The League of Gentlemen **** (1960, Jack Hawkins, Nigel Patrick, Roger Livesey, Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes) – Classic Movie Review 191

The superlative 1960 heist caper film The League of Gentlemen stars Jack Hawkins as a disgruntled former British military officer who assembles a gang of disgraced military gentlemen for a daring bank job. 

Renowned producer-director Basil Dearden’s superlative 1960 British heist caper film The League of Gentlemen is a thoroughly enjoyable, old-style thriller entertainment. Based on a once-famous novel by John Boland, it is the quintessence of Britain in the jaded, jaundiced late-50s. Its cool cynicism has kept it fresh.

Playing it to the stiff-upper-lip manner born, Jack Hawkins relishes one of his most archetypal roles as the rather bossy and frosty Colonel Hyde, an ageing, disgruntled former British military officer forcibly retired by the army.

Inspired by an American crime paperback novel called The Golden Fleece about a robbery, Hyde convenes a gang of seven disgraced military gentlemen with guilty secrets to join him in the daring bank job that he is masterminding. He prepares seven envelopes and sends them a copy of the novel and halves of ten £5 banknotes from Co-operative Removals Limited, so they can collect the other halves when they join him for a posh lunch in a private room at the Café Royal in Regent Street, London. All broke and desperate, they all do join him, just as he expected. He recruits a dissatisfied, satirical-toned second in command, Major Race (Nigel Patrick), who moves in with him. They even do the dishes together, with Race doing the washing up and Hyde doing the drying. Will there be honour among thieves? Maybe not.

Colonel Hyde is the only one of the Gentlemen not disgraced. He was simply made redundant after 25 years of Army service, and naturally feels a bit vengeful. He’s been planning his little vengeance caper for quite a while, very meticulously, so that nothing can go wrong, can it?

Adapting John Boland’s clever novel, Bryan Forbes makes an excellent job of writing the expert script, with lots of cranky, oddball dialogue and quirky, offbeat characters. And he also makes his acting mark as one of the conspirators, Captain Porthill. His real-life wife Nanette Newman’s is also in the cast as Elizabeth, as Major Rutland-Smith’s sexy, unpleasant wife, seen taking a bubble bath, supposedly naked. And Forbes’s real-life friend Richard Attenborough plays another of the crooks, sleazeball Lieutenant Lexy, who may be the Gentlemen’s weakest link.

There are plenty of chuckles to be found in the dark-toned humour that underpins and helps to sustain the thriller story and this is a movie that effectively captures the world-weary, cynical end-of-Fifties mood in the tawdry life of the UK, before the country found new life in the swinging Sixties.

The two main set pieces of their raid an army training camp in Dorset for arms and supplies, and their robbery of £1 million in used notes from a City of London bank are extremely well done. The raid is played mostly for comedy, with an unscheduled food inspection as a decoy for the weapons theft, and the robbery is played very seriously, with smoke bombs, submachine guns and radio jamming equipment. But both are very tense and entertaining in their own different ways. Gerald Harper gives a broad, fairly outrageous comedic turn as Captain Saunders, the officer in charge at the training camp. It’s just about on the right side of funny.

Roger Livesey’s gloomily morose Captain Mycroft (aka the ‘Padre’, posing as a vicar) and Robert Coote’s endlessly talky Brigadier Bunny Warren are standouts among the cast, though in an odd piece of casting, infamous heterosexual Oliver Reed (just 22) is rather less convincing in a tiny part as an offensively camp gay stereotype chorus boy at a theatre rehearsal production of Babes in the Wood! It was one of seven film roles he had in 1960. Captain Mycroft seems to have got himself into a spot of bother in a public park. Bunny Warren has nothing to do with the League of Gentlemen, but turns up right at the end when they are trying to celebrate before making their getaway with s suitcase each of £100,000, democratically the same for everybody.

Terence Alexander as Major Rupert Rutland-Smith and Norman Bird as Captain Frank Weaver, are also vital members of the cast, creating involving offbeat characters.

