Original subtitles

(TRAIN WHISTLES, CHUGS)

(SWEET MUSIC)

MAN: Good morning. Good morning.

Good morning, ma'am. Good morning.

Good morning, Mrs Wilberforce. Good morning, Mr Brown.

Good morning, madam. Good morning.

Much has altered over the years,

but this labyrinth of streets around the Kings Cross area

is the setting for one of the greatest comedies ever made.

A heist movie, a murder story,

a fairy tale steeped in London soot.

A parable of Britishness, and a comedy of manners

in which a gang of thieves TRIES to kill a little old lady.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

What would you say made

The Ladykillers such a timeless comedy?

Because it was so different in turn to any other British film

I've ever seen, I think.

It was a comedy, but it had a dark side to it.

And the amazing thing is

there's so many different interpretations of it.

Mackendrick said once

that if it had not been a comedy,

if he'd made it straight,

it would've been censored out of all existence.

He could never have made it.

So it was a comedy, but it was a dark comedy.

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

IAN: The Ladykillers remains one of the greatest British movies ever made

because it has not lost its sting.

The digs that Rose-Mackendrick made in the '50s

are still relevant today.

The dark surrealism of the film can be found in Monty Python.

The social satire is nearly every British sitcom since.

Of course, comedy, good comedy, is a serious business.

('MINUETTO' BY BOCCHERINI PLAYS)

How about that.

Eh?

How about that.

(SWEET MUSIC)

NARRATOR: London is a city of secret places

of unexpected country lanes and hidden gardens.

The Prime Minister lives like a professional man

in a plain house on the side of a narrow cul-de-sac.

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

(BIRDS SQUAWKING)

All right. All right.

(SQUAWKS) All right, my dear.

I haven't been gone so very long, have I?

Oh darling, water. Oh.

(MUSIC INTENSIFIES) (LOUD SQUAWKING)

(NOSTALGIC MUSIC)

(MUSIC BECOMES OMINOUS)

It was here on Argyle Street,

where Alec Guinness's grotesque Professor Marcus takes a room,

the perfect location from which to spring

the perfect plan to rob the mail train.

In that famous shot in which we first meet him

at the front door, we see St Pancras station framed behind him.

(TENSE MUSIC)

Mrs Wilberforce? Yes.

I understand you have rooms to let.

Oh, the rooms? Yes. Won't you come in, please?Thank you.

As the '50s arrived,

a victorious but exhausted post-war Britain

was getting back on its feet, asking itself, what comes next?

Cinema was still a national preoccupation.

Amid austerity and rationing,

the British public were hungry

for films that reflected the changing times

and they were desperate for laughter.

(BELLS CHIMING)PRESENTER: Already Piccadilly is very much as it was before the war.

The British haven't yet forgotten

when the lights went out for six long years.

(GONG CLANGS)

(AIR RAID SIRENS WAIL)

All was darkness then,

except for light slightly.

The illumination of those years destroyed

more than the historic buildings and human lives.

Accumulated wealth was spent

and the foreign investments of centuries sold to purchase victory.

When victory came at last, Britain was flat.

(MELANCHOLY MUSIC)

In Britain in the 1950s,

the country was getting over

the worst aspects of the war.

So, rationing had started to end.

You were starting to see modernisation creep in.

Interestingly, this film, The Ladykillers,

is shot in the steam age, but in 1955, when it was released,

diesel trains began to replace steam trains.

So we're on the very verge of modernisation,

moving into the 20th century as a country.

The social makeup of London in the 1950s

was fairly tumultuous.

The people were coming out of the shadow of war.

They were also trying to cope with continuing austerity,

and there were a tremendous amount of problems,

social problems on the streets.

And yet, there was a sense that

we had won the war and were unravelling in the peace.

Now, London had been bombed to pieces.

There were gaping holes in the buildings,

in the infrastructure, in the roads

and it was being rebuilt but piecemeal,

a little bit at a time. The country was broke,

it was borrowing money to get by

and so everything that was happening was happening where it could.

There's constant bomb sites which people were taking advantage of.

There was all sorts of dodgy business was possible,

because there was so much money changing hands in odd ways.

