Alec Guinness had a deadpan English wit that brightened up many ‘50s Ealing Studios comedies, and his charm is on full display in Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers. Guinness, partially hidden beneath a garish wig and monstrous fake teeth, is Professor Marcus, a courteous crook who robs an armored truck with a gang of goofy British gentlemen (including Peter Sellers, sporting a shaggy hairdo in his screen debut). To keep a low profile, Marcus and company, disguised as a musical quintet, stage their operation from the home of little old Mrs. Wilberforce (a delightfully perturbed Katie Johnson). The film, like a stage play, is evenly bifurcated – the first section details the crew’s attempts to deceive their elderly landlady, and the film’s latter portion involves their inability to escape with the stolen loot after Mrs. Wilberforce discovers their true identities. As an early Technicolor comedy, Otto Heller’s cinematography utilizes a hyper-realistic, slightly ruddy color scheme, but like this outdated visual palette, the film itself hasn’t aged all that well. Mrs. Wilberforce’s constant interruptions of the quintet’s “rehearsals” – they sit around discussing their plan while a phonograph plays – is quaintly cute, but most of the slapstick set pieces warrant a polite smile rather than a hearty guffaw. The crooks’ ridiculous attempt to capture Mrs. Wilberforce’s parrot features a man falling through the seat of a chair and another guy awkwardly navigating the house’s roof, but like so much of the film’s humor, the scene never rises to truly lunatic heights. The gang eventually decides to do away with Mrs. Wilberforce, but since they all fancy themselves proper English gentlemen, no one is willing to execute the hit. Instead, each criminal attempts to abscond with the money, leading to a murderous conclusion that's at odds with the preceding comedy of manners. With his creepy grin and his bug-eyed cordiality, Guinness manages to make The Ladykillers pleasantly silly, even if the film doesn’t fully live up to its clever premise’s potential. We’ll have to see how the Coen Bros’ upcoming remake fares in the next few days…
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