Steineded How sad is this?

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

SimonJack "The League of Gentlemen" is based on a 1958 novel of the same title by English author John Boland. This film has a stellar cast of leading and great British actors of the mid-to-late 20th century. It was a smash hit in England and played well around the world, including the U.S. Its success inspired the comic series, "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," which itself, led to a 2003 film by the same name. That film, along the lines of the super action heroes genre starred Sean Connery, but it had mixed success and failures at national box offices. The movie is superb, with excellent performances by all. Jack Hawkins plays Lt. Col. Norman Hyde who is a bitter ex-soldier who wants to get even with the government for declaring him surplus and retiring him early from the British Army. But, he read a book about a perfect robbery. So, he spends his last days in the service pouring through records to find the perfect miscreant officers to help him pull off a major bank heist. The movie opens with Hyde hosting the gang to a lavish dinner. They don't know one another. Hyde invited them each with half a 5-pound note and the promise to give the other half on their meeting. The story develops from there. There is some excellent acting in this film by British standouts Hawkins and others. Nigel Patrick is Major Peter Race, Roger Livesey is Captain Mycroft (aka, "Padre"), Richard Attenborough is Lt. Edward Lexy and Bryan Forbes is Captain Martin Porthill. Forbes also wrote the screenplay for the film. I checked this review as a spoiler for the following criticism. How could the London Police and Scotland Yard solve this case and arrest the gang in just 12 hours? I'm not against their capture instead of getting away. But getting caught the same day the robbery took place? This is a heist that was perfectly planned. As good as Scotland Yard and the London City Police may be, the story asks the audience to believe that they could solve the crime and apprehend the crooks in just 12 hours. That's far more unbelievable than the fact of the crime itself. How did the police crack the case? A young boy outside the bank had a habit of writing down vehicle license plate numbers. He wrote down the number on the truck. Truck licenses differ from those of cars. And the police just happened to come across the boy. A constable, many days earlier, saw the gang working out of the warehouse that Hyde had acquired. He didn't see what they were doing through the open bay door. But the inspector later said that the constable wrote down the license numbers of the truck he saw, and of a car outside. The car was Hyde's. Remember that this takes place in 1960. There were no computers to store police records and data then. Yet, in less than 12 hours the police found the small boy who had written down license numbers. They found the license of the truck he had written down. It had a car license plate, so obviously it was a robbery vehicle. Then, they checked all the notes of all the constables of all the days and weeks before that time. What would lead them to do that? London was a city of 8,000,000 people. How many thousands of constables would have walked beats and made notes in all that time? Why would they have a clue to the bank robbery? Surely, every day any number - perhaps hundreds of constables write down things they think are suspicious. So then, having found the same license number of the truck, they looked up the license number of autos the constable noted in the vicinity and found that of Lt. Col. Hyde's car. And with that, they make the connection that Hyde is the leader of the gang that just robbed the bank. So, they surround his home where they know they will capture the gang. And all of this in less than 12 hours. For a realistic account of a superb police effort to solve a crime, I recommend the movie, "Patriot's Day." Made just three years after the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon, that film chronicles the tremendous efforts to find the terrorists. The Boston police, neighboring police, and FBI pulled out all stops. Aiding them in this were several high tech things. They had computers that could check records and data. Cameras on the street helped them spot the likely suspects planting the bombs. They traced cell phones of school friends of the youngest terrorist. Yet, with that superb police work, with much sophisticated equipment, in a city and area only a third the population and size of London in 1960, it still took four days to capture the culprits. The unbelievable time for solving the crime aside, this is a very enjoyable film. Here are some favorite lines. For more, see the Quotes section under this IMDb Web age of the movie. Lt. Col. Hyde, "Enjoy your meal, gentlemen. You know the old saying, 'The rich man eats when you will, a poor man when you can.'" Lt. Col. Hyde, "Oh, one can't bother cooking for oneself."Major Race, "Well, remember rule two, old darling. Never get ahead of the mob. They're liable to shoot you in the ass.Lt. Col. Hyde, "And you said you weren't nasty." Major Race, "Oh, I'm not. It's just the way my mind works sometimes You know, in vicious circles." Lt. Col. Hyde, "Your presence here restores my basic disbelief in the goodness of human nature."

