British Ealing Studio comedies: Comic anarchy

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.