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ALEC GUINNESS The Ladykillers Classic Comedy. UK Official DVD (1955)
Header Photo: Detail from cover of Dvd release.
© Warner.
2016: Forever Ealing Book Reviewed, Photos & In Stock
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CAST
Alec Guinness is Professor Marcus
CREW
Dir: Alexander Mackendrick
(Ealing)
UK DVD SPECIFICATIONS
Format: PAL, Colour, Anamorphic, Widescreen, Mono
7321900381284
DVD SPECIAL FEATURES
Theatrical trailer
MOVIE REVIEW
Alec Guinness read the script and told Mackendrick, "But dear
boy, it's Alastair Sim you want, isn't it?" They assured him
it wasn't.
BuyUK Dvd
In the Spring Honours List of 1955 Alec Guinness was made a Commander of the British Empire. In the summer he descended into the
lowest circle of criminality in the film The Ladykillers at Ealing
with Alexander Mackendrick directing.
This became Mackendrick's
best film to date, and some say his best film ever, although he
went on to Hollywood to make Sweet Smell of Success with Burt
Lancaster as the venomous columnist JJ. Hunsecker, and Tony
Curtis as the sleazy show-biz press agent Falco. The Ladykillers
was Mackendrick's last film for Ealing and he directed it when
Ealing had passed its prime, and was soon to be sold off to MGM,
although still run by Balcon. His script-writer was William Rose, an
American expatriate who told Mackendrick of a dream he had had
one lunchtime when they were drinking in the Red Lion. Rose, from
Missouri, had dreamt a whole film: "complete" and "original".
It was, as he told Mackendrick, about five criminals "who lived
in a house with a little old lady and she found them out. They
decided they had to kill her, but they couldn't and so they all killed
each other". When Rose outlined the idea to Michael Balcon, Rose
recalled Balcon watching him with those strange hooded eyes all
during the telling, "never taking his eyes off me — just once in a
while glanced at Sandy [Mackendrick] as if to say, 'Is it just he
who has lost his mind, or have you both lost your minds?'"
Rose's "dream", as developed, at least partly borrowed from The
Amazing Dr Clitterhouse, an earlier comedy-thriller play (in which
Ralph Richardson had successfully starred in the West End for a
record-breaking run), had the gangsters posing as a string quartet.
In the US film of Clitterhouse they were led by Humphrey Bogart and called the
Hudson River String Quartet — the film also had a character called The Professor,
played by Edward G. Robinson.
Kemp, in his biography of Mackendrick, described how the crucial
casting of The Ladykillers came about, the part of Professor
Marcus being originally intended for Alastair Sim. But Balcon
stepped in: "We're making money with the Guinness films, we're
on a run of strength there. It's got to be Guinness."
Guinness read the script and told Mackendrick, "But dear
boy, it's Alastair Sim you want, isn't it?" They assured him
it wasn't. With Guinness they also cast Cecil Parker, Herbert
Lom, Peter Sellers (who played the Teddy Boy plus the voices
of Mrs Wilberforce's parrots), and Danny Green, an ex-boxer. As
the old lady, again with much opposition, Mackendrick cast the
seventy-seven-year-old Katie Johnson, who had played countless
tiny roles of old ladies but never a big part in her whole life.
Mrs Wilberforce's innocence is absolute. The evil of the criminal
gang wavers in squeamishness: as Rose explained to Mackendrick,
"In the worst of men, there is that little touch of weakness which
will destroy them." In fact, however, in Guinness's academic of
dislocated mental genius, there was plenty to redeem the deformity.
Mackendrick observed how Guinness worked on the character:
"He has a strange habit of working from the outside in. In the
early stages he's very much a putty-nosed character, working off
gimmicks, funny voices and so on. But then he gets it down and
discards the inessentials and finds the core of the character — even
when he's dealing with a comic grotesque." The model for Professor
Marcus had also a strange personal reflection, especially as that
model had just written a book about Guinness.
Apparently the first idea Guinness had was to play Marcus as
a cripple - with a dislocated hip which was, as Mackendrick says
"quite gruesome but horrendously funny". This was discarded
because the "boss" (Balcon) would never stand for it. Guinness
sulked — "and went and looked out of the window. And while I
was talking about the script he was snipping away with a pair of
scissors, and he made some paper teeth which he stuck in, then
turned around and grinned at me."