andeven Great film. One I'd take to the desert island. It's not only entertaining, it also provides a fascinating glimpse of its era.However I do have a few niggles, some of which constitute definite spoilers so if you haven't seen the film and don't wish to note them, please read no further.At the lunch early in the film Hyde accuses all the assembled Gentlemen of being crooks "of one sort or another". While most of them had certainly been up to no good during their time in the army and been punished accordingly the word "crooks" is hardly appropriate in their later civilian lives. Mycroft certainly and possibly Race and Lexy but Weaver and Porthill seem to be more or less blameless, if in the latter case a bit disreputable, and Rutland-Smith's only crime anywhere seems to have been to have run up some "embarrassing mess bills". Stevens' implied indulgence in homosexual acts, while illegal at the time the film was made, would hardly justify his being labelled a crook even then. I feel that some more convincing criminality could have been devised - perhaps beating up Hyde en masse after he had gone round the table insulting each in turn! To my mind the only real weakness in the film is the way they were caught. There are two reasons for this, one regarding plot and the other structure. Firstly, if I am correct, they were rumbled because the policeman who visited their warehouse recorded, for some unexplained reason, the number of Hyde's car, which the latter later used in the robbery. Its number was then noted by the small boy near the crime scene. Would such a meticulous planner as Hyde really have committed such a faux pas? The stolen car, after all, had its number changed so why not his? Or, preferably, would it not have been better - indeed obvious - not to have used his car at all? Secondly the sudden appearance of the boy, taking car numbers, jarred.It clearly had some relevance, otherwise there was no need to include it, and it indicated fairly clearly that it would somehow lead to the plan's ultimate failure.Something that has always worried me and which has doubtless occurred in real life (certainly in the GTR of 1963) but which the film does not address was the fact that the taking of huge numbers of used notes inevitably led to the group taking their share of the loot in that form. We were not told how much was eventually seized but on the basis of the estimated £million divided by eight it would be £125K each. Nowadays, depending on which inflation index one uses, that would need to be, say, around £2.5 million and would need rather more than one suitcase each (see my later comment on a remake) but even the 1960 amount of physical cash would have posed difficult logistical problems for the robbers. Where to store it in the meantime and then how to deal with it, for instance. Even allowing for client confidentiality, banks and other financial institutions would, knowing that a huge robbery had taken place, be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at sudden appearances of large sums in previously threadbare or non-existent accounts. Few would mind the problem but it would need to be solved.Others have criticised the film for not allowing the crime to succeed though most accept that the moral climate at the time would not have permitted it. I think that that is true but I also think that it was not the only reason. If the film had stopped at the post-heist party with "Oh well, thanks for everything, gentlemen, enjoy the money" THE END, it would hardly have met the need for a strong ending. Really they had to be caught if only for dramatic effect.Finally, I can accept Colonel Hyde grubbing around in the sewers surrounding the bank (sadly, that manhole cover has gone now) in order to check on the subterranean situation but would he really have done so in evening dress and with his Rolls parked over the road advertising his presence? Oh, wait, though. He was very careless with his car numbers, wasn't he? Finally finally! I note the tediously inevitable call for a remake. For heaven's sake why? TLOG ain't perfect but what film is? PLEASE think of that ghastly remake of The Ladykillers and leave well alone.

dbborroughs This is a caper film that just kind of fell flat for me.The premise is that a forced to retire army officer gets together a bunch of disgraced army men to rob a bank. We watch as the plan is hatched, and executed in stages before the big job itself.While I like the idea of the film it just didn't work for me.It's much too talky so that it's kind of dull in an all talk no action sort of way. The real problem is the direction which is much too artificially staged. It's directed so everyone is always in a line up or standing so they are facing the camera. It weird and unnatural. It takes the edge off everything.It really fell flat for me and I ended up zipping through the last half hour because I had stopped caring

loza-1 A pretty believable bunch of characters come together at the invitation of their old regimental colonel to preform a daring blank raid he once read in a novel.Some pretty good performances by Hawkins, Bird, Kieron Moore, etc. Some pretty memorable scenes too: the inside of the police van at the end. The meeting in the hall with the ballet rehearsals going on upstairs, the grease-coated frying pan in Jack Hawkins's house.The sudden introduction of the affable silly ass character at the end is a stroke of genius.Watch out for Oliver Reed as the camp ballet dancer. He might have been unknown at the time; he might have only had one line: but he was still a STAR!