A Film Canon

From one perspective, The Ladykillers is the most American of Ealing comedies, playing like a rough transplantation of Arsenic And Old Lace from Brooklyn to Kings Cross. Like Capra, Mackendrick attempts to squeeze the maximum number of bodies and sounds into a single house, producing a claustrophobic cacaphony that centres on the collision of civilised and uncivilised sound, music and noise, speech and drone, with the typically Capraesque revelation that all these dichotomies are ultimately false; a democracy of sound. This produces a pervasively physical comedy that is completely at odds with the restrained, exquisite irony of earlier Ealing efforts, as well as a series of hammy caricatures that don't so much depart from the studio's taste for one-dimensionality as caricature it, falling far short of the charming, nuanced array of types that populate Kind Hearts And Coronets or Whiskey Galore! That said, this cariacturisation paves the way for a Dickensian, industrial Gothic that represents a specifically English departure from both Capra and earlier Ealing efforts, extending the false dichotomy between organic and inorganic sound to one between organic and inorganic bodies. Not only does the eponymous gang of outlaws, headed by Faginesque 'Professor Marcus' (Alec Guinness), find landlady Louisa Wilberforce (Katie Johnson) unkillable, but their own deaths take place as a mere extrapolation of the railway yard that backs onto the house, their bodies gleefully disposed of by a constellation of steam, coal and steel. This gives the physicality of the comedy a distinctly unsettling edge, as if unveiling slapstick's roots in industrial subjugation, and is exacerbated by the dark-palletted cinematography, which creates the impression of a storm cloud perpetually hanging over everything, on the verge of bursting.