film I've seen of his other than that one.