The other night I went to the 'Gala Opening' of the Camden film festival, marked by a showing of the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers. The foam red carpet, fixed to the sticky linoleum floor of the Odeon with black gaffer tape, and a free glass or two or cheap plonk certainly gave me a glimpse of how celebrities live - and the place was peppered with them, from Trigger off Only Fools and Horses to Richard Bacon.

Before The Ladykillers, a predictable, but watchable and vaguely thought-provoking short film about homelessness and skag was aired. The director, who when taking questions from the audience afterwards seemed rather bemused as to why part of his M.A. was being exhibited, did an admirable job of retaining custody of his art in the face of assaults from those crass questioners who wanted to claim it for their own various pet causes (something which Camden borough is over-flowing with) - he just about managed to stumble back to his seat with the artistic integrity of his film intact.

And then to the main feature. Its quintessential 1950s Britishness (despite the screenwriter being an American) and the bright sunshine in which it is mostly shot, sit pleasantly at odds with the dark, cruel humour lurking at the centre of the film. In this strange lost world of post-war London, Alec Guinness's chaotically-teethed, madly-barneted professor rents a room from the charming but slightly senile Mrs Wilberforce, a widow living in a subsidence-ridden house near St Pancras station. He plans to execute a heist with the help of four associates (including a young Peter Sellers and an excellent Herbert Lom), using the unwitting old dear as a key component in the caper. Naturally, she gets wind of what's going on, and the rest of the film concentrates on the five crooks' attempts to work out how to deal with her. The film becomes more explicitly sinister towards the end, as Alec Guinness and Herbert Lom creep around in a twilight wasteland, hunting each other down through the swirling smoke of passing steam engines.

I don't revisit old films enough - The Ladykillers was a pleasure to watch, plagued only by the affected laughter of the idle trustifarians who had managed to drag their Evisu clad, frappachino-bloated frames from their minimalist West London / ShoHo pads northwards, in order to irritate other cinema-goers, no doubt before sloping off towards some ghastly gastro-pub to bark loudly at each other about their plans to make a cutting-edge film in sepia about neglected urban doorways on newly acquired state-of-the-art digital camcorders, thus proving to themselves that they work for a living. But I digress.

Perhaps feeling slightly insecure at the prospect of hob-nobbing with said style gurus, I decided to forgo the delights of the Gala drinks reception, and instead wandered home, clutching my complimentary goodie bag of organic snacks and a free pen.