The Lavender Hill Mob: A Review

By Nicholas Stix
Revised at 3 a.m., on friday, June 9, 2023

The same studio once released two top 100 masterpieces, both starring the same man, and both in the same year. And both comedies. The one picture was The Man in the White Suit; the other was The Lavender Hill Mob. The studio was Ealing; the actor was Alec Guinness; the year was 1951.

The Lavender Hill Mob is a heist comedy based on one of the most brilliant original screenplays ever written, by T.E.B. “Tibbie” Clarke. That means that there’s little I can tell you about the picture, without sperlin’ it.

For 20 years, Mr. Holland (Alec Guinness) has been responsible for personally regularly transporting millions of dollars worth of gold bullion from his bank to the Bank of England in a most punctilious manner. The armed guards chuckle knowingly at his pedantry. But he has always dreamed of attaining great wealth, knows he could never do so legally, and outside circumstances force him to act on his plan.

After 20 years of doing the Bank of England run, his superiors have informed Holland that his next run will be his last. He’s being transferred to a new post. Things now become urgent for him.

But how to transport the gold out of the country undetected, and how does a man with no criminal past put together a competent team?

A partner has fortuitously fallen into his lap. A middle-aged, small-time chiseler, Mr. Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) has recently moved into Holland’s boarding house.

Again, I can’t reveal how he solves those problems, but I will say that how Clarke and Crichton depict him figuring one of them out is through showing two consecutive scenes which are virtually identical, such that a light simultaneously goes off in the viewer’s and the mastermind’s respective heads. The juxtaposition of the two scenes is both brilliant and an homage to von Harbou and Lang’s talkie M (1931). In M, von Harbou and Lang present two consecutive scenes which are virtually identical, and which take place simultaneously. In one, the Berlin police brass meet in conference to come up with a strategy for catching the serial rapist-murderer who has been kidnapping and violating little girls. In the next scene, the leaders of Berlin’s underworld meet for the same reason. (The police have been terrorizing them, while the rapist-killer remains at large.)

This passage would be affectionately copied repeatedly in pictures and even in TV dramas. A young producer-director named Robert Altman would do so during the first season of Combat! (1962-1963), in showing a German officer reaching out to light a cigarette. When the cigarette is drawn back to its owner, the latter is an American G.I. Unfortunately for Altman, that year proved to be the peak of his career. It was all downhill, from then on.

Mr. Holland’s other challenge was in how to fill out his criminal gang. How Clarke solved this puzzle was, if anything, even more brilliant, original, and simple than the solution to the previous challenge, such that I cannot say a word about it.

While watching Mob, you’re actually rooting for the bad guys. (But unlike today's decadent culture, that was not then the norm.)

The Lavender Hill Mob was a sterling example of what came to be known as “Ealing comedies.” Ealing was a British studio which was far from prolific, but also far from a vanity house. And while it did not churn out masterpieces, assembly-line style (who did?), it did produce a series of masterpieces and classics between 1949 and 1955, all but one of which starred Guinness. However, in the first one, Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which he was not the nominal star (that would be Dennis Price), Guinness played not one, not two, not three… but eight different roles! Thus, he was the secret star of Kind Hearts and Coronets. However, I am not a fan of Coronets, which is a very black comedy. (Funny, smile, as opposed to funny, laugh.)

The Lavender Hill Mob was directed by Charles Crichton, produced by Ealing’s head of production, Michael Balcon (1896-1977), and shot by Douglas Slocombe.

Other brilliant Ealing comedies include the aforementioned The Man in the White Suit, and The Ladykillers (1955).

One feature of Ealing comedies, in addition to Guinness, was the ubiquitous, feisty old, widowed landlady who kept her gentlemen’s lodgings clean and respectable, and served them tea every afternoon (Marjorie Fielding, I believe, in Mob, Edie Martin in Man, and Katie Johnson in Ladykillers).

As original as Tibby Clarke was, he was not above seeking out expert assistance. And so, when he needed to learn how to rob a bank, he entered one, walked up to a teller, and asked him, “How might one go about robbing this bank?” The teller then took Clarke inside to the administrative office, where the directors all put their heads together, giving him advice!

And what is Tibby Clarke’s rank on the 2017 new york magazine commissars’ list of the 100 [sic] Greatest Screenwriters? Alas, the poor sod was born a White gentile, and thus there was no room at the inn for him!

(Actually, it's not a list of the 100, but of the 116 Greatest Screenwriters. The commissars counted as many as six screenwriters as one. At the same time, they counted as one screenwriter, directors who never wrote a script by themselves, e.g., Wilder and Kurosawa, and counted as solo great screenwriters directors who never showed any (or showed very little) talent as screenwriters: Spielberg, Lucas, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, Jane Campion, Robert Zemeckis, David Lynch, Orson Welles and James Cameron. And many names on the list are pure affirmative action choices.)

After The Ladykillers (1955), Alec Guinness stopped making Ealing comedies. He made some sort of war picture, and thereafter stuck largely to dramas and period pieces.

Yes, a place called Albion, peopled by Angles and Saxons, whom cambridge university now tells us never existed, once stood, including one Tibby Clarke.