The Lavender Hill Mob (1951): Comedy Gold from Ealing Studios (Review)

Returning to cinemas on 29th March, ahead of its 4K UHD Collector’s Edition and digital download release from Studio Canal’s Vintage Classics label on 22nd April, is the Ealing Studios’ 1951 classic and one of British cinema’s most beloved comedies, The Lavender Hill Mob.

Directed by Charles Crichton, from a screenplay by TEB Clarke, The Lavender Hill Mob stars Alec Guiness as the shy, retiring bank clerk Henry Holland. Twenty years of service, combined with the complete inconsequentiality his existence and endeavours holds for his employers, has seen Holland daydream about the perfect crime. There’s just two catches; Holland doesn’t know any criminals who could help him with his daring, full-proof million pound bullion heist, and even if he did, he has no idea how to move the conspicuous gold on once the audacious theft itself has taken place. For the latter catch, Stanley Holloway’s Pendlebury enters in the most serendpitious of circumstances. Pendlebury makes novelty souvenirs and Holland hits upon the idea that, with Pendlebury’s smelting equipment, he could forge the gold into harmless-looking toy Eiffel Towers, which the pair could then smuggle into France. Whilst the former catch sees the pair recruit the assistance of two professional criminals, Lackery (Sid James) and Shorty (Alfie Bass). And from these eccentric beginnings, Britain’s most wanted felons, the Lavender Hill Mob, is born. 

The Bafta-winning The Lavender Hill Mob is probably my favourite of the Ealing comedies, largely because I don’t think anyone puts a foot wrong in it. The performances from the whole cast are spirited and TEB Clarke’s screenplay is one of his best, as evinced by the Academy Award nomination in the Best Actor category for Alec Guinness and Clarke winning the Oscar for Best Screenplay respectively. Remarkably, the route to this success was a largely serendipitous one. Clarke was actually charged by Ealing to write the screenplay for their 1951 drama Pool of London and struggling to come up with the criminal aspect that the movie required, when he found himself daydreaming about an Eiffel Tower paperweight a friend had recently gifted him after a visit to Paris. Hitting upon the ingenuous smuggling plot, he found himself torn; Pool of London was a slice of life drama about London’s docklands, but what he had here was a natural fit for an eccentric little comedy. Compelled to see it through, Clarke drafted a two page outline of his idea and presented it to Ealing Studios head Michael Balcon the following day. Balcon was decidedly unimpressed. He had tasked Clarke with one movie, and here he was presenting him with another. Nevertheless, the nature of Ealing was often that Balcon backed his creative talent and he quickly came round to Clarke’s idea. The result? Clarke was off Pool of London and The Lavender Hill Mob got the green light.

Balcon was right to trust his creatives, and especially Clarke; a remarkable writer who, with his screenplays for 1947’s Hue and Cry and 1949’s Passport to Pimlico especially, helped create the template for what became known as the Ealing Comedy, still so beloved to this day. This template often saw protagonists who were ‘little men’ or underdogs who, with a gentle yet irreverent defiance, come to challenge the conformity of the establishment. The Lavender Hill Mob follows this formula perfectly, depicting Guinness and Holloway’s bucking the system by performing the last thing anyone in authority would suspect of them – the perfect heist. Thanks to Guinness’ quiet lifetime of observation and his methodical approach, the robbery is a success, and the establisment figures of the piece – his employers at the Bank and the police – are left with egg on their faces. As is customery for the era, you might at first glance think that Clarke concludes his story (or begins it, the whole affair is told in flashback, Guinness’ character’s fate known from the off) with a morality lesson in how crime doesn’t pay, but on closer inspection he too is defying conformity as much as his characters. Note how it is the professional small time crooks of the gang, those perennial cockney faces Sid James and Alfie Bass, who evade capture completely. Further example of Clarke’s mischievous spirit can be found in him gently sending up here the thrilling and frenetic manhunt finale that he personally wrote for Ealing’s police procedural The Blue Lamp a year earlier.

Another example of someone being wise to trust TEB Clarke comes in the amusing anecdote regarding his research for the film. Whilst he had hit upon the idea of how to smuggle the gold away, he was still in the dark about how the robbery itself could take place. Hitting upon the idea that the most logical answer to this conundrum must lie with the experts at the Bank of England, he paid them a visit and make some enquries. To their credit, the Bank of England were happy to co-operate, once their fears were allayed that Clarke was a writer and not someone who was actually looking to rob them. And so, in a twist worthy of an Ealing comedy itself, a committee of bank officials were formed to advise on the best possible way to rob themselves.

The Lavender Hill Mob was evocatively shot on location on London streets still bearing the scars of WWII, and gained some constrasting continental glamour in scenes shot on the banks of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower, including a memorable sequence in which Guinness and Holloway give chase to a party of schoolchilden who have unwittingly purchased one of the gold replicas of the landmark. Whilst we see the two actors launch into their pursuit on top of the tower, the dizzying descent downwards was conducted back at Ealing, the art department recreating a section of its spiral staircase with a vertical axel through its centre. Guinness and Holloway merely had to run on the spot and let the back projection do the rest.

Further European glamour was provided by an unknown actor of just twenty-one who went by the name of Audrey Hepburn. Cast in the film’s Latin-set opening sequence, the former Dutch resistance member and future screen icon shares the screen with Guinness, delivering just one solitary line in the role of Chiquita. After Crichton yelled “cut!”, Guinness was on the phone to his agent. “I don’t know if she can act,” he relayed. “But a real film star has just wafted on to the set. Someone should get her under contract before we lose her to the Americans”. Unfortunately, Guinness’ eye for talent and similar appeals from Ealing’s casting director Margaret Harper-Nelson, was not seized upon. Though Hepburn did find herself third billed in the role of a refugee caught up in an assassination plot in London in Ealing’s largely forgotten thriller Secret People a year later, she was something of a victim of the studio’s recurring flaw – the lack of decent roles for women. The director of Secret People went on to direct a screen test for Hepburn which went on to catch William Wyler’s eye in America. He cast her opposite Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, and the rest is history. Incidentally, Hepburn isn’t the only future star on display in The Lavender Hill Mob – blink, and you’ll miss Robert Shaw as a police chemist.

From a personal perspective, The Lavender Hill Mob remains as fresh and as funny today as it was when my dad first sat me down to watch it in the 1980s. In fact, I’d wager it is as fresh and as funny now as it was on its box office-smashing release in 1951. And it’s barely eighty minutes long – perfect! If it’s playing at a cinema near you, I thoroughly recommend catching it, though if you want to wait for the UHD/Blu-ray collector’s edition release, your patience will be rewarded by a plethora of extras including a 64-page booklet, two posters and four beautiful pop-art artcards alongside new analysis from Benedict Morrison, the London Comedy Film Festival Q&A with Paul Merton, an introduction from Martin Scorsese, archival interviews with Charles Crichton and TEB Clarke, an audio commentary from Jeremy Arnold, a trailer and a behind the scenes photo gallery.

Mark’s Archive – The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)