The Ladykillers
The Ladykillers
4K ULTRA HD + Blu-ray
Kino Lorber
1955 / 91 min / 1.37:1 & 1.66:1
Starring Alec Guinness, Katie Johnson, Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers
Written by Alexander Mackendrick, William Rose
Photographed by Otto Heller
Directed by Alexander Mackendrick
British comedy has always depended on an understated quality, and nothing was as understated as their black comedies. From Kind Hearts and Coronets to In Bruges, England’s humor has struggled mightily against the powers of darkness and the laughs usually won out, but just barely. A looking glass version of Little Red Riding Hood, Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers is perhaps the crown jewel of Britain’s macabre farces; like Grimm’s duplicitous wolf it has a nasty bite, and once again, Grandma saves the day.
Katie Johnson plays Louisa Wilberforce, an adorable bundle of little old lady vibes who lives at the top of a cul de sac in King’s Cross—cottages and shop fronts to the south, and just behind her to the north, a bustling train station. Louisa rents the second floor of her home to the occasional lodger, but because of the thunderous locomotives, her lodgers rarely linger. Right now her only company is a trio of talkative parrots—the house is empty enough that she seeks comfort in the company of neighborhood merchants and at the local police station where she regales the superintendent (a typically benevolent Jack Warner) with her concerns about an imminent Martian invasion.
Mrs. Wilberforce’s rich fantasy life has made her a favorite with the coppers who furnish just the right amount of good cheer and small talk to lift her spirits. It’s a generally cozy life for the lonesome old lady until one day, when an especially crooked shadow appears at her doorstep. The shape belongs to Alec Guinness who plays a buck-toothed horror named Marcus—he claims to be a music professor in search of rehearsal space for his quintet, but in fact he plans to use Mrs. Wilberforce’s home to pull off his latest caper, a robbery that will take advantage of her noisy neighborhood, her home’s proximity to the bank, and Mrs. Wilberforce herself as a front for the stolen loot.
With such a villain living above her, the gentle lady is never far from danger and the hollow-eyed professor is just malevolent enough to inspire real fear. The film might seem like a gloss on Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux in which, through sheer dumb luck, Martha Raye escapes Verdoux’s every attempt on her life. But Louisa is no dummy, in spite of her looney fantasies, she’s only “mad north-northwest”; once she catches on to the professor’s gambit, there’s hell to pay but Mrs. Wilberforce is the angel who’s going to collect.
Marcus is attended by a crew of greedy thugs willing to disguise themselves as musicians even though no amount of makeup could distract us from this band’s true intentions—unless you’re a trusting soul like Louisa. There’s Herbert Lom as Louis Harvey, a sharp-dressed and lethal conman, Cecil Parker as Major Claude Courtney whose underhanded nature belies his title, Danny Green as a man-mountain with a soft spot for the landlady, and 30 year old Peter Sellers as Harry Robinson, one of the well-dressed delinquents of post-war Britain known as Teddy Boys (Sellers and Lom seem light years from Clouseau and Commissioner Dreyfus). They’re a bumbling, surly lot and are slow to understand that they’ve met their match in this tiny but formidable woman. Pretty soon they decide she knows too much to live.
The bodies pile up and so do the laughs but Mackendrick gives the distinct impression he’s not fooling around. Rarely has comedy seemed so ambiguous: imagine a Wile E. Coyote cartoon with a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack.
Even though raucous humor was his forte, Mackendrick had a deceptively subtle approach. He had an architectural method to his madness, always making sure to cast the movie’s setting as one of his characters; an island in Whiskey Galore, or the textile mill in The Man in the White Suit (the dark, glistening New York of Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success should get third billing under Lancaster and Curtis). Mackendrick keeps his cameraman (the Czech cinematographer Otto Heller) high above Louisa’s neighborhood giving us a God’s-eye view that is laid out so precisely, at times it resembles a miniature train set or children’s pop-up book—it only enhances the Grimm’s Fairy Tale atmosphere.
The Ladykillers was Mackendrick’s final film at Ealing, he sailed for America where, two years later, he directed Lancaster and Curtis in one of the most scathing films in Hollywood history, quite a debut for the transplanted Brit who had a clearer eye for American decadence than its own citizens. It was his last great film—the director of The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers wrapped his career with the misguided sex farce, Don’t Make Waves starring old pal Tony Curtis and a dazzling Sharon Tate.
Kino Lorber’s stateside release of The Ladykillers is dazzling too. Taken from StudioCanal’s 2020 restoration, both the 4K and regular Blu ray are a mix of both vibrant and muted colors. Both versions look exquisite but the 4K brings out detail that enhances Louisa’s world, like the delicate patterns in her wallpaper or the King’s Cross billboard advertising The Desperate Hours. Kino presents the film in two versions—the original 1.37:1 aspect ratio and a 1.66:1 option.
Other extras include a new audio commentary from film historians David Del Valle and Dan Marino, and a separate audio commentary by film historian Philip Kemp. Forever Ealing, is a documentary on the studio, and there are interviews with Allan Scott, Ronald Harwood, and Terence Davies to round out the package.
Here’s John Badham on The Ladykillers: