Cream of the cockney crop

Lord love a duck (and a cockney or two) ... Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway in The Lavender Hill Mob. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd

Like the perfect eccentric elderly relative you always wanted as a child (rather than your actual nan), it's always a pleasure to welcome back The Lavender Hill Mob. Ealing Studios' deathless heist caper is about to enjoy a 60th-anniversary re-release and will, as always, represent a slice of pure comic wonderment. But it's also a landmark in the history of the big-screen cockney, bringing with it a distinctive waft of fag ash and dog tracks.

The Lavender Hill MobProduction year: 1951Country: UKCert (UK): URuntime: 78 minsDirectors: Charles CrichtonCast: Alec Guiness, Alec Guinness, Sidney James, Stanley HollowayMore on this film

Not that it makes a song and dance about it. That's sort of the point. If the first part of the film's title is a sleight of hand (Battersea's grubby central thoroughfare never actually appearing on camera), the second is a gag in itself – the very idea of Alec Guinness's exquisitely straitlaced Henry Holland mixed up with anything so brutishly proletarian as a Mob a rib-tickler. That sheer incongruity gives the first half of the film its gleeful oomph, much of it drawn from the pair of gor-blimey chancers who lend Holland their criminal expertise – the harried Shorty Fisher, as played by Bethnal Green communist Alfie Bass, and the cocksure Lackery Wood, brought to life by a pre-Carry On Sid James, trading here as Sidney.

Naturally the film belongs to Guinness and his typically nimble turn as Holland – but his henchmen provide much of the underpinning. For one thing, in spite of their resemblance to Shakespearian fools, Bass and James are required to play straight men to their boss as much as shoot for the laughs themselves, in many ways a more testing assignment. And then – at this point I'll let off a noisy spoiler warning with flashing red lights to anyone who might want to heed it – there's the curious choices the pair have to make in the service of the plot, deciding after being shot at in the course of the robbery and spending endless sweaty hours melting down the bullion to sit out the scheme's finale and simply trust Holland to divvy out their share when he can. Now it's open to debate how much of that was glitchy plotting and how much a wry show of faith in middle-class fair play, but either way it's a telling trajectory – aggro, hard labour, no sign of the profits.

But then "Ealingland" was often a place where tradition co-existed with quiet subversion (witness Lavender Hill's various self-satisfied bankers and dozy coppers). And despite their uncertain fate, Shorty and Lackery did leave behind a legacy – the success of the film laying the ground for The Ladykillers, with another Guinness-led crew now featuring a young Peter Sellers, whose exaggerated north London vowels would in turn be re-deployed as the leading man of 60s comedies The Wrong Arm of the Law and Two Way Stretch, each a cavalcade of glottal stops and dropped aitches.

With Sellers having ascended to full-blown stardom, it wouldn't be long before the cockney didn't even have to make jokes to claim top billing. Tugboat captain's son Terence Stamp became a pin-up, but of course it was his flatmate Michael Caine who really cracked it – and if the sardonic Alfie was the single biggest breakthrough then it came with an umbilical connection to the past in the rumpled form of Alfie Bass, now well into middle age and cast as the luckless Harry Clamacraft, whose hospital friendship with Caine's lothario was repaid by being cuckolded by him.

From there, of course, the cockney would illuminate many of British cinema's finest moments – chief among them the films of Bob Hoskins and Ray Winstone. Yet it's been a long old time since The Long Good Friday and Nil By Mouth, with each man's image having softened down the years into avuncular cuddliness (they're due to appear on screen together next year as two of the dwarves in a glitzy revamp of Snow White, about which I'm saying nothing more). And now, 60 years on from Lackery and Shorty, I'm not sure we haven't slipped a little way back in time. For Michael Caine, recent years have found his most visible part that of a butler in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, while the highest profile modern example of the form is Danny Dyer – a not untalented actor whose woeful career choices mean he now, too, has a recurring role as the world's softest target for people who would in a different time have been called his betters. The more things change, eh? Lord love a duck indeed.

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