There were still the remnants of the black market.

There were still gangsters operating in Soho.

It was a very mixed up, messed up time,

but that was also a time of enormous potential.

A time when someone with a good idea

or an imaginative approach

or, as this film shows,

a cunning semi-legal, if not entirely illegal enterprise,

could probably slip through the gaps in society and make their way.

(INTRIGUING MUSIC)

Picture the scene: Kings Cross in 1955.

The scars of the war are still evident,

but the times are changing.

Advertising hoardings, motor cars,

a sense of possibility hangs in the polluted air.

London is bustling into the future

by fair means or otherwise.

So Ealing Studios' properly, the way that we see it,

sort of golden age in the 1940s and 1950s,

really happens after Michael Balcon

who was an early mogul, who helped Hitchcock

get some of his films off the ground in the 1930s, came along.

And Ealing Studios, as we know it,

happened just around the beginning of the Second World War.

And throughout the second World War, Balcon was very interested

in the idea that film should have some social responsibility,

and he was interested in expanding what kind of things could be done.

And so he started to make films

that were concerned with war propaganda,

things like Went the Day Well in 1943.

And by the late 1940s, had sort of perfected

a very British, very sort of genteel

style and approach, and also a really nice way of working,

which included contracting most of its players out.

So by 1949, he had Alec Guinness,

he had the people that you associate with the Ealing comedy.

The films are an inspired reflection

of a jaunty, disrespectful side to the British character.

The plucky island that has stood up to Hitler,

a spirited non-conformism that had hibernated

during the pomp of the empire and Victorian times,

but had been reawakened by the war.

Indeed, it is often the tension

between these two sides of Britishness,

tradition and subversion,

that stirs up the comedy.

And never more so than in The Ladykillers.

NORMAN: Ealing comedies were a reflection

of the national character at the time.

They caught the zeitgeist

of how people were feeling.

They caught the idea that,

having seen off the Nazis at a cost,

that they had a sense of...it had built up that sense of resistance.

That idea that you could be

sort of tribal in a way.

It brought out the idea of course, that Britain was an island nation

and that they would resist all invaders.

It left the nation with a somehow a sort of residual

sense of resistance, which was transferred

to institutions and authorities

that they didn't care for. They didn't want to be put down anymore.

They wanted to actually have more freedom.

And so Michael Balcon,

who understood the British character very, very well,

he brought together a whole gang

of like-minded directors and writers,

and indeed editors.

The Ladykillers is the last of the Ealing comedies,

a collection of comedies that had nailed this period

because the studios had worked

with a variety of different directors during the war.

They'd learned a documentary style. They wanted realism.

They wanted to look at the streets, the stories around them

and appeal actually to a largely working-class,

cinema-going audience. So, it was very aware

of these changes and The Ladykillers was the final...

if you like... Because the studio was closed pretty much after this.

It was sold to the BBC and the concept of the Ealing comedy

ended with The Ladykillers. This was their final hurrah.

May I introduce Mr Lawson?

How do you do gentlemen? Mr Lawson?

And Mr Robinson. Mrs Wilberforce.

Mr Robinson.

All right. Thank you.

You believe it all.

That's the amazing thing about the film.

It is a kind of a fantasy, isn't it?

It's got a sort of fable-like structure to it, hasn't it?Yes. Mm.

It does have, but you keep on watching and you believe it all.

That's the extraord... And I think that's one of the reasons

you believe it all, is the old girl.

Yes, Katie Johnson. Yes. Katie Johnson.

She's, you know, a fairly unknown figure,

but she's so good in the film.

She keeps it on a steady, I mean,

she doesn't try to be funny in any way.

Yes. She is...completely...herself.

It's that marvellous quality of great comedy.Yeah.

None of the actors or characters know they're in a comedy,

for them the world is dead straight. Yeah. Exactly, yes.

And she certainly is. She's a...

She really bases the whole thing

in reality I think, more than anything else.

(METALLIC CLANGING) (PIPES SHUDDERING, BANGING)

(WATER GURGLING AND HISSING)

(CHUGGING)

WOMAN: (OVER PA) The train now arriving

at Platform 1... (TRAIN WHISTLING)

..is the 1:05pm from Cambridge.

(SUSPICIOUS MUSIC)

This is King's Cross Station, one of the main hubs of London

in the 1950s and it was in this area

The Ladykillers took place.

# BOCCHERINI: Minuetto #

Now she's driving away.

Under the artful eye of director Alexander Mackendrick,

the most cunning of the Ealing directors,

in The Ladykillers, Kings Cross is not just a backdrop,

it is a character.

This is the perfect microcosm of London in 1955.

The oblivious traffic streaming by

that serves as both an opportunity

for the professor's gang of rogues and a trap.

They will never escape its grip.

In fact, they will only ever be free

of Mrs Wilberforce's strange little house

via, how should we put it? The back door.

The plot of The Ladykillers is relatively simple.

It's a caper movie to begin with.

It's about a gang of criminals

who have plans to rob a security van

on King's Cross Station.

The element that is unusual about this

is that they want to use a little old lady

who lives right on the edge

of the Copenhagen Bridge,

which is part of one of the tunnels

leading into Kings Cross.

And they're going to actually use her

to get the loot away from the station

and to safety, because that is where the danger lies

in the aftermath.

We have to have someone to bring out the money. Let's get a professional

or bring it out ourselves. A spectacular getaway, you mean?

That's 70 miles an hour in the heart of London, in broad daylight.

(CHUCKLES) (LAUGHS)

I'll take it back into the station- And send it out by train?

What any intelligent policeman would expect us to do.

Quite a flair for the obvious.

Can't you appreciate that Mrs Wilberforce

is not a mere appendage to my plan. She's the very core of it.

So, we have Mrs Wilberforce,

who is a very old lady,

slightly fussy, slightly bewildered.

She's well-known at the local police station

for constantly going in and reporting crimes

which aren't crimes.

She has a room in her house that she wants to let out,

and this mysterious Professor Marcus appears

and rents out the house. This is Alec Guinness's character.

Very rapidly, it becomes clear

that he's putting together a gang to do a job.

They want to-to pull over a van

and steal what's in it, but for this, they need a patsy.

So he tells her that they're going to have a string quintet

practicing upstairs during the evenings in her house.

And does she mind? She doesn't mind. She loves music.

Once they've got the goods, once they've got the money,

they need to get it past the police.

And the way they've decided to do this

is to tell the old lady to go to the station

and pick up a case which she's got to bring back to the house.

That's the genius,

as the Professor Marcus insists,

that's what's perfect about his perfect plan

is that the police will be looking for money going out,

but what they're going to do is bring the money in.

There is this wonderful quality in The Ladykillers

that it takes real life

and sort of re-serves it up in dark comic terms.

So, the gang are essentially a-a model

of the real life gangs of Kings Cross.

The Italian gangs. They are, yes. They're a model of...

what was going on, really.

After all, what does Peter Sellers play?

He plays an archetypal spiv, really, doesn't he?Yeah.

And uh...Herbert Lom is the international one...

um...dead serious.

He's the most- Yes. He's the assassin, isn't he?

Yes. He's the assassin.

So as a contrast to Mrs Wilberforce,

who has this kind of rosy, quaint English-ness

and a real politeness, but also has this sort of

iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove quality about her,

this kind of unbreakable sense of self

and how things should be in the world.

Versus the men, the criminals, that pile into the picture.

Each of them represents a very specific part

of British society at that time.

So, you have the youngest of the bunch,

you have Peter Sellers who comes along,

and this is basically your East End,

cheeky spiv character.

He even has the sort of draped,

flat lapel jacket that the Teddy boys used to wear.

He represents sort of the danger of youth,

of the youth rebellion, I guess, of the period to some extent.

You have Herbert Lom

who was a Czech-born, half-Jewish actor

who came to Britain to get away from the Nazi invasion

of what was then Czechoslovakia.

And he had a side in playing villains.

He was always playing villains. He had both seemingly the demeanour

and I guess at the time what people consider to be

the right accent for it.

And I think he's the scariest of the bunch.

I think he very much represents this idea of um...

of a foreign threat.

