Four Pints of Guinness: The Lavender Hill Mob (Dir Charles Crichton, 1h 28m, 1951)

The Lavender Hill Mob is something special in the history, not only of Ealing Studios, but in the grand sweep of British cinema. Alone among the studio's filmography, it won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and was nominated for another for Best Actor. It is, according to a BFI poll at the turn of the Millennium. the seventeenth greatest British film of all time (two other Ealing films appear in the top 20, with Kind Hearts and Coronets at #6 and The Ladykillers at #13). Even more auspiciously, The Lavender Hill Mob is one of just 45 films included in the Vatican Library, alongside 2001, On the Waterfront and The Bicycle Thieves. All of these plaudits are, undeniably, excellent; it's somewhat fitting that a film that typifies the Ealing era of comedy perhaps better than any other film we'll cover this season is perhaps its most lauded, but The Lavender Hill Mob is more than a film of shining treasures luring in countless generations of filmgoers.

By 1951, Britain was a very different place than 1949. For one, rationing, and many of the restrictions of the 1940s had been lifted, and in their place, came the Festival of Britain, a veritable earthquake across art, music, theatre, sport, and-yes-cinema, opening in London mere weeks before The Lavender Hill Mob, before spreading out across the entire country for a summer that undeniably changed the entire country's relationship to creativity, and heralded a new era in. Closer to West London, though, Ealing Studios carried on much at they had since the end of the Second World War, with much of their non-comedic work still exploring the post-War milieux, with only A Run for Your Money, a likeable, but somewhat stereotypical also-ran in which two Welshmen engage in hi-jinks on their way to a rugby match marking their sole comedy between Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Lavender Hill Mob.

Guinness, meanwhile, was busy, on the stage in TS Eliot's The Cocktail Party, a starkly written, but lauded metaphysical work, with Guinness as its mysterious stranger, and in Hamlet, a rare directorial role for the not-yet-forty Guinness, whilst on screen, he played the main role in the darkly comic Last Holiday (bizarrely remade in 2006 with Queen Latifah), and Benjamin Disraeli in the overly saccharine The Mudlark. Whilst he did make a brief appearance in A Run for Your Money, it would be in his next two films for the studio, both of them among the best the studio ever made, that he would become arguably the actor most closely linked with that golden age of British comedy, as a duo of put-upon everymen who find themselves thrown into extraordinary adventures, and fiendishly planned capers.

We begin, thus, with Guinness's quiet bank clerk, Holland, enjoying the luxury of his spoils in Brazil, at the centre of attention, a social mover and shaker who has essentially turned the formerly staid British ex-pat community upside down, and entertaining a guest. We see his generosity, including doting on a young woman (Audrey Hepburn in one of her first cinematic appearances), how well he has adapted to his life of luxury, and, as the film flashes back, as he regales his guest, with exactly how he has managed to achieve his ambitions. One year previously, the charming, if details-obsessed Holland, unambitious to a fault, was a mere clerk, punctiliously in charge of the bullion deliveries; the film's story-within-a-story begins with him supervising one delivery, painstakingly picking a tiny piece of molten gold off his shoe and back into the furnace, detailing how much would have been wasted. His detailed approach is seen further as the van returns to the bank.

Beneath this presentable, if unassuming man, however, is one of the great trapped, frustrated performances of comedic cinema; he soon reveals, via his narration, that the larger part of his career, over twenty years, has been spent simultaneously building up this respectable, if staid, image, and plotting a heist, but forever finding himself at a dead end, unable to find a way to get rid of the gold once it has been stolen. This soon changes once Holland meets a fellow dreamer in the form of Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway, perhaps best known to film-going audiences as Doolittle's dustman father in My Fair Lady (both on the stage in Broadway and the West End) and on screen opposite Audrey Hepburn)), a manufacturer of holiday knick-knacks by day, and an artist by night.

Holland soon befriends Pendlebury, who is quickly let in on the plan, and whose foundry is the missing piece of the puzzle, and, with Holland soon to be moved from his department to a higher role in the bank, so the race is on to enact the plan, the duo recruiting two local criminals Lackery (the great Sid James, as a low-key seasoned schemer) and Shorty (Alfie Bass), into their plot, one hiding in wait whilst Holland and Pendlebury sets a trap for the other in a scene that masterfully moves between tension and comedic timing with a rarely matched grace. Both are cut into the deal, and the plot is soon hatched, with the lorry hijacked and the gold swapped to a van belonging to Pendlebury's company. Despite a comedy of errors in which Pendlebury walks off with a painting from a nearby stall, and is subsequently arrested, and Lackery and Shorty failing to rough up Holland convincingly, and has to leap into the nearby Thames to be rescued as an innocent victim, our quartet of heisters have made away with a million pounds worth of bullion.

