The Lavender Hill Mob is a 1951 British comedy film from Ealing Studios, written by T. E. B. Clarke, directed by Charles Crichton, starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway and featuring Sid James and Alfie Bass.

[4] Henry Holland lives the life of luxury in Rio de Janeiro, and spends an evening dining out with a British visitor.

When the clerk discovers he is due to be transferred to another bank department, the pair put their plan into immediate action, recruiting the aid of petty thieves Lackery Wood and Shorty Fisher.

As his associates melt down the gold bullion and recast it as Eiffel Tower paperweights to be exported abroad, Holland gives false statements and misleading clues to the police, led by Inspector Farrow.

The group soon toast to their success, despite Wood and Fisher being unable or unwilling to travel to Paris to collect their share in person, entrusting the other two to provide it.

A confusing pursuit begins across London, as Holland uses the car's radio to feed false, misleading information to the officers pursuing the pair.

[6] Clarke is said to have come up with the idea of a clerk robbing his own bank while doing research for the film Pool of London (1951), a crime thriller surrounding a jewel theft.

The scene where Holland and Pendlebury run down the Eiffel Tower's spiral staircase and become increasingly dizzy and erratic, as does the camera work, presages James Stewart's condition in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, made seven years later.

[11][12] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave the film a positive review, writing "Charles Crichton has directed the whole thing with a touch of polite and gentile mockery applied to wholehearted farce: that Mr. Guinness and Mr. Holloway are deliciously adroit in their roles.

The website's consensus reads: "Fiendishly funny and clever, The Lavender Hill Mob is a top hat Ealing Studios effort.

A stage adaptation of the film written by Phil Porter and directed by Jeremy Sams opened in October 2022 at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham before touring the UK, starring Miles Jupp as Henry Holland and Justin Edwards as Alfred Pendlebury.