Making up the gang is

the huge thug played by Danny Green, who is the muscle.

If-If-If you'd imagined a potato talking,

it would talk in the voice of Danny Green.

You have the major Cecil Parker,

wonderful sort of faux gentleman,

bit of a coward, probably cashiered from the army

if indeed he ever was in the army,

but a sort of prime cowardly con-man type.

This is a wonderful collection,

but it's headed by Guinness.

He gives an extraordinary performance.

Guinness's performance as the professor

is a comic marvel of straight acting.

When he first read the screenplay,

he was sure that it had been written for Alastair Sim.

He was assured by all around him

that, "No, no, no, it's for you, Alec. It's your story".

Nevertheless, what Guinness decided to do

was play the role as Alastair Sim.

So, that extraordinary look, the hairpiece, the teeth,

the dark eyes, the pale skin,

is in a way based on Alastair Sim,

especially his version of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Alec Guinness served during the Second World War in the Navy.

He was a landing craft commander during the invasion of Sicily.

He would also go back to the UK now and again to appear

in patriotic plays. So he was in a play about bomber command

and the odd film where he played a soldier.

He had prior to the war been

in a number of theatrical productions, including one

he'd devised himself, which is an adaptation of Great Expectations.

And just after the war, David Lean took the idea

of that adaptation and then further adapted it with Ronald Neame

into the film Great Expectations, in which he cast Alec Guinness,

which is his first big film role.

Then, his first big breakthrough

popular appeal movie was

Kind Hearts and Coronets, which was an Ealing Comedy's comedy,

and it was the beginning of his career with Ealing.

In Kind Hearts and Coronets, he plays all the members

of the D'Ascoyne family, who are murdered one at a time.

So, he plays a variety of very cartoon-like characters,

which is interesting when you think of his career.

He'd been playing Shakespearean roles largely,

almost entirely up until the Second World War,

then, coming out of it, he plays some serious roles.

He's got some romantic comedies under his belt to come.

He was going to be a romantic lead,

but he was quite prepared to take these very, very

over-the-top, cartoonish roles.

What's wrong? Major! Major! Tell me what's happening!

Louis! Louis!Major!Will you mind your own business, please?

So, with Alec Guinness,

sort of rightly placed, both as an actor

and in every other sense, as the ringleader of this group,

it is a wonderful ensemble piece of a film in terms of these actors.

But it's really interesting to see someone who would become

as huge as Peter Sellers in sort of a second-fiddle part.

Of course, at the time, Sellers was more than happy to just

be on a film set with Alec Guinness.

He regarded him as one of his idols.

He said he was happy just to watch Alec Guinness act.

Guinness in return once recalled that he felt

that Peter Sellers was rather sulky or quiet on set.

Maybe because he was intimidated, although that's just me inferring.

But Guinness is, I think rightly deserving

of that level of adulation from Sellers

and from I think the rest of us.

Because the ability with which he could switch

between, you know, Shakespeare

and comedy, something like Kind Hearts and Coronets

to Bridge on the River Kwai, which was only a few years later

in 1957, is...is really remarkable.

Guinness never overdoes things.

His performance is brim full of subtle ironies and physical comedy.

He's the devil in a threadbare jumper.

There is something Mephistophelian about his performance.

It is less the ill-gotten gains at stake than his own cleverness.

He unravels as the plot unravels around him.

Arrogance is his downfall

and he cannot understand why this little woman

has destroyed his master plan.

(WHISTLE BLOWS)

(CHUCKLES) I'm always leaving it.

(PROFESSOR LAUGHING) LOUIS: What's she doing? What?

MAN: What's going on here? It's all right.

It's just that she went back to get her umbrella.

# BOCCHERINI: Minuetto #

LOUIS: She could have shopped us all.

The silly old- Uh...what you're knocking her for?

She done it, didn't she? We're nearly home, Louis.

What can possibly go wrong now?

(KNOCKING) Driver! Stop at once! Hey, what?

Born in Boston of Scottish heritage

and raised in Glasgow,

Alexander Mackendrick was a gifted artist.

