The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
One of the finest British comedies ever made, this delightful
caper movie stars Alex Guinness as Holland - a mild-mannered bank
clerk who decides to pull off an amazing bullion theft and puts
together the most unlikely gang imaginable to carry out his
scheme.
Inevitably the robbery, which was planned to occur while the
bullion was in transit between refinery and vaults, goes wrong,
not least because the absent-minded Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway)
gets arrested in the middle of it for stealing a painting off a
market stall.
But the chief downfall is caused by a consignment of gold
Eiffel Tower souvenirs getting mixed up with genuine souvenirs on
the sales stand of the landmark itself. A batch of English
schoolgirls buy them, and Holland and Pendlebury have to chase
them back to England to recover them.
The last one ends up in a police exhibition, and the now
intrepid criminals steal a police car to make their escape,
frustrating the hunt by broadcasting false messages from it,
eventually causing a three-way collision (the chase sequence is a
parody of that in one of Ealing's own films, the police drama The
Blue Lamp, released early in the preceding year).
Holland escapes, and appears to be narrating the story in a
balmy South American paradise to an interested companion. It is
only at the end of the film that we realise he is a Scotland Yard
detective sent to bring Holland back.
The luscious dark-haired girl in the Brazilian setting who
looks strikingly familiar is Audrey Hepburn, doing a couple of
days' bit-part work at Ealing when she was still an unknown.
The Lavender Hill Mob was one of Ealing's most
successful pictures and scriptwriter T E B Clarke won a well
deserved Oscar.
The heist plan was largely devised by the Bank of England
itself, to whom Clarke had turned for advice on how to steal a
million pounds' worth of gold, having explained that his request
was on behalf of a film.
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