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Lack of good storyline.

From my favorite movies..

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

One of the strength's of this excellent comedy, wonderfully played by Guinness & Holloway as an unlikely criminal duo with support of a cast of other familiar faces, is TEB 'Tibby' Clarke's imaginative script which takes an absurd premise and spins it out to its comedic conclusion.Very often I enjoy the set-up and premise of a Ealing comedy as they contain lots of characterisation and little details that then find later expression as the plot gathers pace. For instance, the down at heel boarding house filled with little old ladies, one of whom later appeared in 'The Ladykillers'.It's these little gems of observation as well as the main story that make this film memorable. Early in the film, Holland's ordered existence includes reading pulp thrillers with US criminal slang to one elderly lady as she does her knitting, listening intently and providing commentary on the plot. Later, after the robbery, we see her sitting at tea with two policemen & asking one of them, using contemporary slang, about who they think did the job. The bemused policemen are taken aback, anticipating Mrs Wilberforce talking about 'her aliens' to the desk officers in 'The Ladykillers'.Behind these apparently quaint English Ealing comedies lies real anarchy & subversive wit.

A million pounds in bullion is stolen from a British bank; the crooks successfully hide out in a foundry, melting the gold down and pouring it into molds for Eiffel Tower paperweights...but what happens when one little schoolgirl gets away with a souvenir and turns it over to the police? Sluggish and talk-heavy at the start, this comedic caper eventually becomes a breathless chase film, aided by the wonderfully 'light-fingered', light-headed team of Alec Guiness and Stanley Holloway. Their flight by foot from the actual Eiffel Tower is piece-of-genius filmmaking, while director Charles Crichton and screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke are adept at keeping the thieves affable...anti-heroes, as it were. "Mob" provided the virtual formula for many other heist pictures to follow, a genre wherein the audience is prodded to cheer for the criminals as if they were the good guys. This is acceptable here as a bright-eyed early example, with a first-rate cast and production. An added bonus: Audrey Hepburn, pre-"Roman Holiday", in a bit part as a grateful recipient of Guinness's affection. **1/2 from ****

I had recorded "The Lavender Hill Mob" and thought that this was bound to be good. The Guardian TV guide said it was a "sublime Ealing comedy with an Oscar-winning script." The August edition of Uncut magazine gave it 5 stars and told us that the director Charles Crichton "seduces with his charmingly angled take on post-war London". OK, that doesn't exactly have you foaming at the mouth with anticipation but everyone knows the Ealing comedies are brilliant. Everyone.Ninety minutes or so later I sat in my chair stunned into silence. It wasn't a revelatory stunning such as a really great movie can give you. This was a mind-numbingly bored, can't believe I just watched that, did they swap the real film for a bogus film, pass the whiskey bottle quick type of stunned. How could so many people be so wrong? Why have they lied to me about this "sublime" film? Is it me? I think that the facts speak otherwise.So first let me say that Alec Obi-Wan Guinness and Stanley Holloway act well and that there is a nice chiaroscuro effect reminiscent of German expressionist cinema during a scene in a cellar workshop at night. Other good points are…… oh, I'm sorry, there aren't any other good points. What about the bad points then? The whole thing is set in dreary post-war London and is faithfully dreary throughout – the clothes, the buildings, the people, the acting, everything is dreary to the nth degree. The plot is unremarkable, the script pedestrian. The lighting and camera-work is uninspired. There are only one and a half laughs in the entire film and they are more slightly and elliptically amusing than downright funny laughs. There are no pretty women (oh, sorry Audrey Hepburn appears for 3.7 seconds early on and then disappears but I didn't count this), all the men are nerds of the unfunny type and the action looks like it was filmed by the technical crew from Crossroads. I've seen Bergman films that are funnier than this.Recently I heard someone on the radio drawing a parallel between Ealing comedies and modern British comedies like 4 Weddings and A Funeral and Not the Full Monty. I think that they are right about this. In 40 years time people will see British films of the 1990's and be completely mystified as to how anyone could find most of them either interesting or funny. Weddings, Monty, Lavender Hill – all weak jokes based around the English class system that we are supposed to find endearing and funny but which actually practice a deep and nastily patronising attitude to the working and middle classes. There is no affection for ordinary people in these films just a thinly-disguised disdain. Come the revolution and I'll be lining these films up in Wembley stadium, along with all film trailers, for termination with extreme prejudice.

Henry Holland is a milquetoast clerk in charge of gold bullion deliveries who harbours a secret dream to make off with a shipment. When by chance he meets Alfred Pendlebury, who owns a souvenir business with a small foundry, it seems providence has cast them together and the heist is on.One of Ealing Studios' most successful films - writer T.E.B. Clarke won an Oscar - this is a lovely, gentle reminder of a more innocent post-war age, where villains trusted each other with the loot and nobody got hurt. Its success for me is largely down to Guinness' mild-mannered charm as he alternates between meek predictability with his superiors and gleeful exuberance as his masterplan comes to fruition. The whimsy of scenes like the delirious whirling flight down the steps of the Eiffel Tower, where the camera seems to generate the giddy elated panic of the characters, are infectious and exhilarating and the story keeps us empathising with Holland right up to the amusing pathos of the ending. Everybody else is great too, and as with all of Ealing's work the quality of the filmmaking is top-notch. Douglas Slocombe's fluid camera-work is wonderful throughout, such as the big track-in on Holloway in the police station when he mistakenly thinks the game's up, and the clever editing by Seth Holt (who went on to edit and direct several interesting movies for Hammer Films) pulls all the comic potential out of the situations. There's also a great little score by Georges Auric. A great comic caper movie, beautifully directed by Crichton, who also made The Titfield Thunderbolt, A Fish Called Wanda and the very funny golfing episode in Dead Of Night. An interesting comic companion piece to the straight police drama The Blue Lamp, also written by Clarke. Look fast at the start for a very young Audrey Hepburn.