The Lavender Hill Mob │ StudioCanal
Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Two of the most famous characters Audrey Hepburn ever played were Eliza Dolittle and Maid Marion. In StudioCanal’s new 4K restoration home entertainment release of The Lavender Hill Mob, Audrey Hepburn shares her first film with Stanley Holloway, who played Eliza’s father in My Fair Lady, and Robert Shaw, who played the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin & Marion. Not that Audrey Hepburn actually shares the screen in The Lavender Hill Mob with either Stanley Holloway or Robert Shaw, but she does get the film off to a bright start with a nuzzle with Alec Guinness (incidentally, both Hepburn and Sir Alec once penned articles for us.) The Lavender Hill Mob arrived in the middle of the golden era of the Ealing Comedy cycle, two years after Kind Hearts and Coronets and just four years before The Ladykillers. And it remains a pure joy. Unlike heist movies of the future, it manages to be exciting without being violent and even the bad guys are thoroughly decent chaps.
Alec Guinness underplays Henry ‘Dutch’ Holland, an unassuming, mild-mannered bank employee, who asserts, “I like the bullion office – it holds all I ever wished for.” He has worked in his current position for twenty years without promotion, on the princely salary of £8 pounds, 15 shillings, and is in charge of overseeing the smelting of liquid gold into ingots and the safe transportation of the same. But there is a twinkle in the deadpan countenance of Holland (by which name most people know him), for he has a plan…
Needless to say, the restoration of this 1951 classic is as impeccable as Holland’s employment record and took 200 man-hours of painstaking removal of any dirt or scratches from the original print. It looks glorious, all the more so as the film was shot on location in and around the City of London and Notting Hill, where the remnants of the Second World War bombing are all too-evident. And yet there is an air of optimism and good-naturedness about it all, even though the film is essentially an international crime heist, taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Paris and the Bank of England.
When the scenarist T.E.B. Clarke was asked by Michael Balcon to come up with a follow-up to Ealing’s The Blue Lamp of 1950, he remembered extracting a model of the Eiffel tower from a drawer and a light bulb going off. But he needed to do his research, and so he made an appointment at the Bank of England, explained what he was doing and got the full cooperation of a bank committee on the best way to smuggle out a million pounds worth of gold bullion from their premises. If anything, they seemed even more excited than he was by the proposition.
It is an ingenious script, effortlessly realised by the director Charles Crichton (who was 78 when he directed his last film – A Fish Called Wanda). Crichton was nominated for an Oscar for his direction of the latter, while The Lavender Hill Mob actually won the best screenplay Oscar for ‘Tibby’ Clarke and Alec Guinness was nominated for his role as Holland. But however brilliantly understated Guinness is, the film, like most of the Ealing comedies, is an ensemble effort, with peerless turns from Stanley Holloway, Sidney James, Alfie Bass and John Gregson and endless recognisable faces in supporting turns, including an uncredited Robert Shaw as a lab technician for the police force – and Audrey Hepburn as a socialite, a ten-second turn just two years before she won an Academy Award for Roman Holiday.
The bonus material is particularly impressive. There’s an introduction to the film by Martin Scorsese, a Q&A with Paul Merton – a film comedy expert – a straight-to-camera essay by a very articulate Benedict Morrison, an in-depth interview with Tibby Clarke, as well as the original trailer, an audio commentary by the film historian Jeremy Arnold, and more. It is such a pleasure and a huge privilege to see the legacy of British cinema preserved and honoured in this way, particularly for such a clever, delightful gem as The Lavender Hill Mob.
STUDIOCANAL’s release of The Lavender Hill Mob is now available on Blu-ray and in 4k
STUDIOCANAL is Europe’s leader in production, distribution and international sales of feature films and series, operating in all nine major European markets - France, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Spain, Denmark and Benelux - as well as in Australia and New Zealand. It owns the largest library in Europe and one of the most prestigious film libraries in the world, boasting more than 8,000 titles from 60 countries, which span 100 years of film history. 20 million euros has been invested into the restoration of 750 classic films over the past 5 years. Known for releasing a stunning roster of incomparable vintage classics titles, StudioCanal’s releases include outstanding thrillers, heart-rending masterworks, horror favourites, war dramas, Ealing comedies, and plenty of lesser-known gems. The collection boasts some of the greatest and beloved stars of British cinema.
