The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), directed by Charles Crichton. Streaming at home, Saturday, May 13.

Here’s the thing: we hadn’t seen The Lavender Hill Mob in years and decided to watch it the other night. It’s fun–dry humor, witty, the story of well-meaning half-losers or outright losers, two men stuck in bland jobs working with two friendly villains in a silly heist. You know no one’s going to die or even get hurt and no one will get away with anything but, still, prison ain’t so bad in the Queen’s country. These fools are hoping to take millions of pounds of gold and turn it into Eiffel Tower statues and move the stuff in Europe. Meticulously planned by Henry Holland (Alec Guinness), paired with trinket maker Al Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), the story unfolds and it charms, and it makes you laugh. Audrey Hepburn is in it for just a second. It works, it’s fun, you watch it, the night’s over.

But I just can’t help but see these Ealing Studios movies, and be entertained by most of them (Man in the White Suit, The Maggie, Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, to name. but a few), and not have that nagging feeling–this is the best they could do?

It sure was. World War II was over and Britain was one of the victors. And yet, outside of Michael Powell’s movies and The Third Man, and the enormously popular James Bond fantasies, what does that sceptered isle have to show the world cinematically? France produced the New Wave, amazing movies by Varda, Godard, Truffaut, the stunning crime films of Melville, to name a very small few. Japan, one of the losers, sees Ozu and Kurosawa and Seijun Suzuki… again, to name a small number. Germany would take awhile, but Wenders, Fassbender and Herzog’s insane pictures are far more real and honest than the stuff came out of the UK. And let’s not talk about America–we probably produced a dozen better comedies every year than the UK did in forty years after the war ended.

I’m sorry, but The Lavender HIll Mob works for a pleasant evening, but it just doesn’t have the power of so many other countries’ films, and I think part of that is the very British sense of wishing they were still an empire and being unable to really criticize themselves. Some Like it Hot, to name but one, is both a riotous comedy and a fascinating critique of capitalism, gender, and sex. Maybe because America was at the top, its filmmakers could make charged, critical movies that at once entertained and provoked thought–like the former Brit Alfred Hitchcock, whose Strangers on a Train, from the same years as Lavender Hill, was better than anything released in England that year. Maybe even that decade.