He had been a political cartoonist

and drawn propaganda pieces during the war,

and then moved into documentaries.

The head of Ealing Studios, Michael Balcon,

had reluctantly accepted him as Director of Whiskey Galore.

And Mackendrick would wrap his stylish comedies

in barbed wire and through films like The Man In The White Suit

and The Lady Killers come to be seen

as the greatest exponent of the Ealing comedy.

He was very politically minded. A lot of his cartoons

are quite satirical and quite edgy.

During the Second World War, he worked in the film industry

and was part of a group of people who helped to restructure

the Italian film industry. So, when he came back to the UK,

he, instead of going back into advertising and cartoons,

he went into working for Ealing Studios,

where, initially, he worked as a sketch artist

and gradually took little assistant directing jobs

until his first directing job for the studios

was Whiskey Galore about Scots thumbing their noses at the English.

And he worked his way up through The Man in the White Suit,

which was seen by Ealing as excessively satirical

and this, The Ladykillers, was his,

I would argue his finest work. It was his farewell to the UK.

He left after this to go to America

and it really is the apogee of his career.

It's a phenomenal piece of work.

It's interesting that Alexander Mackendrick ended up

on The Ladykillers because Michael Balcon

did not originally want him for it.

He'd made a film in 1951 for Ealing Studios

called The Man in the White Suit, which was, I think,

quite politically subversive and spiky for its time.

And perhaps slightly outside of the remit

of what Ealing usually did, which tended to fall back on

slightly more cosy truisms about British authority, particularly.

Mackendrick was known for having a little bit more of a,

perhaps more quietly, but still a subversive attitude.

He had also a little bit of a different background

to perhaps some of the other Ealing directors.

He came from Boston originally,

by the time he was seven, he had both lost his father

and his mother had left him behind.

So, his grandfather took him to Scotland where he was raised.

And perhaps partly as a result of that,

he had something of a lonely childhood.

By the time he was making movies,

you can see some of that cynicism about humanity, I think,

and some darkness in that work.

And so even though he was not originally slated

to end up on The Ladykillers,

he was already friendly with

and had worked with William Rose, the screenwriter.

Ironically, but fittingly,

The Ladykillers is a creation of two outsiders

who had made Britain their home, and they brought a disdainful

and slightly distant examination of the country to the film.

The screenwriter William Rose had been born in Missouri,

but was stationed in London during the war,

married a local woman and stayed on.

So, he could observe British manners from close quarters.

He wrote five screenplays for Ealing, among them Genevieve,

and claimed to have dreamed up his masterpiece in its entirety.

Brilliantly structured, piercingly clever

and scaberulously funny,

the screenplay for The Ladykillers would be nominated for an Oscar.

(DUBIOUS ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

I don't believe it. I don't believe it.

Shut up. It's just sitting there.

Look, could we-No-one, I hope, is going to suggest that we steal it.

So, you're talking about two people, to some extent or another

who had a slightly external view of British-ness,

but also seemingly could take a scalpel to it in certain ways.

And so when they met at this meeting

at Ealing Studios that they had weekly

and Rose mentioned that the entire concept of The Ladykillers

came to him in a dream, Mackendrick was fascinated by that.

That was when he thought he could really do something

with the material because it was quite an unusual concept.

Well, Mackendrick is a director who...

..really came from Scotland and did things differently.

Him and Robert Hamer were the best, I think, of that group of directors.

Yes. But he was the most original,

and this is the most original of all the films

that are so admired now.

Were they admired at the time?

I mean, they're revered now. Yes, they were. I think they were.

But I think the Americans thought,

oh, the funny British are at it again, you know,

but they did like this film, didn't they?Yes.

I think it was um...

was well remarked upon, and as I say,

Mackendrick was immediately invited to Hollywood.

Rose and Mackendrick had had slightly difficult dealings

with each other on a previous film, The Maggie,

but at the weekly meetings at Ealing,

when Rose pitched his new idea, which he dreamed of,

Mackendrick took to it immediately.

He saw the possibilities and so the two of them

really collaborated on this script.

Interestingly enough, Michael Balcon was rather nervous of the script

and so was Rank, the distribution company.

