Charles Crichton (1951)
Improbable lawbreakers are a recurring feature of British comedies of the period – from Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) through The Ladykillers (1955) to The League of Gentlemen (1960). The cut above criminals must eventually get their comeuppance – a poor reward for the entertainment they’ve provided but a corrective that acquits the film-makers of charges of moral irresponsibility (and the audience of being accomplices after the fact). Thanks to the elegance and inventiveness of T E B Clarke’s Oscar-winning screenplay and the originality of Alec Guinness’s portrait of the mild-mannered clerk who masterminds a gold bullion robbery, The Lavender Hill Mob is one of the best of these films. Ealing’s conservative affection for English temperament and social routine and its gentle mockery of authority are well balanced here. I liked a sequence that seems to parody newsreel of the time, in which the putative viewers of a report about the bullion theft are assured that the police are on the verge of arresting the guilty men. The audience watching The Lavender Hill Mob knows otherwise.
Guinness plays Henry Holland who, for twenty years, has been responsible for overseeing the transport of bullion from a gold refinery to the Bank of England. Guinness gives Holland a somewhat constricted gait – as if he were concealing something about his person, which indeed he is. As his cunning plan develops and he’s face to face with gold, in whatever shape or form, Holland wears an almost idiotically serene and admiring smile. His relationship with the precious metal is the love story of The Lavender Hill Mob – he wants to escape with riches and for them to start a new life together. His chief partner in crime is a recently arrived lodger at the Lavender Hill boarding house where Holland lives. This is Arthur Pendlebury, an artist manqué but also the owner of a foundry that makes holiday souvenirs, sold at home and abroad. This pair are made for each other: the stolen bullion is melted down at Pendlebury’s foundry and fashioned into Eiffel Tower paperweights. Stanley Holloway as Pendlebury gives an unusually agreeable and easeful account of himself – neither the foghorn voice nor the nudges to the audience are in evidence. The two authentic but very small-time crooks who support him and Guinness are played by Alfie Bass and the superb Sidney James. The cast also includes Ronald Adam (Holland’s immediate boss), John Gregson (a police detective) and Sydney Tafler (a shady street vendor of paintings). This isn’t a film with great roles for women but Edie Martin (the owner of the Lavender Hill digs) and Marjorie Fielding (a lodger there, who’s an American private-eye fiction fanatic) both register. Alanna Boyce is the splendidly uncooperative schoolgirl who refuses to part with the Eiffel Tower she bought on a trip to Paris, even though she doesn’t know how much it’s really worth.
This and some of the other Eiffel Towers are put on sale in Paris due to a linguistic misunderstanding between Pendlebury and one of the French buyers of his usual tat. Pendlebury and Holland’s desperate efforts to retrieve the precious paperweights start with a dizzying sprint down the real Eiffel Tower; continue with a frantic, fruitless dash to Calais for the ferry to Dover; and culminate in a visit to an exhibition of police history and methods at Hendon Police College – at which point they become the pursued rather than the pursuers. A complicated car chase ends with Pendlebury’s arrest and Holland’s swift departure from the scene. All these sequences are staged by Charles Crichton with fine comic aplomb – they’re exciting as well as amusing (and finding yourself excited is part of the amusement). When Holland makes his escape, Crichton puts Alec Guinness’s famous anonymity to good use. He blends effortlessly into a crowd of bowler-hatted city workers and disappears into the underground. As he later explains, instead of getting off at Charing Cross he heads straight for Rio de Janeiro.
The film begins in a South American restaurant, where Holland sits with another Englishman, who smokes a big cigar and remarks how agreeable the country is. As if to practise what he preaches, the man dispenses largesse in bank notes to various locals – the wife of a politician, a jockey and a strikingly beautiful girl, whose ten-second appearance is notable for the fact that she’s played by a young Audrey Hepburn. Holland begins to tell his story to the man sitting next to him at table. In the final scene, he concludes it and the two stand up, handcuffed. They move towards the restaurant exit and Henry Holland’s extradition. It’s a gracefully succinct ending. Perhaps The Lavender Hill Mob has a rather self-satisfied tone but it has better reason than most to feel pleased with itself.
9 April 2012
