The Lavender Hill Mob: Vintage Classics

Details

Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) is the sort of man nobody really notices. For twenty years he's worked as a bank clerk responsible for supervising the transportation of gold bullion, accompanying it from the refinery to the Bank of England and earning a reputation as a thoroughly dependable employee in the process.

What nobody suspects is that Holland has spent much of that time contemplating how he might steal some of it.

Planning the robbery isn't really the problem. Holland knows the routines, understands the security arrangements and has had plenty of time to consider how the gold might be taken. The difficulty is what happens afterwards. Gold bullion isn't exactly easy to dispose of and, unless he can find some way of getting it out of the country without attracting attention, Holland's perfect crime is destined to remain nothing more than a pleasant daydream.

Then Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) moves into the same Lavender Hill boarding house. Pendlebury owns a foundry producing cheap souvenirs for the tourist trade, including miniature Eiffel Towers which are exported to Paris. Quite why the French need an English foundry in London to supply them with models of their own most famous landmark is another matter, but for Holland it's the missing piece of the puzzle: stolen bullion could be melted down, recast as harmless souvenirs and shipped abroad beneath everybody's noses.

Suddenly Holland's long-imagined robbery begins to look distinctly possible. Recruiting professional crooks Lackery Wood (Sid James) and Shorty Fisher (Alfie Bass) to provide the rather more practical criminal expertise, Holland and Pendlebury put their plan into action and relieve the Bank of England of a considerable quantity of gold.

And, remarkably, the difficult part appears to work. The bullion is melted down, transformed into miniature Eiffel Towers and sent to Paris, leaving Holland and Pendlebury seemingly within touching distance of the perfect crime.

Unfortunately, there's a fairly obvious danger in disguising stolen gold as souvenirs and then putting those souvenirs somewhere they're available to tourists. When a small number of the golden Eiffel Towers end up being sold to a group of British schoolgirls, Holland and Pendlebury suddenly find themselves desperately trying to recover them before anyone discovers exactly what they've taken home from their trip to Paris.

What began as a meticulously planned robbery rapidly develops into something considerably less organised, as two thoroughly unlikely criminal masterminds find themselves racing to prevent Holland's perfect crime from unravelling around them.

Picture & Sound

StudioCanal has treated The Lavender Hill Mob to a new 4K restoration undertaken by Silver Salt Restoration, although the original camera negative was unfortunately unavailable. Instead, the restoration was produced from a second-generation 35mm duplicating positive, making the quality of the results achieved here all the more impressive.

Some 200 hours of manual restoration work was carried out to clean up the image and that effort certainly appears to have paid off. Film grain is ever-present, but that's exactly as it should be and, more importantly, I didn't notice any distracting scratches, print damage or other obvious imperfections. For a film approaching its 75th birthday - and one restored without access to the original camera negative - it's an impressively clean presentation.

Black levels are pleasingly solid throughout, giving the monochrome photography plenty of depth without sacrificing detail within the darker areas of the image. The foundry sequences are particularly effective, with the intense light from the furnace illuminating the excited faces of our would-be villains as their criminal enterprise finally begins to take shape.

There's some lovely detail on display too. Faces, clothing and the various machinery inside the foundry all hold up well in 4K, while the additional clarity really comes into its own once the film ventures out onto the streets of post-war London.

It's here that the restoration reveals something rather more fascinating than additional picture detail. The Lavender Hill Mob was filmed only six years after the end of the Second World War and the scars of the Blitz are still clearly visible across London. Bomb-damaged buildings, empty plots and conspicuous gaps where buildings once stood regularly appear in the background, yet nobody pays them the slightest attention. In 1951 there was nothing particularly remarkable about any of it - this was simply what parts of London still looked like.

Sound is inevitably a rather less spectacular affair, although that's hardly a criticism given the film's vintage. The LPCM 2.0 Mono soundtrack provides dialogue that is clear and bright throughout, while the typically brass-heavy musical score comes across cleanly without ever demanding too much attention. There's little here that's going to give a modern surround system much of a workout, but then The Lavender Hill Mob hardly needs helicopters flying around the room or gold bars clattering through the rear speakers. What matters is that everything can be heard clearly and, on that score, there's very little to complain about.

Menu & Extras

The Limited Edition is presented in the sort of wonderfully chunky box StudioCanal tends to favour for its Classic releases, immediately giving the package a suitably substantial feel. The film is included on both 4K UHD (reviewed here) and Blu-ray, so those who haven't yet made the jump to 4K aren't being left out in the cold, while tucked inside the box are a collector's booklet, a selection of art cards and two posters - one reproducing the original artwork and another produced for the new restoration.