The portrait which now developed — "snaggling teeth, lank hair,
trailing scarf, the cigarette between second and third fingers" —
was, so Mackendrick said, "an absolute personal portrait of
Kenneth Tynan", although Guinness naturally disclaimed any
such intention. "I think I had in mind the wolf in Red Riding
Hood. When I first saw myself in make-up I remember saying
to Sandy, I look remarkably like an aged Ken Tynan; perhaps I'd
better smoke cigarettes the way he does. But that was it. Nothing
really deliberate."
Or, one might add, conscious. But, unconsciously, this was
Tynan to the core. Exaggerated though it was, the role grew into
a "gestalt" cartoon of the naked psyche of Tynan, perhaps in a kind
of (completely unintentional) revenge on him for writing a book
about him. In some way, albeit at a comic, slightly ridiculous or
even ironic level, it had to be a reassertion of control, of power, over
the critic. Here, anyway, was Guinness's own private biography
of Tynan, and, curiously enough, it revealed something accurate
about the brilliant although often misguided mind of the young
critic, described by one of Tynan's friends:
The eyes, the whites above the pupils, dart right into the farthest
recesses of your psyche, the hollow cheeks crease into the shape
of a stylised gargoyle, and more fangs than one had believed
possible fight like maenads to jockey themselves to the front.
Buck-toothed and macabre as he is, Professor Marcus lives and
makes us laugh because the portrait Guinness gave the audiences
was rooted in reality and observation. The criminal mastermind
was endowed with eccentricities both disconcerting and reassuring
- kindness, intellectual scrupulousnesss,, wwhich are as much part of
the comedy, as the terrifyingly enlarged teeth. To Elaine Dundy,
Tynan's wife, there was absolutely no doubt that he was playing
Ken. "They admired one another tremendously."
It was an affectionate, ironic and many-layered portrait of
someone who was by now himself becoming something of a
caricature — an immature, nightmarish person who was then at his
peak but who was, as he always had been, operating at one remove
from reality. This showed especially, for instance, when he would
write a review of his old hero Orson Welles as Othello, calling him
"Citizen Coon" and an amateur, the next inviting him to a party
and expecting him not in any way to react in an unfriendly way
to his review. Guinness was alert to the treachery of the brilliant
mind and immortalised it in his depiction of Professor Marcus in a
completely comic and harmless way. It was a portrait in which the
spirit of G.K. Chesterton breathed beneath the surface: a diabolical
visitation by a man who believed increasingly in the existence of
the devil. He might even have quoted Chesterton: "St John the
Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no
creature so wild as one of his own commentators."
The Ladykillers was filmed in North London in the vicinity of
King's Cross Station: with its image of a decaying England, its
genteel horror, its Dickensian scale of character — and indeed of
good and evil — it mingled mirthfulness and icy macabre in such
a way that it drew a wide following and became a commercial
success. The American critics failed to register its subtleties — it
was compared unfavourably to The Court Jester with Danny Kaye - yet it did well at the box-office.
Mackendrick subsequently left Ealing, the studios were sold off
to the BBC and Balcon took his Ealing entourage with him to
Boreham Wood under the wing of MGM. Balcon was now joined
by Kenneth Tynan, who became Script Editor in spring 1956, to a
studio which he described as a kind of "outsize Anderson shelter"
in a corner of the Metro lot. Later he advised on two not very
distinguished Guinness films. Barnacle Bill ("not a very good idea
of T.E.B. Clarke, for whom work had to be found"), and The
Scapegoat. When he himself left Ealing feeling highly disgruntled
at what he had not been able to do, he complained of Ealing's
reluctance to deal at all seriously with sex, social problems or
politics. He also felt it had "made" no actors of any significance,
except for Alec Guinness.
OSCARS
1956: Nomination: Best Original Screenplay
BRITISH FILM ACADEMY AWARDS
1955: Best British Actress (Katie Johnson), Best British Screenplay (William Rose)
Buy UK Dvd
INFO. FROM EALING FOREVER BOOK
Opened in the UK in December 1955.
Was Mackendrick's last film for Ealing.
© Pavilion Books.
2016: Forever Ealing Book Reviewed, Photos & In Stock - the ultimate source for anything Ealing
I'll start it off: it's arguably the best British comedy film ever made. I say 'arguably' but to me it is. Nothing comes close. Not Monty Python, not even Tony Hancock's The Rebel. It's a joy to watch from start to finish thanks to the ensemble cast. Whether the part is big or small each actor rises to the occasion.
With Herbert Lom dying in .2012 the whole case has now stepped into the past but they are still alive, so alive, whenever you visit or revisit this glorious film bathed in Technicolor.
All images © Warner.
Condition: New. 2016: I've got a handful in as I want to try and sell as many of this wonderful Dvd as possible and have priced it as low as I possibly can so more people can enjoy it.
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