I caught this listed on TCM, mostly because of it’s proximity in the listings to ??The Ladykillers??. I’ve not finished it yet, but it occurred to me to look it up on “IMDb”:http://imdb.com/, which led me to look at some of the external reviews, which led me to “this”:http://decentfilms.com/reviews/lavenderhillmob.html review.
Now I really have no complaint about an organization with a particular bent doing its own film reviews–as long as they don’t mind me mocking them if I feel it to be necessary. And, in fact, the review is actually pretty reasonable, even if it does seem to contain some mild moralizing.
(Well, I might mock their list of things-that-might-offend. Where, say, HBO tells you, “Violence; Nudity”, they tell you “Brief comic drunkenness; comic depiction of grand larceny.” It’s really the second that makes me want to laugh.)
No, what mildly surprises and maybe a little confuses me is the notation that this film is:
bq. One of the 15 films listed in the category “Art” on the Vatican film list. A National Catholic Register “Video/DVD Picks” film.
This is, ultimately a film that centers around a crime and its perpetrators and it’s on the Vatican film list?
Weird.
Incidentally, I am guessing this is one of the movies that led Robert Heinlein to write, in ??Double Star?? (1956):
bq. I needed a face as commonplace, as impossible to remember as the true face of the immortal Alec Guinness.
Well, OK, maybe that was actually about ??Kind Hearts and Coronets??, wherein Alec Guiness plays as many characters as there are other actors.
