The title of this Ealing comedy pokes fun at the incongruity of serious crime being plotted on the quiet streets of south London, yet the film is rooted in certain amount of realism. Writer T.E.B. Clarke struck gold when, during his research for jewel-theft thriller Pool of London (Basil Dearden, 1951) he was inspired to script the story of a clerk robbing his own bank. He completed the screenplay after consultation with the Bank of England, and the result satisfied Ealing chief Michael Balcon’s request for another crime film in the vein of police-procedural The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1950). Location shooting on the streets of (blitz-damaged) London and Paris provides an edge of authenticity to what is nevertheless a gleefully absurd caper.
Alec Guinness is excellently droll as “Dutch”, the smirking “nonentity” who puts together a daring double-bluff heist to steal his own employer’s gold and smuggle it out of the country in an unrecognisable form. Stanley Holloway is Pendlebury, his eccentric partner-incrime, a purveyor of “gewgaws” who melts the gold into Parisian souvenirs to baffle customs, while the motley mob is completed with bona fide cockney hoodlums played by comic actors Sidney James and Alfie Bass. Blink and you may miss a walk-on part for a young Audry Hepburn in the first five minutes.
True to Ealing form, this film relishes deflating the smugness of British propriety, epitomised by Dutch’s bowler hat floating through the Paris sky as he and Pendlebury dash giddily down the steps of the Eiffel Tower, or the coppers who are quite literally dummies. Under Charles Crichton’s direction, the comedy escalates from mocking satire to fullblown farce, in a chaotic climactic chase across London.
No less an expert in the crime genre than Agatha Christie ranked it in her favourite films of 1951 for “Sight and Sound” magazine. She wrote: “Excellent – Good acting, original plot, and very amusing.”

Pamela Hutchinson