Cinema
The Lavender Hill Mob
Charles Crichton · 1951
Synopsis
In Rio de Janeiro, an Englishman who has grown rich dines with a fellow countryman passing through and tells him how he came to be there. A year earlier, Holland was a bank clerk in London who had escorted gold for twenty years, known for his meticulousness and capable of having the van stopped because of a car that seemed to be following him. He had his plan, but no way of getting the gold out of the country. One evening, a new lodger, Pendlebury, arrives at his boarding house on Lavender Hill: he owns a souvenir foundry.
Context
The screenwriter, T. E. B. Clarke, a former police reservist during the war, consulted the Bank of England on how to steal gold, and the bank convened a committee to help him. In its first version, the story followed the fate of each of the melted-down Eiffel Towers, which multiplied the characters; it was simplified at the suggestion of the associate producer, Michael Truman. The film won Clarke the Oscar for best screenplay and earned Alec Guinness a nomination. Audrey Hepburn, aged twenty-one, makes a one-line appearance in the opening scene.
Who it is for
Eighty-one minutes, in English. The story begins in Rio, after the events, and then takes them up again from the beginning.
Prizes and reception
Seventeenth in the ranking of the hundred best British films drawn up in London in 1999.
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