The Ladykillers
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| The Ladykillers | |
|---|---|
 original film poster |
|
| Directed by | Alexander Mackendrick |
| Produced by | Seth Holt associate producer Michael Balcon producer (uncredited) |
| Written by | William Rose |
| Starring | Alec Guiness Cecil Parker Herbert Lom Peter Sellers Danny Green Jack Warner Katie Johnson |
| Music by | Tristram Cary |
| Cinematography | Otto Heller |
| Editing by | Jack Harris |
| Distributed by | Continental Distributing Inc. |
| Release date(s) | 1955 |
| Running time | 97 min. |
| Country | U.K. |
| Language | English |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
- This article is about the 1955 original. For the 2004 remake, see The Ladykillers (2004 film).
The Ladykillers is a 1955 British film. It is one of a series of classic post-war Ealing Studios comedies. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, it stars Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers, Danny Green, Jack Warner and Katie Johnson.
American William Rose wrote the screenplay, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and won the Bafta Award for Best British Screenplay. He claimed to have dreamt the entire movie and merely had to remember the details when he awoke.
In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted The Ladykillers the 36th greatest comedy film of all time.
[edit] Synopsis
A comically unpleasant criminal, Professor Marcus (Guinness), rents a room in the rundown King's Cross house of a bewilderingly innocent old lady, Mrs. "Lopsided" Wilberforce (Johnson) - who lives with her parrots. The Professor and his gang of curious characters plot a sophisticated armoured car robbery, while convincing Mrs Wilberforce, by playing records, that they are in fact musicians using the room for rehearsal space.
After the successful theft, the real conflict of the movie begins. Mrs. Wilberforce finds out what her tenants have done and foolishly tells Marcus she is going to report them to the police. Members of the gang are split on the decision to murder her; some of the more tender-hearted criminals cannot bring themselves to follow through with the plan. Eventually they double-cross each other, under the cover of the noisy East Coast Main Line trains passing nearby, while the marvelously oblivious Mrs. Wilberforce remains unharmed. In the end, the gang members kill each other, and Mrs. Wilberforce ends up with the money. The police refuse to believe her story about the robbery, and jokingly tell her to keep the money as it was insured. Ironically, the insurance was Professor Marcus's justification for the theft.
[edit] Trivia
- The Guinness role was originally written for character actor Alastair Sim.
- The piece which is played repeatedly to deceive Mrs. Wilberforce is Boccherini's Minuet (3rd movement) from String Quintet in E, Op.11 No.5.
- Frankie Howerd has a cameo role as an agitated market fruit seller along with Kenneth Connor as a taxi driver. A young Stratford Johns (Charlie Barlow from Z-Cars) plays the driver of the lorry that gets robbed.
- A radio adaptation of the film was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on January 13, 1996.
- It is understood that some of the shots depicting corpses and other items dropping into goods trains were actually filmed at the southern portal of Copenhagen Tunnels to the north of King's Cross Station, anecdotally disrupting railway operations on the day.
