A Film Canon

The Lavender Hill Mob takes the emergent heist genre's preoccupation with collaborative etiquette as the starting-point for a quintessentially Ealing deconstruction of English refinement, embodied first and foremost in Alec Guinness' sublime portrayal of Henry Holland, the go-between for bank and gold refinery who, after being repeatedly told that he needs to do something more with his life, decides to commit the perfect crime, and, in doing so, gradually transforms his self-effacing nervousness into the pathetic, infantile smugness of a "bank clerk hero", their common denominator the utter anonymity that is the hallmark of his screen persona. In the process, those contingencies and twists that define the American heist are largely deflected into a series of exquisite ironies, most of which centre on the motifs of gold and heat, or the Anglo-French relations that dominate the third act, while the concomitant characterisation of the heist as an aesthetic achievement is literalised in the form of Henry's partner, Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), whose ambition to "surround myself with rare and beautiful things" is beautifully offset by the squalor of his factory, where the gold is disguised as statues of the Eiffel Tower, as well as the boarding-house from which the narrative radiates, and whose banality is, in turn, poetically clarified by its resident crime fan. The result is a complication of the heist's subversive potential, as well as a delightful clarification of the fact that, for the English, the absence of a mythical, gangster heyday means that the criminal nostalgia underpinning the genre needs to take the aristocracy itself as its object, which the film both affirms and derides, and which Henry ultimately (if unwittingly) longs, but is unable, to join.