However, Mackendrick had his way.

He said, "I can make this film with Rose's script",

which actually wasn't completed at the time of filming.

And, that it won't be... He assured Balcon

that it wouldn't be too satirical or too political.

In fact, what it did give Mackendrick was the opportunity

to actually put all these elements in, in a much more coded form.

And I think that's one of the reasons why The Ladykillers

is so endearing.

Because every time you see it, you see yet another little layer.

You see another little element um...

that has been smuggled in by Mackendrick.

Alexander Mackendrick has said this is a film

about Britain in subsidence, and I think it's significant

that Rose and Mackendrick were both outsiders.

They were looking at the UK

in this slightly bewildered fashion.

For instance, William Rose had previously written Genevieve,

this film about this car race to Brighton.

There's a scene in that where two people cannot understand

why in a boarding house they have to pre-book their hot water

for 30 minutes. And after they've complained... (CHUCKLES)

..one woman says, "Are they Americans?"

And you can see that's William Rose's voice.

That's the man, the American in Britain.

You've got to book your hot water?!

And this film is very much like that.

It's people looking at Britain and going,

"This is how they do things?!

"This is how crimes are committed? This is insane!"

But it's done with enormous affection.

(SINGING INDISTINCTLY) (DOOR OPENS)

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

Ah, professor!

Good afternoon, gentlemen. (LAUGHTER)

Your last rehearsal! Ah, professor,

I must give you back your ten shillings.Thank you.

You see, the cab man wouldn't take any money cause he said

he was going into some other business.

In terms of style, Mackendrick was recalling German expressionism,

particularly the work of Fritz Lang and F W Murnau,

films such as M and Nosferatu.

You can see the Vampire in Nosferatu in Professor Marcus

and Mackendrick makes wonderful use of exaggerated silhouettes.

Tall, dark angles

and this division, this sort of scale

between the little old lady and these mobsters in her home.

So, Mackendrick was extremely visually

and cinematically literate, as you might expect,

and you can see with him that as much as he has an ear for dialogue,

which he's well known for, he also has a great eye here

in these interiors. Even though that house looks very sort of cluttered

and overcrowded by people and so forth,

he finds a way to get those Dutch tilts in,

and he finds a way to kind of get those angles at an odd skew.

And it only aids this feeling of this kind of dream-like sense

of things not quite being right,

because whose perspective are we looking at here or from here?

Even when the camera's kind of floating around behind

the heads of characters, it's almost like an omniscient viewpoint,

which suggests that there's someone else in the room watching

all of this as though it's almost like an out-of-body experience

to see it. And I think that's really fascinating.

NORMAN: This is a film that is shot on real locations,

but it has the exaggeration

and the distortions of

a kind of really grim fairy tale.

Not only that, but it moves through different ways

and modes of comedy, of farce,

into something that is close to film noir.

It goes into a caper film.

One of the impressive things about this film is that

this actual robbery itself...

So meticulous is that depiction of that robbery

that it was... The film was banned for being shown

in prisons for many years

after a bunch of ex-convicts performed a robbery

based almost entirely on the robbery in this film.

Once you've got the measure of this film,

once you've got the idea that you are watching something

that is unreal, but in a realistic environment,

then you've got it. You can play with anything.

The interior of Mrs Wilberforce's house

encompasses all of Mackendrick's expressionist games.

It appears tilted, a fairy-tale house

built around a bewilderment of rooms

and these inconstant pipes

that Mrs Wilberforce encourages with a rubber mallet.

Mackendrick classified his film

as a parody of Britain in subsidence.

It was just on the edge, wasn't it?

Yeah.When you look at it now, you think...

..is that working?

You know, but it does. Somehow, it works.

These ridiculous crooks... Yeah.

..who are really quite real,

as well as being ridiculous.

There's something fantastical about this film, isn't there?

Yeah.When you see it again, you think, gracious me,

I've never seen a film quite like this.(CHUCKLES)

ALL: (SINGING) # Shine upon my brow today

# Life is fading fast away #

(CHUGGING)

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

It was over there on Frederica Street

where the facade of the house was specially built.

