The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)

A classic caper from the much-loved Ealing Studios, The Lavender Hill Mob holds up today as a charming, amusing film full of great characters and a few fantastic set-pieces. It's overshadowed by a few other movies from the studio (does it get any better than The Ladykillers? I think not), but remains as watchable as ever thanks to uniformly perfect performances from everyone involved.

Alec Guinness is the leading man, he plays a mild-mannered bank employee named Holland. Holland oversees the transport of gold bullion from the refinery to the bank. He is as predictable as he is punctilious, but that hasn't stopped him from coming up with a plan to rob the gold and give himself a lifestyle he could never otherwise afford. He needs the help of an artist named Pendelbury (Stanley Holloway), who spends most of his days making souvenirs out of lead, and two men with experience in criminal activities - Lackery (Sid James, here billed as Sidney James) and Shorty (Alfie Bass). The robbery should be easy, getting the gold out of the country and keeping hold of it might be the hard part.

Directed by Charles Crichton and based on a screenplay by T. E. B. Clarke, The Lavender Hill Mob starts off in an exotic locale with a character about to tell his tale before jumping back into the past to become a low-key character piece. The beauty of the movie is that, for most of its run time, it remains a low-key character piece. You want these criminals to succeed because, well, they're just a good group of blokes aiming to commit a crime without hurting anyone besides the bank. And considering how the banks have failed people in recent years, the whole thing feels much more satisfying.

Alec Guinness gives yet another wonderful performance, Stanley Holloway is a great partner for him and both Sid James and Alfie Bass bring a roguish charm to their roles. Marjorie Fielding and Edie Martin are good as two women who live in the same block/house as the men, the former has a couple of fun scenes while the latter has a lot less to work with. John Salew and Ronald Adam are also enjoyable in their respective roles and there's even the teeny tiniest of roles for one Audrey Hepburn (don't let your attention stray for a moment or you will miss her).

If you're unfamiliar with the output of Ealing Studios then I urge you to change that as soon as possible and you could do a lot worse than starting your exploration of their movies with The Lavender Hill Mob (although there is a risk that it will spoil you when it comes to viewing many of the others).

8/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lavender-Hill-Mob-60th-Anniversary/dp/B00525QHM8/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1361404550&sr=1-1

Quatermass 2 (1957)

It's the return of Professor Bernard Quatermass, in case you couldn't guess that from the title, in this Hammer movie that is again based on a TV series written by Nigel Kneale. Val Guest is back in the director's chair, after doing justice to the character and material in The Quatermass Xperiment, and everything is in place for another slice of low-key sci-fi drama.

This time around, Professor Quatermass (Brian Donlevy in the role once again) becomes involved in a mystery that involves meteorites causing a fair bit of trouble for those who get too close to them. The meteorites have all been landing at an area known as Winnerden Flats, but when Quatermass gets there (with his colleague, Marsh, played by Bryan Forbes) he finds more than he bargained for. As the plot thickens, Quatermass is told that what he saw at Winnerden Flats wasn't just a design very similiar to his own plans for  a moon colony but actually a plant where artificial food is being made. Quatermass finds this hard to believe, but finding out just what IS going on could prove very difficult. Time is against him, as are a number of people who no longer seem in control of their own minds.

Thanks to his character being slightly less arrogant in this outing, Brian Donlevy fares better in the main role than he did the first time. He is the pursued as opposed to the pursuer in this tale, seeking help from others as opposed to nominating himself as the one and only chance of fixing a situation. John Longden is very good as Lomax, someone who might just be the help that Quatermass needs, and it's great to see Sid James in a fairly straight role, playing a reporter named Jimmy Hall who likes to drink a bit too much, but works best when all sobered up. The rest of the cast includes William Franklyn, Vera Day, Charles Lloyd Pack and Hammer stalwart Michael Ripper. They may not all get to play particularly memorable characters, but the performances are just fine.

It may not feel quite as quintessentially British as the first movie, but this is a fine sci-fi drama with a fair share of thrills, one or two decent shocks (okay, nothing in the movie shocks nowadays, but back in 1957 this could have been gasp-inducing stuff) and a nice development of the plot that keeps it all entertaining enough to stop viewers from picking over the implausibility of it all. While it's not on a par with the first movie in terms of intelligence and tone it remains an equally enjoyable piece of entertainment.

7/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Quatermass-Collection-Experiment-Pit/dp/B000772838/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1366773093&sr=8-4&keywords=quatermass+2