Alec Guinness' first nomination

This one took me a while to get to. Sorry for the delay. I had the movie at the top of my Netflix queue, but it suddenly became unavailable. I'm sure, faithful readers, that you have all been breathless with antici...


pation!

Alec Guinness' early career was dominated by a series of successful comedies made by a little British studio, Ealing. Guinness was prominently featured in most, if not all, of these comedies, and was even given writing credit on a few of them. One such film got Guinness his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor. The film was The Lavender Hill Mob. Though Guinness lost, the film won that year's Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (T E B Clarke).

Guinness plays Henry Holland, a meek, fastidious, bureaucratic man who has spent 20 years working at a bank, in charge of security in the delivery of gold bullion to the bank. Holland is known for being a stickler for detail, kept on the job for his impeccable honesty, but never moved up because of his lack of imagination or ambition. He is also a man with a single goal for himself - to steal a load of the bullion that he has been protecting. Twenty years spent on the job, in the name of building an unimpeachable reputation for himself, and in searching for the perfect opportunity to steal the gold - gold which will be worthless to him without the perfect plan to smuggle it out of the country and exchange it for cash.

This is, in the British style, an exceedingly dry comedy. It has more of a general sense of amusement than a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, though it does have a few of those as well. Guinness is spectacularly subtle as a man seeking revenge of sorts for spending his entire career being overlooked, while at the same time being careful to act in precisely the way that he would need to act in order to continue being overlooked. The film is a bit light in terms of substance and story, but it is also light in terms of mood, so it is enjoyable even if it doesn't have much to say.

Don't blink during the opening scene, or you'll miss a small role by Audrey Hepburn, just one year before her breakthrough, Oscar-winning role in Roman Holiday!

Movie trivia question: In Oscar's first year, there were actually two films which won awards equivalent to Best Picture - one was for the artistic quality of the story, and the other was for the technical accomplishment of making the film. What were the two Best Pictures of Oscar's first year?