The Lavender Hill Mob (1951, Charles Crichton) (Patreon)

65/100

Second viewing, last seen 1994. Don't know whether it's quite accurate to say that this peaks early, but I definitely much prefer the first half (through the robbery) to the second half (retrieving the errant Eiffel Towers). Partly that's because the planning stage provides Guinness with more opportunities to traffic in the offbeat, weedy intensity that makes Holland a memorable criminal mastermind; arguably the film's finest sequence is the one in which he "hypothetically" floats his plan to steal the gold, maintaining a position physically behind Pendlebury, his voice studiously casual but his eyes wild with excitement and avarice. Just on a basic plotting level, though—and there's not much going on thematically, or even character-wise beyond what I just described—the level of invention diminishes as the film goes along, culminating in blatant contrivance. Advertising for an expert safecracker by going to crowded venues and loudly chatting about the money in your safe, then waiting for whoever tries to rob you, is pretty brilliant, and screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke further complicates matters by having one future mobster (so to speak) show up earlier than expected and then introducing another, with an extra twist. We also get the Ocean's Eleven prototype here (Soderbergh version), in that it's not entirely clear for a while whether everything's going according to plan or straight to hell. But Pendlebury is right: Under ordinary circumstances, the chance of those six schoolgirls (or anyone else) discovering the true nature of their souvenirs is minuscule. To justify Holland's paranoia, one of the girls has to (a) refuse to swap her Tower in exchange for a cash reward, for no apparent reason other than sheer cussedness, and then (b) give it to a policeman upon whom she has a crush while he's (c) working at an exhibition of investigative practices where a test for gold can conveniently be conducted on the spot. Works reasonably well as comedy, but it's still a bit much. Also, the misunderstanding that causes the snafu in the first place makes no sense—if the French saleslady didn't think that the sound "arr" represented the English pronunciation of the letter 'R,' what did she think Pendlebury was talking about? There's no French letter pronounced "arr." (This was so easily fixable, too, as 'G' and 'J' more or less precisely swap pronunciation between English and French, i.e. the French say something not unlike "gee" for 'J' and "jay" for 'G.') Stuff like that might be less bothersome were the film aiming to be more than cleverly amusing, but even the Rio de Janeiro framing device (featuring a then-unknown Audrey Hepburn—I'd totally forgotten about her bit part, briefly wondered if I were somehow watching the wrong movie) is ultimately revealed to be mere misdirection. If you subordinate everything else to narrative ingenuity, the twists and turns had better be legitimately ingenious.