The Ealing Studios Collection: Vol. 1

Description

Collection of three films from Britain’s Ealing Studios all starring Alec Guinness. In ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ (1949) an embittered aristocrat sets out to murder the eight heirs that stand between him and succession to the family title. Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) holds no love for the aristocratic family he counts as relations, the D’Ascoynes. The family cast his mother out when she decided to marry a ‘commoner’, Louis’s father, and on her death refuse to allow her to be buried in the family vault. An outraged Louis vows revenge and begins working his way into the trust of the family to provide him with the opportunity to bump off the male heirs (all played by Guinness) one by one. However, complications arise when he becomes romantically entangled with one of the widows of his victims, Edith D’Ascoyne (Valerie Hobson). Will Louis be able to stay the course and murder his way to a Dukedom? In ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’ (1951) Guinness stars as a mild-mannered bank clerk whose sudden compulsion to rob the bank he works for causes all manner of chaos. Henry Holland (Guinness) has been trusted with delivering gold bullion for 20 years and is considered a safe pair of hands by his employers. However, Henry harbours dreams of becoming rich and hatches a plan to steal the gold when he makes the acquaintance of the artist, Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway). The pair realise that if Alfred melts the stolen gold into miniature statues of the Eiffel Tower, it could be smuggled safely to France and sold on. However, things go awry when the gold statues become mixed in with a group of ordinary statues, leading to a frantic chase as Henry and Alfred try to recover the gold without their crime being detected. The film features a brief cameo from a young Audrey Hepburn. In ‘The Man in the White Suit’ (1951) eccentric Sidney Stratton (Guiness) is a laboratory cleaner in a textile factory, who invents a material that will neither wear out nor become dirty. Initially hailed as a great discovery, Sidney’s astonishing invention is suffocated by the management when they realise that if it never wears out, people will only ever have to purchase one suit of clothing.