British Ealing Studio comedies: Comic anarchy

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): Have posters for hard-boiled action movies been bearing down on you lately? The option exists to look away and towards the Widjojo Center in South Jakarta where the British Council is screening selections from comic masterpieces of British screen. Light relief has slipped into town and it is available to the viewer who can peel off to a mid-afternoon screening, before the hujan downpour begins, on Tuesdays and Fridays until mid-May.

These comedies, the Ealing Studio comedies, were made after World War II in a Britain still living among bombed-out ruins while coping with the trials of daily life, like having to use vouchers for purchasing household essentials. Tough economic constraint nonetheless brought out some of Britain's best-ever comic films, films that dealt with the problems of ordinary men and women fed up with their lot -- and prone to dream a daydream or two.

Over the next few weeks Passport to Pimlico (directed by Henry Cornelius in 1948) and The Lavendar Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951) will be screened. These films are remembered not so much for their directorial flourish as for their actors -- Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway, Sid James and Margaret Rutherford -- and for their funny, funny screenplays (The Lavendar Hill Mob won T.E.B. Clark an Academy Award for Best Story and Screenplay). In the film academies, attention of a more sober kind has been given to the Ealing comedies' reflections on the social reality of Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The Lavendar Hill Mob is a fantasy turn about a bland bank clerk called Holland (Alec Guinness in steel-rimmed specs). He dreams of another life beyond the boarding house where he lives, beyond the streets with throngs of bowler-hatted clones and beyond the bank where he has put in 20 years of faithful service. Making his nostrils twitch with the whiff of adventure are the gold bars that lie on the floor of the security van that he rides from bullion refinery to bank vault.

As luck would have it, Henry Holland works in the bullion office of a bank, a position he has acquired through a reputation for apparent unwavering honesty.

He is lonely but not alone, not the only one waiting for his big chance. A new boarder (Stanley Holloway as Pendlebury) arrives at his lodgings, the Balmoral Private Hotel, bringing along with him a tacky array of artworks (his creations) and crates of tacky souvenirs (his business).

The piles of Ann Hathaway cottage miniatures and the Eiffel Tower paperweights inspire Holland to hit on an idea.

Nobody would notice the difference between leaden gold-plated paperweights and solid gold paperweights, now would they? By insinuation he is able to enlist Mr. Pendlebury of Gew Gaws Ltd. to his own enterprise, to his plan to smuggle stolen gold bullion out of England in the form of souvenirs.

A plan is hatched between the two. With loud talk between them on the Underground they broadcast among commuters the (false) message that there is a large payroll left overnight at the Gee Gaws warehouse. During that night two robbers enter the premises as hoped and on cue and Holland and Pendlebury are able to enlist two more players by default -- practiced petty criminals, played by Sid James and Alfie Bass. Then Mr. Holland sets to in hatching his clever plan. Suddenly he has news of a promotion to Foreign Exchange. How inconvenient. The moment has all but passed. Galvanized, he swings into action, training his gang in the series of steps to make theirs the security van full of gold.

On the day, the plan goes right, then wrong, then right again and things go from bad to worse. Pendlebury is detained by police for questioning -- it was not planned. Holland, bound, gagged and blindfolded (dressed up as a hostage) wanders away from the warehouse and topples into the river. He is rescued by two policemen.

Despite the zigzag progress, they get the gold and the plan unfolds to the point where Holland and Pendlebury can beam proudly and parentally over their first gold Eiffel Tower, and as the camera moves in on them in ironic two-shot they croon, "Our first born". They move to the foreground as the Sid James and Alfie Bass characters drop away, saying they expect Holland and Pendlebury to give them their share when the deals are done abroad, "You mean you trust us?" an incredulous pair of gentlemen scoundrels ask their working class colleagues. To each other Holland and Pendlebury turn, "The world is ours".

Not quite. Impediments are yet to come. From a race against the elevator down the spiral staircase on the Eiffel Tower to a car chase through London streets with Pendlebury and Holland at the wheel of a stolen police car, issuing contradictory messages over the radio, the Lavendar Hill Mob diminishes to its last surviving member. He manages to escape to South America (a few years ahead of Ronald Biggs!).

Does crime pay? Look closely during the film's final framing device in the restaurant in Rio.

Passport to Pimlico continues this wonderfully batty tradition of eccentric situation comedy, peppered with wit and slapstick. Like Lavendar Hill it looks at an unthinkable act, outside the law, and renders it harmless through comedy. In this film the people of the tiny London borough of Pimlico uncover treasure and accredited deeds, hundreds of years old, that declare they are a part of France, Burgundy in fact. Seems like a good idea when London is three years out of World War II but there are still endless restrictions in daily life and the city has been sweating through a heat-wave summer. They decide to secede.

The whimsy is sustained and the people cut themselves off, bank the buried treasure and keep the pubs open well after hours. Pimlico can do it alone for a while, but soon survival becomes dependent on donations of food that are either lobbed over the perimeter boundary wire -- schoolboys' lunch packs -- or that land from the sky by parachute.

Within each of these films there is inserted a Gaumont-style cinema newsreel that gets to the heart of things -- the real as against the declared. In The Lavendar Hill Mob a newsreader's voice-over declares that the police are leaving "no stone unturned" as the visuals show us policemen kicking rocks aside as they walk through an alleyway. An MP in Parliament declares that measures have been taken to ensure that no gold leaves the country over the image of a Frenchman nonchalantly unwrapping an Eiffel Tower souvenir in front of a customs officer who gives it a shrug, barely a glance, and a Ca va to let it pass.

In Passport to Pimlico the newsreader announces that Pimlico's privy council is handing out policies while the image we see is of a group of residents sitting in the kitchen, thumping the table with their fists. Each and every image contradicts the authority of the voice-over commentary.

Both these films, and especially The Lavendar Hill Mob, represent British comedy at its best. Fast-paced, witty and whimsical, with a dash of social realism, these examples of the Ealing oeuvre are a cheerfully clever diversion for a weekday afternoon.