What follows, as the quartet and Pendleton's business begin to melt down and prepare the disguised bullion, now made into Eiffel Tower paperweights, to be exported to France until the coast is clear, is a smartly told cat-and-mouse story, Holland leading the investigation, led by Farrow (John Gregson), down paths of misinformation and dead ends. All the while, the bullion, now in Eiffel form, is slowly slipping under the noses of both the French and English governments, in a beautifully observed montage of customs officials unpacking and making cursory inspections of the Eiffels that masterfully buttresses up against Holland and Pendlebury's later experiences with French customs when in the country. With the bullion now safely in France, and our heroes bidding farewell to their criminal accomplices at a boozy party, so Holland and Pendlebury set off on "holiday" to France to reclaim their stolen wares.

It is here that the film jumps up a gear, and that classic Ealing caper energy rears its head. For, no sooner have our duo arrived in Paris to reclaim their ill-gotten gains than they have to contend with not one but six of the paperweights being sold to a troupe of schoolgirls, who they proceed to give chase to. There is a breakneck energy, a moment that borders on madness and giddy excitement in the chase as they descend, the disorientating charge down the stairs unmistakably later referenced in Vertigo (1965) by Hitchcock's cinematographer, Robert Burks, their panic mixed with laughter. At the base, though, they are seconds too late, and once more give chase through the streets of Paris, only to find themselves arriving as the boat back to England containing the school party prepares to set sail. With the duo now having to scramble through uncaring-and at points almost gleefully unhelpful-French border agents who frustrate them at every turn, as they have to race hither and thither to placate bureaucracy, so their plans begin to comically unspool, until they arrive on the docks, to see the boat sliding out of dock.

From here, things increasingly slide out of control, with smartly done moments of pathos and beautifully paced setpieces that shift back and forth between drama and comedy-our heroes arrive back in London and instantly set out to the girls' school, with Farrow's suspicions growing. Masquerading as employees of the paperweight company, so Holland and Pendleton manage to get five of the six back, but the owner of the sixth will not relinquish it, and soon leads a trailing duo to a police training college and museum. Worse is to come, as she presents it to a friendly police office, it is chemically tested in front of an aghast Holland and Pendleton, and revealled to be gold

What follows, as the duo proceed to make away with the last paperweight from under the police's nose, is a masterfully done chase, the duo stealing a police car and using their radio to sow confusion, only to be undone as an officer corners Pendleton, and Holland has to make a bid for freedom, the film returning to the present to show Holland has run through the money from the six gold towers, and that his companion has come to arrest him, the duo leaving cuffed together, in another of Ealing's superbly pitched endings.

The Lavender Hill Mob is, undeniably, a masterpiece, a sublimely made film in which barely a second is wasted, in which our everyman heroes hatch and undertake their plan, and almost get away with it too, until undone by their greed and ill-gotten gains. Small wonder it is now one of the most beloved films by the studio. Its influence can be seen everything from Nick Park's charming plasticine heist-comedy, The Wrong Trousers, in which a villainous penguin plots a diamond heist under the nose of Wallace and Gromit, to paving the way to the darker and more murderous of the Ealing Comedies.

Once again, though, Guinness rules this film-it is the evolution of his meek hero, his put-upon working classic figure, stuck in his dead-end job, with unfulfilled dreams, and who we see shrinking back into his work persona from his adventures, into a criminal mastermind that has not only Scotland Yard, but the British Government hunting for him. Against the twittish Pendleton, Holland is, simply, heroic-even when he is lead away, handcuffed to the man who has finally tracked him down, he is confident and happy, his ill-gotten gains having made him happy, and fulfilled his dreams.

Next week, we'll see Guinness as his other great everyman hero in his other film appearance for Ealing in 1951, in The Man in the White Suit, where he plays a scientist who comes across a nigh-miraculous new cloth that threatens to turn the entire textile industry, and Britain itself, upside down. The Lavender Hill Mob, though, may be the most charming of the entire studio's comedic output, in which Alec Guinness's everyman enacts a daring heist against the background of a slowly recovering London, for his fortune-and almost gets away with it!

Rating: Must See.

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