The Lavender Hill Mob

The Ealing Comedies are amongst the best loved products of the British film industry. One of these is currently showing here in London, at the Odeon, Panton St. giving us the rare opportunity to see it on a (relatively) big screen.  After handing over an eye watering £11.45, I settled down to wait. Screen 2 at Panton St is typical of  any multi screen cinema and as such is comfortable enough but adds nothing to the cinema going experience.

As the lights dimmed we slipped into the seemingly endless series of trailers of “now showing” and “coming soon” films. These were a serious assault on the senses. Designed, as they were, to show off the power of digital technology. The sound, in particular, left me with the sense that there was blood trickling from my ears. I have no idea what any of those films were, except that one included rapping penguins and another featured Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher!

Eventually this madness stopped and the old familiar certification appeared on screen, assuring us that The Lavender Hill Mob was highly unlikely to offend anyone……….bliss!

Released in 1951, written by T.E.B. Clarke and directed by Charles Crichton, it is a beautifully crafted heist movie. Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) is a clerk in the Bullion Office  at “The Bank” who for twenty years has been responsible for the transportation of gold. His devotion to his job and his utter reliability make him appear to be the ideal man  for this position, but he has a secret. He has developed the perfect plan to steal a consignment and escape from the tedium of his life. The only fly in the ointment is how to dispose of the gold. Selling it on the post war British black market is far too risky but getting it out of the country seems like an impossible task.

Enter Alfred Pendlebury (the wonderful Stanley Holloway), the new lodger at the boarding house in Lavender Hill where Henry Holland lives. A frustrated artist, Pendlebury owns a small foundry producing cheap souvenirs for the British and European holiday trade. Put two and two together and you have the basis for a very entertaining 80 minutes.

Everything works in this film. The set pieces, the robbery, the wild run down the spiral staircase of the Eiffel Tower and the car chase are wonderfully handled. It is both funny and tense and all of the characters are likeable, how often can you say that!

The cast is brilliant, the two principles are well supported by Alfie Bass and Sidney James as professional thieves recruited to assist in the caper. There are many other well known names in the cast, such as John Gregson, Sidney Taffler and Michael Trubshawe and even more of those shamefully anonymous character actors from the period such as Marjorie Fielding, Clive Morton and Meredith Edwards. Blue Peter’s Valerie Singleton apparently has an  uncredited part although I think that I must have blinked while she was on screen, because I didn’t see her. There is even an early and quite brief appearance by Audrey Hepburn. But there is one star that hasn’t been mentioned yet.

London. This film is as old as I am and provides some wonderful footage of the Capital in the post war years. Surprisingly, Lavender Hill makes little or no contribution but there are some nice shots of Notting Hill/Dale. However, the real interest is in the City. The Bank, The Royal  Exchange  and most importantly the area around St Paul’s are very well portrayed. The amount of open space around the Cathedral, the result of wartime bomb damage, may well astonish some younger viewers.

So, this is not a slick, high tech, modern heist caper. There are plenty of those around and many of them are very entertaining, but this is something special. Seemingly old fashioned now, it was cutting edge in its day.

Go and see it.

From left to right - the former Bramley Arms, the site of the Old MacDonald police car crash - Lavender, you have to use you imagination for the rest of the title - St Paul's, not as depicted in the film!

Peeping Tom

There has been a great deal of fuss recently about the film Peeping Tom, mostly centred around the fact that its new release has been championed by Martin Scorsese. As I had only ever seen it on TV, I thought it would be a good idea to see it on a bigger screen, so I went to see it at Screen 5 of the Empire, Leicester Sq.

In a theatre of only 51 seats, I probably had the best. In the middle of the back row (there were only 5 rows!) with an aisle in front of me, so no heads to get in the way. The seats reclined backwards and were very comfortable. Initially, I thought it was going to be fairly empty but the punters spilled in during Pearl & Dean and in the end there were only a couple of empty seats. It was, however, at £12.95, vastly overpriced.

Despite being so small, the relative size of the screen and the seating positions meant that it was actually very similar to watching on a "proper" big screen.

It was pretty much as I remembered it. Very period, very stylised, even comic bookish (in fact it has the look of a graphic novel but from a time before such a thing existed, let alone a time when the cinema industry relies so heavily on them as source material!) and is somewhat overacted by modern standards. The colour process was extraordinary, adding to the overall sense of discomfort.

The film itself is an interesting idea, deeply flawed by the fact that this was a clearly unbalanced young man who insisted on drawing attention to himself by whipping out his cine camera at the most inappropriate moments It took most of the film before anyone noticed either of these things! Also, he had already moved far beyond being a peeping tom by the beginning of the film and had become what I suppose you could call a homicidal voyeur, but, then again, that wouldn’t have made such a snappy title!

The German accent of Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is unexplained and inexplicable as he grew up in the same house in which he eventually died and the sheer naivety of Helen Stevens (Anna Massey) would be unacceptable were it not for the fact that in the real world there are something like 150 British Women engaged to men on Death Row in the US! All other cast members played their parts with varying degrees of subtlety, but none of them played the parts with too much! Moira Shearer just looked great!

Extremely controversial in its day and resulting in the end of director Michael Powell’s, previously illustrious, career. It remains an interesting, though uncomfortable, film.

It was certainly worth seeing on the big screen during this 50th anniversary season.