The League of Gentlemen (1960)

The League of Gentlemen is a great crime caper. It's filled with excellent characters and wonderful acting, and I loved every second of this. Basil Dearden is such a good director, and I continue to be impressed with his work. Of course because it is 1960, the gang can't get away with their heist, and that's always the main disappointment of these heist films, but dammit I do love a good heist film, and The League of Gentlemen is an excellent one.

I'm not adding The League of Gentlemen to be my Cinema Q list, although a case could certainly be made for it. There is a lot of homoeroticism among the criminals – especially Kieron Moore's character, who is some kind of a coach at a men's gymnasium and is massaging a young man played by Dinsdale Landen when we first meet him. Then there is Roger Livesey's character who we learn has been convicted of Gross Indecency.

My personal favorite queer moment in the movie is when the league meets for the second time all together to discuss their plan. They meet at a kind of community theatre hall and two very effeminate gay men complain that the men in the league (who are pretending to be reading a play) are intruding on their rehearsal space. It's a completely unnecessary little sequence, and I loved it. I probably shouldn't make too much of these small moments of queerness, but Basil Dearden's next movie would be the crime thriller Victim, which is a shockingly good film about a gay man trying to cover his tracks and a blackmail ring who is threatening to out him.

Both The League of Gentlemen and Victim are available via Criterion.