The League of Gentlemen is a 1960 British heist action comedy film directed by Basil Dearden and starring Jack Hawkins, Nigel Patrick, Roger Livesey and Richard Attenborough.

When Hyde asks their opinion of the novel, which is about a robbery, the men show little enthusiasm for it, but their interest is piqued when he reveals his knowledge of the misdeeds that led each man to leave or be kicked out of the military.

Although he has no criminal record himself, Hyde holds a grudge for being made redundant by the army after 25 years of service and intends to rob a bank using the skills of the gathered men, each of whom is to get an equal share of £100,000 or more.

After agreeing to Hyde's plan, they move into his house, where they live like a military unit, complete with a regimen of duties and discipline in the form of monetary fines.

Hyde reveals that he has spent the past year collecting details about the regular delivery of approximately a million pounds in used banknotes to a City of London bank.

Using smoke bombs, Sterling submachine guns, and radio jamming equipment, the gang raids a bank near St Paul's, seizes the money, and escapes.

Allied Film Makers was a short-lived production company founded by Dearden; actors Hawkins, Forbes, and Attenborough; and producer Michael Relph.

Each of the Gentlemen is introduced by a little establishing scene, after which the script fails to develop their idiosyncracies and, in fact, weakens its own possibilities by making them all basically shady characters.

Bryan Forbes (as in his script for The Angry Silence (1960)) brings a lively surface edge to the dialogue, but tends to overdo the slick, ripe repartee as well as imposing on his characters a variety of fashionable perversions.

As a study of a certain strata of society, then, the film lacks a strong centre and a firm point of view – one is never quite sure how seriously the parody of the officer code is intended, especially in the ambiguous, obligatorily moral ending.

The players, on the other hand, are often forced by the script's limitations to fall back on familiar mannerisms – Jack Hawkins is altogether too smooth and heavy and Nigel Patrick's oily bounder brings no revelation.

Roger Livesey has some dry moments as a spurious officer doing the rounds whilst Robert Coote's drunken intervention enlivens the somewhat anti-climactic climax.