Despite being a British semi-comedy, this has nothing to do with the modern TV series of the same title. Nor does it connect with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Or A League of Ordinary Gentlemen, for that matter.
A former lieutenant colonel (Jack Hawkins) is sore about the honorable yet seemingly ungrateful dismissal he received from the British Army. He traces seven other ex-officers (one played by Richard Attenborough), each with a criminal past, and persuades them to join him in an armed bank job inspired by a book (not the John Boland book on which the film is based). Their military savvy is well suited to acquiring powerful equipment and acting with precision. Of course, given the era of cinema, it's no spoiler to say they still fail in the end.
OK, maybe I shouldn't have taken that for granted. U.K. studios were not beholden to the Hays Publication Code, and it shows slightly herein. I doubt a contemporary U.S. flick would get away with nudie magazine covers, for instance, or some of the coarser language.
The DVD comes with closed captioning by default—and no apparent way to turn it off. I think I know why: The dialog is rather difficult for Americans to understand. Not Kes difficult, but if I were merely listening, I'd miss portions of about one in five sentences. Characters also make a number of cultural references I didn't know, so I kept pausing to look them up.
The other particularly British thing about TLoG is that it reminds me of an Alec Guinness crime comedy. Sadly, it's no funnier; afterward, I had to check whether comedy was actually listed among the genres. In this case, I blame a dearth of exaggeration: Not much happens that's hard to believe, nor is there a rash of clumsiness. The snags in the scheme all amount to unexpected visitors, only two of whom really make a difference in whether the robbers succeed. About five moments came anywhere close to tickling me. Probably the funniest moments come in the base infiltration, which makes fun of the army; and the finale, involving a jolly old friend (Robert Coote) who has no idea what's going on.
Taken as a thriller, it's a little better. I was pretty eager to see first how the plan would progress and then how it would come apart, albeit with no doubt in my mind that such a sequence would happen. If you hope for violence, I'm afraid no one actually takes a bullet.
The result is better than the last heist flick I saw, but that's not saying much. I think I should just avoid old British comedies regardless of ratings.
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