The League of Gentlemen, released in 1960, is a low budget, black and white, heist, comedy caper.
Not a masterpiece but with a lot going for it. Oliver Reed has a small uncredited role. Jack Hawkins and Richard Attenborough are both in The League of Gentlemen and were part of the syndicate that financed the film. Cary Grant was considered for a part but it was correctly assumed that it would be beneath him; David Niven ditto.
What I enjoyed about the film – look out, spoilers ahead – is all the stuff that inspired other comedy heist films. The van with the stolen money drives up a ramp into a pantechnicon (The Italian Job); the gang do meet but are hand-picked by their leader (The Thomas Crown Affair) and the heist has been copied in Ocean’s Eleven and improved on in many other heist movies.
It wasn’t a comedy caper on Saturday morning at Windsor Castle; it was the birthday parade. The Scots Guards trooped the colour in a ceremony not unlike the one usually carried out on Horse Guards Parade. I watched on television and was struck by a few things. First, the BBC interspersed their coverage with interviews with mostly soldiers (not officers) serving overseas. It was emphasised time and again that the Household Division has a dual role; ceremonial duties, yes, but more time spent soldiering, often overseas. I don’t suppose many school leavers were watching but it was a powerful recruiting tool and maybe their mums and dads will steer them in that direction.
Secondly, the scaling down of the ceremony meant that senior officers who would have been mounted on Horse Guards were on foot. They were dressed in the kit they would have worn on horseback and cut pitiful figures, hobbling along in tall riding boots and spurs, trailing swords. They clumped like skiers on the way to the lifts. The Queen, as usual, was on form; many wouldn’t after a night on a sleeper from Cornwall after the G7 meeting.
The young Scots Guardsmen, marching past Her Majesty with their heads turned to salute her and meeting her eye, have something special to remember. There is no similarity between the soldiers portrayed in The League of Gentlemen and the armed services today.
The last lines in the film, when they have been thrown in a drunken heap into the back of the Police van, “I say,are we going on somewhere?” became a much used phrase in my family when returning home from a night out.