In the film, Frederica Street overlooked the railway line

and the mouth of Copenhagen Tunnel.

This gave Mackendrick his Dante-like images

of criminal bodies being dispatched

onto passing coal trains to descend,

we don't doubt, all the way to hell.

(RAILWAY TRACKS CLATTER)

(BOLD MUSIC)

ONE-ROUND: Guess who's next!

Of course comedy, good comedy, is a serious business,

and there are many different ways in which The Ladykillers

has been read over the years.

Is it some kind of psychological study of the family unit,

where Mrs Wilberforce becomes the mother figure

and the reason, the very reason, the gang finally can't kill her?

Is it that there is an honour amongst thieves,

there are certain levels they will not stoop to?

She is their mother. How could they possibly kill her?

Then it is read as a political satire.

The between Mrs Wilberforce is the unchanging,

unstinting, conservative side of things,

whereas the gang is huffing and puffing

to change things in the 1950s,

but they cannot change tradition.

NORMAN: Mrs Wilberforce is the emblem

of a kind of older generation of Britain,

the one who grew up with Victorian values,

one who is sort of full

of moral rectitude.

And although on the surface

she appears to be one of Ealing's kindly,

little benign, genteel, little old ladies,

she's actually got reserves of strength

and fortitude that emerge during the course of the film.

NATHAN: What they're doing is they're pinpointing a moment

in British history and they're drawing in a variety of characters

and a variety of archetypes and a variety of narratives,

and putting them into this one mythical place

in order to illustrate a point.

And the point is the change that Britain is about to go through

or is currently undergoing and how it is irreversible,

but how Britain is trying to fight back and trying to stop it.

And this is very much what Mackendrick was clear on.

It's a satire, it's a social satire, about the state of the nation.

He saw the lady that is not killed despite the title,

Mrs Wilberforce, as symbolic of Old Britain,

the Pre-War Britain, the Victorian Britain

that was still clinging onto its ideas and its principles.

And he saw the gang as modernity.

They represent these types that were coming in, you know,

trying to get their purchase into this tiny weenie street,

which is holding onto all its values.

And he saw that as being what the film was about.

So really, so much of the...

the cen... like, the linchpin, I guess I would say

of The Ladykillers is the performance

from Katie Johnson as Mrs Wilberforce.

And Katie Johnson was an actress

who was sort of a jobbing, supporting actress

for decades in British film.

So it's fair to say that some British audiences may well

have recognised her face.

Which I think only heightens this feeling that you get in the film

of here's an actress who's, I believe, 76 years old

when the film was being made or as the film came out

and is already a likable character. She's a very sweet, little old lady,

but it gives you the sense that audiences or contemporary audiences,

would've been on this woman's side in some ways.

They'd been watching her for a long time,

but she'd never had her name by the title.

She'd never got a proper credit on a film

or been in a real starring role, even over all those years.

So, Alexander Mackendrick actually spoke to Ealing

and spoke to Rank, the distributors, and wanted to get her name

above the title, which he succeeded in doing.

But then you could always get that in British films.

When you look down the cast list,

you've seen a number of bit players, who hardly...you hardly...

Frankie Howard is a barrow boy, for goodness sake.Yes! (CHUCKLES)

Young man! Do you mind?

That's the charm of the film

and the charm of lot of British films at the time is the cast list.

Oh, good God, it's him and him, and her and her.

And it's certainly true of this film.

And it creates a texture, doesn't it? Because...

they're all very different actors... Yes, absolutely.

..and that kind of mixture sort of gives it something.Yeah.

I think the real...it advertises

the fact that British character actors

are probably the best in the world.

I don't know whether that's true or not,

but I think it is, and this...this film

absolutely agrees with that theory.

Yeah. But what it's about,

it's very difficult to ascertain.

What do you think it's about?

I think it's about,

on one level it's a morality tale.

Yes, it is. Yes. It's about...

wrongdoers who get their comeuppance delivered to them...Mm.

..by fate, by the little old lady.

I think as you said, it is a portrait of a changing time.

I think we'd come out of the war and the empire, the old order,

have been sort of pushed aside... Mm.

..and this new order hasn't found itself yet.

