The League of Gentlemen is a "caper" movie, a heist, and we all know the formula and love it. It has a plot mechanism like a handmade clock, smooth and precise, and it chimes at just the right moments.

When the picture opened in April 1960, Britain was in a state of turmoil, having discarded an empire and not yet found a role, as Dean Acheson put it. The British government, run by public schoolboys and minor aristocrats, had been shattered by the embarrassment of Suez and was troubled by sex and spy scandals. But there was also an economic boom, summed up by Prime Minister MacMillan when he said, "You've never had it so good." The population took him at his word: everyone wanted to get rich quick.

The story is simple--a bunch of ex-army officers plan to rob a bank of one million pounds--and its adroit blend of wit and tension made it a box-office hit. But another reason for its success is the way that its characters, once members of the establishment, turn into rogues. The army no longer has any use for them, so they apply their military skills to criminal endeavor.

It began as a novel by John Boland that was optioned by Carl Foreman, the blacklisted screenwriter of High Noon who had exiled himself to London. Foreman hired Bryan Forbes to write the script and sent it to Cary Grant. Since Foreman worried that Grant would not bother to read a script by a unknown British writer, Forbes' name was deleted. But Grant declined, and so did David Niven. Then the script was bought by director Basil Dearden, and a new company was formed, Allied Filmmakers, in which Forbes, Dearden, the producer Michael Relph, and Richard Attenborough were partners. They secured a lucrative deal with the Rank Organisation and shot the picture in six weeks for around $500,000.

Much of the picture recalls the Ealing Comedy, The Lavender Hill Mob, in which the meticulous planning of the heist is brought to life by a gallery of character actors. But there is an edge to it, a tartness, that Ealing would never have sanctioned and which effectively mirrors the acquisitive times. For instance, the leader of the gang is played by Jack Hawkins, one of Britain's most popular stars, who for years typified the strong, stiff-upper-lipped officer in countless war movies. But when one of the gang members asks the embittered Hawkins about his absent wife, wondering if she might be dead, Hawkins grimaces and says, "I'm sorry to say, the bitch is still alive." Audiences gasped with shock.

Hawkins and his cronies--stalwarts like Nigel Patrick, Roger Livesey (who played Colonel Blimp in Powell and Pressburger's masterpiece), Kieron Moore as well as Attenborough and Forbes himself--are gentlemen in league with greed, united by the chips on their shoulders. And we want them to get away with it.

The picture dates from a period widely regarded to have been one of the worst for the British cinema--a cinema on the brink of a brief renaissance with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Dr. No, Tom Jones and the rest. But The League of Gentlemen, with its sly subversion of a genre and a social order, was a progenitor of things to come, a real gem, and it remains so.
--Adrian Turner

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