The cinema : 1952 (1952)

The Lavender Hill Mob INTRODUCED BY T. E. B. CLARKE Anyone with a good memory who has seen The Lavender Hill Mob will notice, in reading the following extract from the shooting script of the film, that certain scenes do not conform entirely with what has appeared on the screen, and that the first of these scenes failed altogether to achieve the transition from paper to celluloid. When I learned that this section of the shooting script had been selected for publication in The Cinema 1952, my first impulse was to ask that it should be edited in such a way as to eliminate these discrepancies; but it then struck me that it would probably be more interesting to the reader if published in its original form. Here, then, it is, as it faced Charles Grichton when he got down to the practical job of shooting the film. The number of pages in the shooting script made it immediately apparent that cuts were necessary, for a subject so light in essence as The Lavender Hill Mob must be restricted to a running time of ninety minutes at the outside. A careful timing of the full script showed that the film would run for something like a hundred and five minutes if it were shot as written. What was to go? This was the stage — an alltoo-familiar stage in scripting — when a conflict had to take place between my own personal desires and the more detached, more rational viewpoint of the director on the script as a whole. I was pleased with the way I had written the first scene here, in which Mr Holland inspects a derelict warehouse where he proposes to bring the bullion he has planned to steal, while his assistant Lackery sentimentalizes over past crimes he has himself committed in this building. Charles Crichton liked the scene, too : but, as he rightly pointed out, it could disappear in toto without upsetting the balance of the film. And that was more than could be said of certain other scenes which — regarded solely as scenes might be inferior, but which were essential to the development of the plot.