The booklet is your typical collector's dream, containing plenty of information about the film, its production and story alongside a selection of photographs. It's certainly a lovely thing to flick through, although anyone exploring the on-disc supplementary material will discover that much of the same ground is covered there too.

I'm always slightly less convinced by the inclusion of posters in sets such as this. They're undoubtedly a nice touch and it's particularly good to have both the original artwork and something representing the new restoration, but their relatively small size - combined with the fact that they need to be folded several times simply to fit inside the box - rather limits what you can actually do with them. Putting one in a frame would be the obvious answer, except the collection of fold lines running across it isn't exactly ideal for something you're hoping to display on the wall.

Still, that's more of a personal grumble about collector's editions in general than a criticism of this particular release. Taken together, the chunky presentation, booklet, art cards and posters certainly help make this feel like something rather more special than a couple of discs dropped into a standard plastic case.

Moving onto the discs themselves, there are two newly produced featurettes and, I must admit, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from either of them. The Lavender Hill Mob: Analysis by Benedict Morrison runs for around 24 minutes, while the 28-minute London Comedy Film Festival Q&A with Paul Merton initially sounded as though it might be a rather more lightweight affair. As it turns out, both proved considerably more interesting and revealing than I expected.

There's some fascinating discussion of the post-war London captured by the film, including many of the same bomb-damaged streets and buildings which are so noticeable when watching the new 4K restoration today. What was simply contemporary London when the film was made has inevitably taken on an entirely different significance more than seventy years later.

There's also the wonderful story of screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke approaching the Bank of England and essentially asking how somebody might go about robbing it. Rather helpfully, they explained the security arrangements and the various difficulties a would-be thief would encounter, giving Clarke exactly the sort of information he needed to work out how Holland might attempt it. You do have to wonder whether the Bank would be quite so accommodating if somebody turned up asking the same questions today.

Another particularly interesting observation concerns the clever way the film is shot during the opening sequences so as not to reveal too much about Holland's circumstances. It's something that's particularly easy to overlook on a first viewing, but knowing how the story eventually plays out makes you appreciate just how carefully those scenes have been constructed. Even with Holland telling us his own story, the filmmakers are making sure the camera doesn't inadvertently tell us something they don't want us to know just yet.

There are also some rather more analytical observations about the relationship between Holland and Pendlebury. As two bachelors who live and travel together, share an increasingly close domestic relationship and rather playfully celebrate the milestones of their criminal enterprise, there's discussion of a homosocial element to their friendship. It's an interesting interpretation, although I'm not entirely convinced there's quite as much going on beneath the surface as some would suggest. Personally, much of it struck me as simply part of the wonderfully understated Britishness of the film and its characters, but it's another example of the featurettes raising ideas I'd never really considered before.

That's ultimately what made both pieces worthwhile for me. Rather than simply recounting the production history or telling us why The Lavender Hill Mob is a classic, they actually gave me a few things to think about the next time I watch it. And given that I've already found myself wanting to watch the film yet again while writing this review, that may be sooner rather than later.

Carried over from the previous release is the short Introduction by Martin Scorsese. It's certainly interesting, not least because it's always fascinating to hear a filmmaker of his stature discussing a film he clearly admires but some of his observations now overlap with material covered in greater detail elsewhere on the disc. Mind you, that's hardly the fault of an introduction produced for an earlier release. If anything, it's good to see StudioCanal retaining it rather than discarding worthwhile archive material simply because something newer has subsequently come along.

I guess most folk would associate the film with Alec Guinness, but also carried over from the previous release, the featurette Those British Faces: Stanley Holloway takes an in-depth look at Stanley Holloway's career and the wide variety of characters he played. It's quite interesting really as, until The Lavender Hill Mob, I'd never really heard of him, but his career certainly left its mark on British cinema history.

Also carried over is the Audio Commentary by film historian Jeremy Arnold. Originally recorded for an earlier Blu-ray release, it covers the history of Ealing, the production and the various cast and crew involved. Whilst interesting, if you've already worked your way through all of the extensive supplementary material you may find that some familiar ground has been covered elsewhere.

