The Lavender Hill Mob

The Lavender Hill Mob
British quad poster
Directed by	Charles Crichton
Produced by	Michael Balcon
Written by	T.E.B. Clarke
Starring	Alec Guinness Stanley Holloway
Music by	Georges Auric
Cinematography	Douglas Slocombe
Edited by	Seth Holt
Distributed by	GFD (UK)
Release date	15 June 1951 (UK)
Running time	81 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

The Lavender Hill Mob is a 1951 comedy film from Ealing Studios, written by T.E.B. Clarke, directed by Charles Crichton, starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway and featuring Sid James and Alfie Bass. The title refers to Lavender Hill, a street in Battersea, a district of South London, in the postcode district SW11, near to Clapham Junction railway station.

The original film was digitally restored and re-released to UK cinemas on 29 July 2011 to celebrate its 60th anniversary.

Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) is dining with a fellow Briton in a posh restaurant in Rio de Janeiro where he is well known. He relates a story explaining his presence in Rio. It seems he was a seemingly unambitious London bank clerk in charge of gold bullion deliveries for over 20 years. He had a reputation for fussing over details and suspecting all cars he observed following the bullion van, but all in all appeared to be a man dedicated to his job and the gold's security. In fact, he had hatched the "perfect" plot to steal a load of bullion and retire. The one thing stopping him had been that selling the gold on the black market in Britain was too risky, and he was at a loss as to how to smuggle it abroad.

One evening a new lodger – artist Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) – arrives at Holland's boarding house in Lavender Hill. Pendlebury owns a foundry that makes presents and souvenirs that are sold in many resorts, including foreign ones. Noticing how similar the foundry is to the place where the gold is made into ingots, Holland decides that the ideal way of smuggling the gold out of the country would be as Eiffel Tower paperweights sold in Paris, and puts this hypothetically to his new friend: "By Jove, Holland, it's a good job we're both honest men." "It is indeed, Pendlebury."