THE LAVENDER HILL MOB AND OTHER CRAP BRITISH FILMS |
| I’d had a bad day. My video machine was eating tapes, chewing its
way through yards of recordings, executing magnetic tape without mercy. It had rendered
the first half hour of "River of No Return" virtually unwatchable and the film
itself had rendered the remainder of the film unwatchable. Marilyn Monroe and Robert
Mitchum may be film icons but this film was dire. I’d started to watch a
made-for-cable film staring Tommy Lee Jones in a western he’d directed himself. It
was worthy, very worthy. His acting was brilliant, his topic pertinent, his support
sterling, the big blue sky was big and blueish. Unfortunately it was so boring that I
bailed out before it was half done. Later I came back for another modern western on TNT
advertised as starring the "gorgeous Linda Fiorentino" – I could hardly
wait. But then TNT cancelled the film and instead showed some unspeakable dreck starring
Judge Rheinhold that even my cats refused to watch. Never fear. I had a trump card in my pack. I had recorded "The Lavender Hill Mob" and this was bound to be good. The Guardian TV guide said it was a "sublime Ealing comedy with an Oscar-winning script." The August edition of Uncut magazine gave it 5 stars and told us that the director Charles Crichton "seduces with his charmingly angled take on post-war London". OK, that doesn’t exactly have you foaming at the mouth with anticipation but everyone knows the Ealing comedies are brilliant. Everyone. Ninety minutes or so later I sat in my chair stunned into silence. It wasn’t a revelatory stunning such as a really great movie can give you. This was a mind-numbingly bored, can’t believe I just watched that, did they swap the real film for a bogus film, pass the whiskey bottle quick type of stunned. How could so many people be so wrong? Why have they lied to me about this "sublime" film? Is it me? I think that the facts speak otherwise. So first let me say that Alec Obi-Wan Guinness and Stanley Holloway act well and that there is a nice chiaroscuro effect reminiscent of German expressionist cinema during a scene in a cellar workshop at night. Other good points are…… oh, I’m sorry, there aren’t any other good points. What about the bad points then? The whole thing is set in dreary post-war London and is faithfully dreary throughout – the clothes, the buildings, the people, the acting, everything is dreary to the nth degree. The plot is unremarkable, the script pedestrian. The lighting and camerawork is uninspired. There are only one and a half laughs in the entire film and they are more slightly and elliptically amusing than downright funny laughs. There are no pretty women (oh, sorry Audrey Hepburn appears for 3.7 seconds early on and then disappears but I didn’t count this), all the men are nerds of the unfunny type and the action looks like it was filmed by the technical crew from Crossroads. I’ve seen Bergman films that are funnier than this. Recently I heard someone on the radio drawing a parallel between Ealing comedies and modern British comedies like 4 Weddings and A Funeral and Not the Full Monty. I think that they are right about this. In 40 years time people will see British films of the 1990’s and be completely mystified as to how anyone could find most of them either interesting or funny. Weddings, Monty, Lavender Hill – all weak jokes based around the English class system that we are supposed to find endearing and funny but which actually practice a deep and nastily patronising attitude to the working and middle classes. There is no affection for ordinary people in these films just a thinly-disguised disdain. Come the revolution and I’ll be lining these films up in Wembley stadium, along with all film trailers, for termination with extreme prejudice. However, I will make an exception in the case of Brassed Off, a genuinely funny and touching British film with a sound political message. Otherwise I fear I will be returning to the subject of crap British films again. |