The Ladykillers Totally Explained

Everything about The Ladykillers totally explained

This article is about the 1955 original. For the 2004 remake, see The Ladykillers (2004 film). The Ladykillers is a 1955 British dark comedy film. It is one of a series of classic post-war Ealing 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.

Synopsis

A comically sinister criminal, "Professor" Marcus (Guinness), rents rooms in the gradually subsiding "lopsided" King's Cross house of an innocent and eccentric old lady, Mrs. Louisa Wilberforce (Johnson) - a widow who lives alone with her parrots. The Professor has put together a curious gang: the gentlemanly con-man "Major" Courtney (Parker), the Cockney spiv Harry Robinson (Sellers), the slow-witted ex-boxer "One-Round" Lawson (Green), and the vicious continental gangster, Louis Harvey (Lom). The Professor is in fact plotting a sophisticated armoured car robbery, but convinces Mrs Wilberforce, by having the gang members carry musical instruments and by playing records of chamber music during their planning sessions, that the group are an amateur string quintet who are using the room for rehearsal space. After the successful heist, in which Mrs Wilberforce plays an unwitting but crucial role by escorting the loot through the police cordon, the real conflict of the film begins. As the gang leaves her house, One-Round accidentally drops his cello case full of banknotes. As they spill out in front of Mrs. Wilberforce, she realises the truth and informs Marcus that she's going to report them to the police.
The gang, it seems, has no choice but to do away with her. However, no one volunteers to be the one to dispose of "Mrs. Lopsided". The Major draws the short straw requiring him to do the deed, but instead he tries to make a run for it with the cash in hand. In quick succession, the criminals double-cross and kill one another, with the bodies dumped into railway wagons passing behind the house. Through all this, the marvellously oblivious Mrs. Wilberforce remains asleep.
In the end, the gang members are all dead, and Mrs. Wilberforce is left with the money. The police, familiar with her strange stories, pretend to believe her account of the robbery but jokingly tell her to keep the money. Ironically, Professor Marcus had earlier assured her that, because the money was insured, any effort on her part to return it would only confuse things. She is therefore finally persuaded that keep it she must.

Production notes

The British comedian Frankie Howerd has a cameo role as an agitated market fruit seller, along with Kenneth Connor as a taxi driver. Jack Warner, who for many years on British television embodied the avuncular policeman "Dixon of Dock Green", plays the superintendent. A young Stratford Johns (Charlie Barlow from Z-Cars) plays the driver of the lorry that gets robbed.
   Mrs. Wilberforce's house was a set built at the western end of Frederica Street directly above the southern portal of Copenhagen Tunnel on the railway line leading out of King's Cross station. However the views from the front door of her house show Argyle Street, a couple of miles away, with the tower of St Pancras Station in the background.
   The piece which is played repeatedly to deceive Mrs. Wilberforce is Boccherini's "Minuet (3rd movement) from String Quintet in E, Op.13 No.5".
   A radio adaptation of the film was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 13 January 1996.

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