WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. On Thursday, Nov. 9, the Clark Art Institute continues its series of British films honoring the birthplace of Sir Edwin Manton during its Manton Research Center's fiftieth anniversary. 

 

The Clark shows "The Lavender Hill Mob" at 6 pm in its auditorium, located in the Manton Research Center.

 

"The Lavender Hill Mob" might be the archetypal Ealing comedy. The film features everything the studio is famous for—loveable crooks, class conflict, London streets, avuncular bobbies, pratfalls, slapstick, tea, buns, and Alec Guinness—but with a Hitchcock-inspired thriller plot that makes it the most pacily enthralling of their features. Guinness and Stanley Holloway play the bumbling suburbanites whose plot to hijack a van full of gold bullion and smuggle it abroad disguised as Eiffel Tower paperweights leads to hysteria. (Run time: 1 hour, 21 minutes)

 

The event is free.