British Gangsters:The League of Gentlemen (Dir Basil Dearden, 1h48m, 1960)

A street, somewhere in London, or beyond; the camera holds on it, the fog in the background, on the trio of streetlamps. Something, so the stirring score by Philip Green implies, is about to happen. The manhole cover slides open. We see half a face, a man in a three piece suit, but looks out. The manhole cover drops again, as a street cleaning lorry passes, before, once more, the manhole cover moves, this time sliding away as a man (later revealed to be Norman Hyde (Jack Hawkins)) in a suit and bow-tie clambers out, pulls the manhole cover closed, and gets into his car, soon arriving home to put into action the first stage of a plan that will see demobbed soldiers attempt a daring bank heist. The British Gangster has arrived in the 1960s, not as villain but as sympathetic criminal hero.

By 1960, the British Gangster was a far cry from the sociopathic Pinky Brown and the crooked Harry Fabian. Not only had the Ealing comedies spoofed them to great effect in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), they'd made Alec Guinness’s mild mannered bank clerk the put-upon everyman who-almost-gets away with his scheme, although his turn as the sinister Professor in The Ladykillers (1955) remains the definitive criminal mastermind of the decade. More serious fare was, largely due to the arrival of a great number of American Gangster films, including Kubrick's The Killing (1956), John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Guys and Dolls (1955), thin on the ground; only at the end of the decade did Hell is a City (1959) herald a return to hardcore British Gangsters.

The Gangster as Gentleman: Norman Hyde (Jack Hawkyns) emerges from the sewers.

Against this, The League of Gentlemen may feel like a throwback to the 1950s; its general tone is that of genteel Ealing comedy, rather than the seaside postcard humour of the Carry On series, that, by 1960, was on its fourth film. We are introduced to the League over a series of vignettes; from Nigel Patrick's Race, who is introduced penniless in the aftermath of a drunken night, to Roger Livesey's crooked priest, introduced hiding "girly mags", to the henpecked Weaver (Norman Bird), and Richard Attenborough's spivvish technically-minded crook, Lexy. All seven are soon introduced and enticed to a meeting via banknotes cut in half inside a novel outlining an organised plan to steal from a bank. Once together, each man is revealled to have be demobbed, either as scapegoats for the mistakes of other soldiers, for their own mistakes as soldiers, or, as Hyde reveals himself, because he has been made redundant and retired.

The heist, thus, is personal, Hyde setting the group a further rendezvous, before beginning to plan the heist at his home; much of this planning stage is shot through with humour, both from the eight members of the team's interactions, cutting across class and rank, and the odd-couple energy from Hyde and Race, who settle into the house in a quasi-domestic arrangement, Race now otherwise homeless, though the humour in these sections leans towards wry rather than outright belly laughs, though Bryan Forbes (who wrote and directed Whistle Down the Wind a year later)'s script does have an impressively light touch on its mix of social commentary, the mechanics of the heist, and its funny moments.

With the League in place at Hyde's manor, the film gathers pace; the infiltration of a military base to steal the weaponry needed for the heist is both a smartly shot sequence in which our protagonists are split into three teams, one masquerading as soldiers, one as a duo of repairmen, and two as IRA members, but also a remarkably tense one, in which the subterfuge is nearly undone by interference within the base, and without. From here, the film gathers pace to the excellently choreographed heist, a sequence that builds steadily for several minutes as its pieces move into place, before sudden, chaotic action in thick churning smoke and its memorable aftermath. If there is one thing to critique the ensemble piece, it is that it is far more interested in the relations between classes, and in its gang coming together; the heist itself feels anticlimactic, and its aftermath perfunctory. Nevertheless, it's charming, gentlemanly, business.

A Very British Heist: The League Of Gentlemen is a charming, if occasionally mannered heist-comedy

Whither the gangster? Certainly, the figures in The League Of Gentlemen are gentlemen: they are far from the gangster of the two films we have considered so far: too erudite, too noble, and painted in too positive a light; in the decade between Night and the City and The League of Gentlemen, the gangster had become defanged, a comic, or even genuinely heroic figure, wronged by the powers that be, or an unwitting, or unwilling cog in far less pleasant criminals' plans ironically came at a time when the real life spivs and crooks had long disappeared from our screens, only to resurface in films and television, most notably in Dad's Army's , Private Walker (James Beck), a spiv.

In their place came figures like Peter Sellers' Pearly" Gates in 1963's The Wrong Arm of the Law or, when played seriously. such as Herbert Lom's mob accountant in The Frightened City (1961), only turn to crime as a last resort; the ultimate example of this will be The Italian Job (1969), where Michael Caine and his gang of likely lads, who cement themselves in British cinema as likeable anti-heroes, who have become synonymous with British Gangster cinema. We shall consider what Caine, and the gangster did next in our next review. The League of Gentlemen, for its part, is a genteel take on the gangster, a wry, if occasionally dated ensemble heist comedy that typifies the changing form of criminals and their world in 1960s cinema.

Rating: Recommended

The League of Gentlemen is available on DVD and Bluray from Network. It is available for streaming on ITVX

Next week, Get Carter changes the gangster film forever, as Michael Caine's anti-hero heads to Newcastle to uncover the truth of his brother's death.