The Lavender Hill Mob (1951, UK)

In Charles Crichton's Ealing Studios' caper comedy about the pursuit of English schoolgirls to retrieve six golden miniature Eiffel Towers:

• the opening sequence of prim and timid bank clerk Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) dining in a fancy restaurant in Rio de Janiero next to a pipe-smoking British gentleman, when he met Chiquita (Audrey Hepburn in her screen debut, with a very short walk-on role) and gave her money for a birthday present

Henry Holland Dining in Rio Restaurant

• Holland's start of a flashback - expressing pleasure at having had a superb year, and thinking back to when he worked in a London bank and had 20 years of service in the transport of gold bullion: ("One superb year. Just when I was beginning to believe I'd never achieve it. For 20 years, I've dreamed of a life like this. For 19 of those years, fate denied me the one contact essential to the success of all my plans. Still, I never quite lost sight of the goal, inaccessible as it often seemed to me when I was merely a, merely a non-entity. Among all those thousands who flock every morning into the city. Most men who long to be rich know inwardly that they will never achieve their ambition. But I was in the unique position of having a fortune literally within my grasp. For it was my job to supervise the deliveries of bullion from the gold refinery to the bank")
• his continuing flashback, as he mused in voice-over about his small paycheck: ("Many a rascal would have risked his all for half a million, not realizing that gold, in the form of bullion, is useless without a method of smuggling it abroad. To find that method was my last remaining problem...Meanwhile, I gave the bank their gold....I was a potential millionaire, yet I had to be satisfied with eight pounds, fifteen shillings, less deductions. A weekly reminder that the years were passing, and my problem still unsolved. Until my ship came home, I was obliged to live at the Balmoral private hotel in Lavender Hill")
• and then, his solution to commit the "perfect" crime - he met up with his potential cohort-in-crime Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), an artist in his Balmoral-Lavender Hill boarding house; Alfred had a foundry that could convert the gold into souvenir Eiffel Tower paperweights to be exported (smuggled) out of the country without detection
• their recruitment of two other petty crooks to aid in the robbery: Lackery Wood (Sidney James) and Shorty Fisher (Alfie Bass)
• the scene of Holland and Pendlebury realizing that a souvenir shopkeeper at a Parisian kiosk (on the upper level of the Eiffel Tower) had sold six of the gold-converted Eiffel Tower statues from a crate specially-marked R that she wasn't supposed to open; Holland rushed to the elevator to watch as a group of British schoolgirls, who had accidentally bought six of the statues, descended in the Tower elevator, and in a riotous sequence, they chased after them down a dizzying, winding circular staircase
• the zany wild goose chase sequences from Paris to London after the British schoolgirls - and after the bullion robbers (including a crazy and confused police pursuit in squad cars as Holland broadcast false directional reports from a stolen police car)
• the concluding surprise revelation: Holland had escaped to Rio de Janeiro: ("I came straight on to Rio de Janeiro - 'Gay spritely land of mirth and social ease'") with the six Eiffel Tower statues worth 25,000 pounds: ("Enough to keep me for one year in the style to which I was, ah, unaccustomed"), but then as he left the restaurant, it was revealed that his left hand was handcuffed during the telling of his entire flashbacked story to his dining partner