The Ladykillers ***** (1955, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, Katie Johnson, Herbert Lom, Danny Green, Jack Warner, Frankie Howerd, Philip Stainton) – Classic Movie Review 36

Ealing Studios’ 1955 black comedy crime film delight The Ladykillers is a deliciously funny film throughout, with Alec Guinness leading a cast to die for. Bafta-winning writer William Rose dreamed the entire film.

Packed with memorable characters and brilliant performances, Ealing Studios’ 1955 black comedy delight The Ladykillers is deliciously funny throughout, enthusiastically written by William Rose and eagerly directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Briskly, nimbly and vigorously made in a most captivatingly lively manner, it is the best of the best.

Like an English tea with strawberries and cream, it all should seem ultra-cosy and nice, but, with its cynical, unsettling air of menace, it never is. Katie Johnson, who made her first film in 1932, finally became a star at the age of 76 0r 77 as the sweet little old London landlady Mrs Wilberforce who unwittingly takes in a little band of crooks as lodgers.

In American-born William Rose’s scintillating, very British vintage story, Mrs Wilberforce soon rumbles, and then puts a stop to, the little plans of her new creepy, toothy lodger Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) and his comic gang of inept villains, Harry, Claude, Louis and One-Round (Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Danny Green).

The gang, pretending to be a string quintet practising their music and playing Boccherini, is planning a £60,000 great train robbery and is hiding out at Johnson’s down-at-heel boarding house at a then very run-down King’s Cross, London. They trick Mrs Wilberforce into picking up the loot, but later she finds it, and they reluctantly decide they have to kill her. There’s just one snag: who’s going to do it? Instead they start bumping each other off.

The clever, witty script, which came to writer Rose intact in a dream, is seemingly cosily British but is topped up with a touch of real venom that provides the film’s true, hard-hearted character. It proved to be the last great Ealing comedy, performed up to the max by the highly distinguished cast of comic actors, working with the utmost finesse, delicacy and practised ease.

Rose recalled that he dreamed the entire film one uniquely profitable, creative night and merely had to remember and write down all the details when he was awake.

Cinematographer Otto Heller’s Technicolor filming on now largely vanished King’s Cross locations adds immeasurably to the atmosphere and pleasure the film brings.

Tristam Cary’s score is a little gem and that music you hear played is Luigi Boccherini’s Minuet from Quintet in E major, Opus 11 No 5.

A delicious movie to treasure and see every time it pops up on TV, this British national monument should have a Grade One listed preservation order slapped on it. Only one other film has achieved this perfect mix of gentility, charm and gleefully cynical black comedy: Arsenic and Old Lace.

Katie Johnson, who offered to pay her own insurance to secure the role of Mrs Wilberforce, won a BAFTA award for Best British Actress, going on to just one more part in How to Murder a Rich Uncle.

Producer Michael Balcon rejected Mackendrick’s choice of Katie Johnson thinking she might be too frail and cast a younger actress who ironically died before filming began. So Katie Johnson was cast, but she already 76, and Mackendrick asked Balcon for her name to be billed prominently above the title in case it might be her last movie. She died two years later.

Having said that, look at the original film poster by Reginald Mount. The five male stars get billing prominently above the title with cartoon drawing pics, and she gets billing way below the title after Jack Warner and Frankie Howerd, with no cartoon picture.

Watch out for appearances by Brit luminaries of the day like Jack Warner (the police superintendent), Frankie Howerd (the barrow boy), Philip Stainton (the police station sergeant), Kenneth Connor (the taxi driver), Stratford Johns, Harold Goodwin, Sam Kydd and Arthur Mullard.

Alec Guinness, acting with spectacular false teeth, based his performance on fellow actor Alastair Sim, for whom the part was originally intended, and the waspish drama critic Kenneth Tynan, who had probably given him a bad review one time or another. Actually Guinness had an axe to grind there with a couple of specific things. Tynan had written a detailed printed study on him and been an assistant on an unsuccessful 1951 Festival of Britain production of Hamlet starring Guinness.

It won totally deserved BAFTA British Film Awards for Best British Actress and Best British Screenplay, but shamefully it missed out on both Best Film from any Source (nominated) and Best British Film (nominated), and there were no Academy Award wins and only the one Oscar nomination for the screenplay.

The Ladykillers was poorly remade and disastrously Americanised in 2004 as the charmless The Ladykillers by the misguided Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. It is their worst film and arguably Tom Hanks’s too.  The setting is moved to Saucier, Mississippi, home of a riverboat casino.

Herbert Lom died in his sleep at his home in Camden Town, London, on September 27 2012, aged 95. Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru was born in Prague on (11 September 1917. On the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany, Poland and Hungary in 1938–39, Lom immigrated to Britain in 1939.

Katie Johnson with (left to right) Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Alec Guinness and Danny Green.

The cast are Alec Guinness as Professor Marcus, Cecil Parker as Major Claude Courtney, Herbert Lom as Louis Harvey, Peter Sellers as Harry Robinson, Danny Green as ‘One-Round’ Lawson, Jack Warner as the police superintendent, Katie Johnson as Mrs Louisa Wilberforce, Philip Stainton as the police station sergeant, Frankie Howerd as the barrow boy, Kenneth Connor as the taxi driver, Lucy Griffiths as Miss Pringle, Harold Goodwin as the parcels clerk, Stratford Johns as a security guard, Sam Kydd and Arthur Mullard.

Sellers and Lom appeared together in five of The Pink Panther films, beginning with the second in the series, A Shot in the Dark (1964). Lom played the beleaguered Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus in seven Pink Panther films. Sellers and Guinness appeared together in Murder By Death (1976).

It is not Sellers’s first film but it is his first major film role. He said it was: ‘The first real film I made. I can remember all of that very well. I used to watch Alec Guinness, who is an absolute idol of mine, do everything, his rehearsals, his scenes, everything. It was fascinating. Not that I could hope to be as good as Guinness. But he is my ideal, and my idol.’

The Ladykillers is directed by Alexander Mackendrick, runs 91 minutes, is made by Ealing Studios, is distributed by The Rank Organisation, is written by William Rose, is shot in Technicolor by Otto Heller, is produced by Michael Balcon, and is scored by Tristram Cary.

Release date: 8 December 1955 (UK).

Much of the filming is at King’s Cross and St Pancras, London. But much of the film is at made with great loving care in the studio at Ealing Studios, Ealing, West London.

The fragrant, down-at-heel Fifties London locations combine as an extra star character in the movie: Mrs Wilberforce’s house is in Frederica Street, Caledonian Road, Holloway, London. The view down the street from Mrs. Wilberforce’s house is Argyle Street, St. Pancras, London. the scene of the robbery is at Cheney Road, St. Pancras, London. The gang gathering before the heist and the phone booth scene are at Vernon Square, London.

It was adapted as a play by Graham Linehan, premiering at the Liverpool Playhouse in November 2011 before transferring to the Gielgud Theatre in London with Peter Capaldi as Professor Marcus. It was revived at the London Vaudeville Theatre in 2013 with a new cast and toured the UK and Ireland.

The top 20 British heist movies.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 36

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