Basil Dearden (1960)
How old was I when I first watched this on television – perhaps eight or nine? Mum really liked it and I think of watching it with her – twice, maybe three times – but it must be forty years since I’d seen it. A motley collection of ex-army officers plan a bank robbery. It’s a serviceable idea turned into a highly entertaining film and there are some funny scenes. But the picture is also darker than I expected or remembered. The build-up, as each of the characters is introduced, takes some time, during which we get a strong sense of the men’s unhappiness. Before they come together, they’re all in situations that are variously straitened or humiliating. What’s particularly good about The League of Gentlemen is how it shows working together, in preparation for the bank raid, as life-enhancing for each member of the group – and Basil Dearden achieves this without either pushing that idea too much into the foreground or making these would-be lawbreakers adorable. The prime mover, who plans the robbery and rustles up his partners in crime, is Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Hyde – he had a good war but he’s out of a job now and desperately short of cash. There’s a social comment there but this isn’t too salient either – all the more surprising when Basil Dearden and the producer Michael Relph are perhaps best known for work where a social conscience is more blatant (films like Sapphire (1959) and Victim (1961)). What’s much more striking – and sinister – about Hyde is that this man, who held a rank senior to the others in the army, knows the weaknesses of his recruits, their misdeeds during the war or in civilian life subsequently. He’s inviting them to earn lots of badly needed money but there’s a whiff of blackmail too.
The screenplay was adapted by Bryan Forbes from a 1958 novel of the same name by John Boland and it’s a sharp, well-constructed script (with some pretty acid lines). Dearden lets a sequence at an army training base (from where the gang steal most of their tools for the bank job) go on too long but the climactic robbery is well done and the aftermath is enjoyably suspenseful. For someone of my generation the cast is a delight – not just because there are plenty of decent performances but also because people I associate with television rather than cinema keep turning up and it’s great to see them again, almost regardless of whether or not they’re up to much. For every one who’s a good actor – like Dinsdale Landen (uncredited, as a young man getting a massage) – there’s more than one who isn’t – for example, Gerald Harper and Patrick Wymark (although Harper’s not bad as a what-ho captain on the army base). Brian Murray does a jolly turn as an army trainee complaining about the canteen food. Terence Edmond, PC Sweet in Z-Cars, anticipates that role with a cameo as a rookie constable. There are also familiar faces from both television and British films of the period (David Lodge, Norman Rossington), and a single big-screen name of the future – Oliver Reed, amusingly vivid in a thirty-second appearance as a camp amateur actor. The women’s roles don’t amount to much: the two relatively glamorous ones are played by Dearden’s wife Melissa Stribling and Forbes’ future wife Nanette Newman; the only actress who registers is Doris Hare as a yattering housewife.
Part of the appeal of this band of demobbed criminals is that we naturally associate some of the actors with their roles in war movies and/or with characters of a particular social rank. Jack Hawkins brings little characterisation but a strong presence to the role of Hyde. The two majors are Nigel Patrick (wittier and freer than I expected, as Race, an unsuccessful gambler) and Terence Alexander (rather touching as Rutland-Smith, floundering in a marriage of convenience to a faithless but moneyed wife). Bryan Forbes is one of the four captains in the company: Porthill is a kind of young-middle-aged gigolo and Forbes creates something persuasively hard and nasty in his personality. The others are Kieron Moore, Norman Bird and Roger Livesey. Moore is hopeless as Stevens, an ex-Mosleyite homosexual who runs a gym: it takes him all his time to get his lines out (and he doesn’t seem remotely gay). Bird, however, as Weaver, an ex-bomb disposal expert (who liked a drink and managed to blow up some of his fellow soldiers when under the influence), creates one of the most compelling characters in the film. The scene which introduces Weaver and his soul-destroying home life (with Doris Hare) is really oppressive. Drab, downtrodden husbands were Bird’s speciality of course but Weaver’s backstory gives his portrait an extra edge here. We expect richness of characterisation (as well as voice) from Roger Livesey and get it: there’s a beguiling blend of humour and self-loathing regret in his ‘Padre’ Mycroft, a quartermaster dismissed for gross indecency (who now makes a living impersonating vicars and selling pornography). Lexy was militarily the most junior member of the outfit and is now a repair man-cum-petty crook (in his army days, he sold information to the Russians). Richard Attenborough is thoroughly seedy in the role. He has one of those vile moustaches that look like a dead rodent on the upper lip.
As the men celebrate the ill-gotten gains at Hyde’s house, someone knocks on the door – and keeps knocking. It’s a heart-stopping moment but the man outside is only Hyde’s old army boss – bonhomous, bibulous Brigadier ‘Bunny’ Warren. It’s tough for a performer to gatecrash at this late stage but Robert Coote delivers a triumphantly funny caricature and the blend of comedy and suspense in what follows is nicely judged. The martial music by Philip Green invites you to spot the difference between the music for a straight military movie of the time and a relatively subversive piece like this one. For me, the phrase ‘league of gentlemen’ still connotes, before Royston Vasey, this film. It was very good to renew its acquaintance.
28 June 2011
