Classic heist caper The Lavender Hill Mob is getting a cinema rerelease. But which of these 40s and 50s film fancies are slyly subversive, and which have dated less well?
Anyone wanting a look at Dublin in the late 1940s might like this, but there’s not much else especially compelling about this weird Walter Mitty-ish comedy about a park loafer hoping to finance a one-way trip to the South Seas by helping rich people who have fallen over. Inspired by the anywhere-but-here mood of postwar privations, this is pretty charmless, and almost completely tone-deaf to the class/ethnic sensitivities of a crew of posh Brits rolling around the Irish capital. Not director Charles Crichton’s finest hour.