The film is populated with favourite British actors on their way up and actors either on their way or their way down.

It was the film debut of Dinsdale Landen, aged 27, who died aged 71 in 2003 of mouth cancer. He has a walk-on part here as a young massage client at the gym run by Captain Stevens (Kieron Moore), who, it turns out, likes young men. The unpleasant, philandering Lieutenant Lexy is not at all pleased to have to share a room with Captain Stevens and makes jibes against The Padre. All this gay stuff in a 1960 film must have been quite daring, even if it’s a bit rancid, though arguably good natured. After all, the liberal-minded film-makers’ production company Allied Film Makers went on to make the incredibly influential pioneering gay drama Victim (1961).

In his debut, Terence Edmond plays a young PC, the same kind of role he famously played in TV’s Z Cars (1962-64) as PC Sweet. It’s a tiny role but it turns out to be crucial to the plot. And there is a little, uncredited (though key) role for Bruce Seton, as the helpful AA Patrolman, who nearly gets in the way of the army raid. He had been a big TV star as the detective superintendent in Fabian of the Yard (1954-56), but was typecast and found other roles hard to come by. Workwise, he took what crumbs of comfort he could, even appearing with Charlie Drake on TV (no offence to Charlie!).

Director Basil Dearden ensures that there is a part (as Peggy) for his wife, too, Melissa Stribling, mother of film director James Dearden, who was Oscar nominated for the screenplay for Fatal Attraction (1987). It must have been funny for Forbes and Basil Dearden to see their wives being kissed on film by other actors!

The film was planned and originally written for Cary Grant, who turned it down. It was thought not important enough a project for him, but it became a huge hit. Hawkins stepped in, though he was already suffering from cancer and the production had to close for a few days for his illness. The film-makers are lucky to have Hawkins. Acting mostly with his eyes, he gives a bravura performance that stays fascinating and successfully motors the entire film. And he forms a very good double act with the equally skilled Nigel Patrick.

The portrait of Colonel Hyde’s wife (‘I regret to say the bitch is still going strong’) is a copy of the one of Deborah Kerr in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which starred Livesey. Forbes commented that usually in films of this time Hyde would simply have described his wife as having died.

The girly magazines in Mycroft’s suitcase at the beginning of the film were borrowed from the set of Peeping Tom, filming simultaneously at Pinewood. Queens Gate Place Mews, SW7, stands in for Edward Lexy’s garage.

Forbes, Attenborough, Hawkins, Dearden and co-producer Michael Relph formed the short-lived Allied Film Makers production company in November 1959, which produced several films, including The League of Gentlemen (1960), Man in the Moon (1960), Whistle Down the Wind (1961), Victim (1961), Life for Ruth (1962), and Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964).

The cast are Jack Hawkins as Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Hyde, Nigel Patrick as Major Peter Race, Roger Livesey as Captain ‘Padre’  Mycroft, Richard Attenborough as Lieutenant Edward Lexy, Bryan Forbes as Captain Martin Porthill, Kieron Moore as Captain Stevens, Terence Alexander as Major Rupert Rutland-Smith, Norman Bird as Captain Frank Weaver, Robert Coote as Brigadier “Bunny” Warren, Melissa Stribling as Peggy, Nanette Newman as Elizabeth Rutland-Smith, Lydia Sherwood as Hilda, Doris Hare as Molly Weaver, David Lodge as C.S.M, Patrick Wymark as Wylie, Gerald Harper as Captain Saunders, Brian Murray as Private “Chunky” Grogan, Terence Edmond as Young PC, Nigel Green as Kissing Man, Patrick Jordan as Sergeant, Dinsdale Landen as Young man in gym, Ronald Leigh-Hunt as Police Superintendent, Oliver Reed as Chorus Boy, Norman Rossington as Staff Sergeant Hall, Bruce Seton as AA Patrolman, and Michael Corcoran as Blackmailer.

Bryan Forbes died aged 86 on May 8 2013. Richard Attenborough died on August 24 2014, aged 90.

Top 20 British heist movies

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 191

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