Rounding out the more substantial archive material are two interviews carried over from the previous Blu-ray. The first is a 1988 audio interview with director Charles Crichton, looking back over his career and his progression from tea boy to editor and eventually director at Ealing. Unfortunately the archive recording is rather muffled and requires a little perseverance, but there's some interesting material buried within it. Much easier to recommend is a 1974 Good Afternoon interview with screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke, in which he talks to Mavis Nicholson about his early life and his lengthy writing career, including his time at Ealing. Neither piece concentrates solely on The Lavender Hill Mob, but hearing directly from the film's director and Oscar-winning screenwriter gives both considerable historical value.

Finally, no Limited Edition collection would be complete without the Original Trailer and Behind the Scenes Stills Gallery.

Overall

For me, The Lavender Hill Mob is just about the perfect Ealing comedy. Alongside The Ladykillers and, perhaps, The Man in the White Suit, it remains one of my favourite British comedies of old. And yes, there does appear to be something of a common theme running through all three of them - Alec Guinness.

What's perhaps most remarkable is just how well the comedy has aged. The humour remains wonderfully innocent, there's no coarse language and, aside from the small matter of plotting to relieve the Bank of England of a considerable quantity of gold, it's all rather good-natured.

In many ways The Lavender Hill Mob feels like a comedy from another world. It's an enormously British caper from a bygone age, populated by respectable gentlemen, boarding houses, bowler hats, bank clerks and criminals who remain unfailingly polite while planning a major robbery. Yet rather than making the film feel hopelessly dated, that's become a large part of its charm.

The way the story is told is rather clever too. We first meet Holland apparently living a remarkably comfortable life in South America, from where he recounts the unlikely sequence of events which transformed an anonymous Bank of England employee into the mastermind behind an audacious gold robbery. It immediately leaves us wondering how this timid little man ended up there and, perhaps more importantly, whether he really managed to get away with it.

From there the film takes us back to London and allows Holland to tell his story, eventually bringing us full circle in a way that I'm certainly not going to spoil here. Suffice to say, it's worth paying attention right to the very end.

Alec Guinness is, of course, absolutely wonderful as Holland. He's precisely the sort of quiet, unassuming little man you'd happily trust to accompany a van carrying a fortune in gold every day, which is exactly what makes him so perfectly suited to stealing it. Holland has spent years being overlooked and underestimated and eventually realises that his apparent insignificance might actually be his greatest advantage.

Stanley Holloway makes the perfect partner in crime as Alfred Pendlebury, particularly once Holland discovers that his souvenir business might provide the answer to the one problem which has prevented him from carrying out his plan - how do you dispose of a large quantity of stolen gold without somebody noticing? The wonderfully ridiculous solution of melting it down and turning it into miniature Eiffel Towers somehow seems entirely reasonable in the world of an Ealing comedy.

There are some familiar faces to spot along the way too. Keep your eyes open during the opening scenes for a very young Audrey Hepburn, whose appearance as Chiquita amounts to little more than a fleeting glimpse but is rather special given the career that was about to follow. And then there's Sid James as one of the crooks recruited to help Holland carry out his plan, already displaying that unmistakable screen presence years before the Carry On films came calling. In many respects, he's already doing what Sid James would continue doing remarkably well for years to come.

More than seventy years later, the London captured by The Lavender Hill Mob gives the film an additional fascination which its makers could hardly have anticipated. What was merely the background to a contemporary Ealing comedy has become a remarkable record of post-war London. Streets, buildings and entire areas have changed beyond recognition since then, leaving the film to preserve a version of the capital which has long since disappeared.

Almost seventy-five years later, The Lavender Hill Mob remains enormously entertaining, frequently very funny and blessed with a wonderful collection of characters led by Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway. The London captured around them has changed almost beyond recognition, adding another layer of fascination to the film, while StudioCanal's impressive restoration and substantial Limited Edition give one of Ealing's finest comedies the treatment it deserves.

But beneath all the talk of restorations, post-war London and its place in British cinema history, it's still essentially a wonderfully simple story about four unlikely crooks, a van full of gold and an ingenious plan involving miniature Eiffel Towers which really ought to work. Of course, coming up with the perfect crime is one thing. Getting away with it is quite another.

Special features

• The Lavender Hill Mob: Analysis by Benedict Morrison
• London Comedy Film Festival Q&A with Paul Merton
• Introduction by Martin Scorsese
• Those British Faces: Stanley Holloway
• Extract from BEHP Audio interview with Charles Crichton
• Good Afternoon: Mavis interviews T.E.B. Clarke
• Audio Commentary by film historian Jeremy Arnold
• Original Trailer
• Behind the Scenes Stills Gallery