The Lavender Hill Mob

The Lavender Hill Mob
British quad poster
Directed by	Charles Crichton
Written by	T. E. B. Clarke
Produced by	Michael Balcon
Starring	Alec Guinness Stanley Holloway
Cinematography	Douglas Slocombe
Edited by	Seth Holt
Music by	Georges Auric
Production company	Ealing Studios
Distributed by	General Film Distributors
Release date	28 June 1951 (1951-06-28) (UK)[1]
Running time	81 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

The Lavender Hill Mob is a 1951 comedy film from Ealing Studios, written by T. E. B. Clarke, directed by Charles Crichton, starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway and featuring Sid James and Alfie Bass. The title refers to Lavender Hill, a street in Battersea, a district of South London, in the postcode district SW11, near to Clapham Junction railway station.

The British Film Institute ranked The Lavender Hill Mob the 17th greatest British film of all time. The original film was digitally restored and re-released to UK cinemas on 29 July 2011 to celebrate its 60th anniversary.^[2] It is one of fifteen films listed in the category "Art" on the Vatican film list.^[3]

Plot[]

Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) is dining with a fellow Briton in a posh restaurant in Rio de Janeiro where he is well known. He relates a story explaining his presence in Rio. It seems he was an apparently unambitious London bank clerk in charge of gold bullion deliveries for over 20 years. He had a reputation for fussing over details and suspecting all cars he observed following the bullion van, but all in all appeared to be a man dedicated to his job and the gold's security. In fact, he had hatched the "perfect" plot to steal a load of bullion and retire. The one thing stopping him had been that selling the gold on the black market in Britain was too risky, and he was at a loss as to how to smuggle it abroad.

One evening a new lodger – artist Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) – arrives at Holland's boarding house in Lavender Hill. Pendlebury owns a foundry that makes presents and souvenirs that are sold in holiday destinations such as Margate, Stratford-upon-Avon and Paris. Noticing how similar the foundry is to the place where the gold is made into ingots, Holland decides that the ideal way of smuggling the gold out of the country would be as Eiffel Tower paperweights sold in Paris, and puts this hypothetically to his new friend: "By Jove, Holland, it's a good job we're both honest men." "It is indeed, Pendlebury."

When Holland suddenly finds that he is about to be transferred to another department at the bank, he and Pendlebury quickly move into action. They recruit two petty crooks, Lackery Wood (Sidney James) and Shorty Fisher (Alfie Bass), to help them carry out the robbery. The plan is simple but clever, and it succeeds: Wood and Fisher carry out the hijack of the bullion van and switch the gold to Pendlebury's works van. Holland, who is supposedly assaulted and almost drowned in the robbery, becomes the hero of the hour. The City and Metropolitan police forces find themselves running around in circles, unable to track down the "master criminal" who is in fact right under their noses giving them false statements and misleading clues. Meanwhile, Holland and his associates melt the gold in Pendlebury's foundry and export it to France disguised as miniature Eiffel Towers.

Adopting the names of "Al" and "Dutch", the pair arrive at the souvenir kiosk atop the Eiffel Tower supplied by Pendlebury's firm, only to find that the woman running it has misunderstood her instructions due to a language mixup – the box of gold towers is marked with an 'R' (for 'Reserve') but she assumes she has to keep back any boxes marked 'A', which in French sounds like the English pronunciation of 'R'. Instead of holding back the specially-marked box of Eiffel Towers, she had opened it and put them out for sale, with six English schoolgirls buying one each just before Holland and Pendlebury arrived. A wild chase down the Tower and back to Calais and the Channel ferry Canterbury^[4] follows but they are unable to catch the girls in time thanks to hold-ups in buying tickets and negotiating passport, customs and currency controls.

If just one of those towers is found to be gold then the game is up. Pendlebury and Holland therefore track down the schoolgirls and, in exchange for a similar tower and ten shillings apiece, recover five of the six. One girl however refuses to return hers since she intends to give it to a friend who is a policeman. The girl delivers the souvenir to the officer, who is at an exhibition of police history and methods at Hendon Police College. Also attending is Inspector Farrow who is investigating the robbery. As part of the case he has traced vans seen near the site of the robbery, including that of Pendlebury's firm, which led him to the foundry, where he was told that many souvenirs bought abroad are actually made in Britain. A sudden thought occurs to him and he orders the souvenir to be chemically tested. At that moment Pendlebury snatches it and he and Holland make their escape in a police car.

A confused pursuit then takes place through London, with Holland using the radio in the police car they have stolen to divert the pursuers to a different car. The pair give a lift on the footplate to a passing police officer, but when the police transmissions resume on the car's radio he arrests Pendlebury. Holland escapes to Rio de Janeiro with the six gold towers, worth "£25,000, enough to keep me for one year in the style to which I was, ah, unaccustomed." But now, he finishes telling his visitor, the money is mostly gone. As they leave the restaurant, Holland is seen to be handcuffed to his countryman.

Cast[]

Cast notes

• Audrey Hepburn makes an early film appearance in a small role as Chiquita near the start of the film. Robert Shaw also made his first film appearance, playing a police laboratory technician towards the end of the film. English actress Patricia Garwood made her first film appearance in this movie at the age of nine.

Production[]

Screenwriter Clarke is said to have come up with the idea of a clerk robbing his own bank while doing research for the film Pool of London (1951), a crime thriller surrounding a jewel theft. He consulted the Bank of England on the project and it set up a special committee to advise on how best the robbery could take place.^[5][6]

Extensive location filming was made in both London and Paris.^[7] The scenes show a London still marked by bomb sites from the Second World War.

London, England, UK

• Bank Underground Station
• Bank of England, Threadneedle Street
• Bramley Arms Pub, Bramley Road, Notting Hill (finale: end of the chase)
• Cheapside
• Carlton Road, Ealing (zebra crossing on way to police exhibition)
• Gunnersbury Park (police exhibition)
• Queen Victoria Street, Blackfriars (scene of bullion robbery)
• RAF Northolt, Ruislip (airport)

Paris, France

• River Seine
• Eiffel Tower

The scene where Holland and Pendlebury run down the Eiffel Tower's spiral staircase and become increasingly dizzy and erratic, as does the camera work, presages James Stewart's condition in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, made seven years later.^[6] A film montage of sensational newspaper headlines marks the crime as taking place in August 1950, whilst posters for the Hendon exhibition state that it marks the centenary of the death of Sir Robert Peel, which occurred on 2nd July 1850. In the car chase scene at the end of the film, an officer uses a police box to report seeing a police car being driven by a man in a top hat. In fact, the driver is a modern-day police officer from the exhibition wearing the uniform of the police as originally set up in 1829 by Peel, known as "Bobbies" or "Peelers" after him.

Reception[]

The Lavender Hill Mob had its charity world premiere at the Marble Arch Odeon cinema in London on the 28th of June 1951.^[1] The film was popular at the British box office.^[8] It had rentals of $580,000 at the U. S. box office.^[9][10]

Awards and honours[]

The film won the Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay. Guinness was nominated for the award of Best Actor in a Leading Role. The film also won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.

See also[]

• 1951 in film
• BFI Top 100 British films
• British films of 1951
• Heist film

References[]

Notes

Bibliography

• Vermilye, Jerry. The Great British Films. Citadel Press, 1978. ISBN 0-8065-0661-X pp. 147–149

External links[]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: The Lavender Hill Mob

• The Lavender Hill Mob at IMDb
• The Lavender Hill Mob at the TCM Movie Database
• The Lavender Hill Mob at AllMovie
• The Lavender Hill Mob review at Old Movies