The great charm of the Ealing Comedies (of which this, I suggest, is the most enduringly popular) is that they were insular without being parochial. The story of a meek, middle-aged bank messenger (Alec Guinness, who plans and pulls off a £3,000,000 bullion robbery, is constructed as to be essentially English. Of course, it could be transposed to New York, Paris or any other city you care to name, but it would lose a lot in the translation (check out the remake of that other Ealing classic, The Ladykillers, with Tom Hanks, and you'll see what I mean). Somehow it needs London and the particular characters assembled in 'the mob': Guinness's archetypal bank clerk, Stanley Holloway's genteel second in command, Sidney James's and Alfie Bass's half-smart Cockney wide boys - their direct equivalents are not to be found anywhere else.

And yet, having admitted the insularity, one must also acknowledge the universality of the tale. It's the little man's, Everyman's, dream of how to get rich quick, the perfect crime in which nobody is hurt and, in a way, nobody is the loser except, alas, the mob themselves. The cinema morality of the time, which insisted sternly that crime must not seen to pay, gave the film its bitter-sweet ending. It's a neat enough pay-off but it's not the ending the audience wants, for by the time it arrives we know these people so well and like them so much that we are desperate for them to get away with it. If the movie was made today, they would and we would like them no less for their triumph than we did for their failure. After all, consider another crime caper, A Fish Called Wanda, which the same director, Charles Crichton) made thirty-seven years later. In this John Cleese and Jamie Lee Curtis fly off happily with their ill-gotten loot - and our complete approval - to much the same part of South America from which Guinness was returned in handcuffs.

Incidentally, in The Lavender Hill Mob's early South American scenes you may recognise a little-known starlet named Audrey Hepburn. I wonder whatever became of her?