So the crooks kind of represent that aspirational side.

It's definitely a comment on its time.Yeah.

Definitely. But quite what that comment's actually saying is,

well, you can have all sorts of theories about it.Yeah.

The Ladykillers remains one of the greatest British movies ever made.

What's more, it is hugely influential.

It's had such an influence on pop culture.

The dark surrealism of the film can be found in Monty Python.

The social satire is nearly every British sitcom since.

It's kind of fairy-tale London can be felt in films as diverse

as The Long Good Friday, Performance, and the Harry Potter films.

And the Coen Brothers proved with their remake,

it was an unrepeatable film as well.

I think that The Ladykillers is a masterpiece

for many, many reasons, not least visually.

It's timing is so impeccable.

The comic timing, the combination of the screenplay,

someone like even Peter Sellers who was fairly green at the time,

just the way he can land a simple quip,

it's...it's flawless.

And people will always laugh at it,

regardless of the fact that it's really specifically

in 1950s Britain, it doesn't really matter.

It-It travels. Like there's this wonderful moment with Peter Sellers

that I always think of and it's not one of the bigger comic moments,

I don't think, but to me, it just shows the brilliance

of the combined efforts of all the creative people

involved with the film. Where you get

the old ladies piling in for the tea party,

the initial idea is Herbert Lom's like, oh, we'll throw her

in the car. Oh, we're gonna have to take that one too.

The second woman comes in and then they all start coming in,

and Peter Seller's looks and he says, "What shall we do?

"Charter a bus?" And it cuts.

Doesn't let you have any reaction time.

It cuts away immediately and keeps moving the action.

(WOMEN CHATTER INDISTINCTLY) What do you think we should do?

Charter a bus? (CHATTER CONTINUES)

The Ladykillers is a superb film

because it can exist in pure isolation

as a fable, as a fairytale,

and yet it is also if looked at, a document of its time.

So, you can study this film almost endlessly.

You can study this film as a document about '50s Britain

and about a historical moment in this country.

You can also use it to study film.

It's about a particular point where Ealing Studios,

who represented a particular kind of cinema, is ending.

And understanding, the arrival of new forms.

It's also, at the same time,

something which you don't have to worry about any of that whatsoever.

It's also just a daft story about this little fairy-tale cottage

in a forest of London

where these monsters come and try to scare an old lady

and then fail and she ends up living happily ever after.

So, you can see any film you want to in this and it will work.

That's what is so genius about it.

It can be every film to every person.

(SOMBRE MUSIC) (BUS CLATTERS)

But I do hope you'll believe me.

It's true. I get it, the lolly, but I wasn't really one of the gang.

I admit the keeper was planned in my house,

but it wasn't I who planned it.

And I did not plan or have anything to do

with the East Castle Street job. Didn't ya, ma'am?

The central character of Mrs Wilberforce,

who is trying to give the money back to the police

and partly because she spent a lot of time

talking about things that haven't happened,

they are very kind, they're indulgent.

But they simply don't believe her. They say, "Well...

"just keep the money. She's done her best to actually

be as righteous as possible

and uh...as law abiding,

and that is her reward.

Her reward is to have all the money.

I think that's a fantastic,

fantastically subversive message.

Especially given the fact that she is the one

who's actually...emblematic

of these old, almost sort of past-it values

of implacability, you know, the Victoriana.

And the great thing is that

it doesn't seem to have affected her at all,

because now she is able to be generous.

Now she's able to be benevolent in a way that she was before,

but without the resources. Now she has the resources.

Absolutely wonderful and a strangely uplifting ending.

Oh, very good, very good.

Turned out nice, hasn't it. Yes. It has.

Perhaps more than any other Ealing,

it's lasted because you don't see it maybe nostalgically,

you see it as its own thing.

I see it nostalgically too

because of King's Cross and everything.Yes. Yes.

But at the same time,

it's an astonishing film because it...

it works on so many different levels.Yeah.

Not sure what Mackendrick really was trying to do with the film,

but whatever it was, he made a very good film.

Oh, hey, hey, hey! Look! Here, lady! Look!

(SWEET MUSIC)

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