Title: The Lavender Hill Mob
Release Date: 28 June 1951
Director: Charles Crichton
Production Company: Ealing Studios
Summary/Review:
The Lavender Hill Mob is an Ealing Studios comedy starring Alec Guinness, much like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955), and directed by Charles Chrichton, who later directed A Fish Called Wanda (1988).
Guinness plays Henry Holland, a fastidious bank clerk who spends twenty years in charge of transfers of gold bullion. While known for his honesty, he’s in fact playing a long game to steal the bullion. The only problem he faces is how to smuggle the bullion abroad so that he can sell it. The solution comes when he meets a new boarder at his boarding house, Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), who runs a foundry that produces souvenirs for the export market. The two men come up with a plan to steal the bullion, melt it down, make it into Eiffel Tower paperweights, and then ship it to France.
Things, of course, go very wrong. But the way they go wrong and how the characters react is where the humor lies. As an added bonus, much of this film was shot on location in London and Paris. We get to see London still bearing the damage of World War II, and a stunning sequence where Henry and Alfred run down the circular staircase of the Eiffel Tour. It all makes for an enjoyable, laugh out loud film with many twists right up to the conclusion.
Rating: ****
Panorama of the Mountains 