David Hast: Scott, have you seen the Ladykillers?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen the Ladykillers, the original 1955 version. I have not seen the 2004 Coen Brothers version yet. And in fact, not only have I seen it, but I've seen it many times.But recently I rewatched it for the first time in probably decades and really enjoyed it.
DH: Yeah, it's a wonderful film. Since you mentioned the Coen Brothers, let's dispense with that right away. I'm going to say right up front. That is the only Coen Brothers feature I've never seen. And I refuse to watch it because the Ladykillers is one of those movies that would be a crime to remake.And apparently I've read and heard that the Coen Brothers remake is pretty bad.
SWV: I don't know. have not heard that it's bad, but I know that it's the least favorite of their films and also probably I believe that was one of the final theatrical releases of their career and they haven't returned since they've done some streaming movies.
DH: Well, I see why they remade it though because the Lady Killers is it is one of a number of comedies that Alec Guinness acted in early in his career that were produced at Ealing Studios in London between 1949 and 1957 were the ones he with the comedies he was in. And the best remembered ones that we'll talk about today are the Ladykillers, which was the fourth of them. But the other three in order were Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, and The Man in the White Suit.Alec Guinness, we did a show earlier on David Lean's early films before he started making his epics. So Alec Guinness got his start in movies with the great director David Lean in the two adaptations of Charles Dickens' novels. Great Expectations and Oliver Twist in 1946 and 48. And he immediately established himself in these films as a versatile actor with both dramatic and comic skills. Nowadays, I'm sure that Alec Guinness is best remembered for two things. Number one, he was Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars movies. And number two, his more famous dramatic roles in the later David Lean epics like Lawrence of Arabia,Dr. Zhivago, and especially the Bridge on the River Kwai, which he won Best Actor for.
SVW: Well, and of course with Star Wars, you're talking about something that is almost beyond iconic in terms of, you know, Star Wars, you know, whether you, what you think of it as in terms of the series as a film quality, in terms of popular culture, it doesn't get any bigger than that. And Obi-Wan was the Gandalf of Star Wars.
DH: And like Gandalf, like Ian McKellen cast as Gandalf, there’s a reason why these directors cast people like that. Because Guinness, even if you knew nothing of his movie history from before that, he brings this gravitas to the role. He's great, whatever he's doing. So he made a great Obi-Wan Kenobi. But actually, Guinness did a ton of comedies. And the greatest ones are the Ealing comedies that we're going to talk about today. And maybe we'll mention a little something about Ealing towards the end. So let's start with Kind Hearts and Coronets, because that was the first one he did. And that one is an iconic film in a sense, certainly for Alec Guinness, because he plays eight roles in it.
SVW: And he's fantastic. And going back to talking about the earlier films, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist.He's younger in those films and he's playing, at least in one of them, a very much older character. And in Kind Hearts and Coronets, he also plays characters that are much older than he is.
DH: That's true. But Guinness actually was himself older when he got into movies. Like many of the great British screen actors, he got his start in theater. And I think he was already in his 30s when he did those first two David Lean films. But yeah, in Kind Hearts and Coronets, you know, it's just, we should say that these Ealing comedies, when people talk about British humor and British comedies in the movies, these are the iconic ones. These are sort of the ones that established in the minds, certainly of American viewers, what British comedy was all about in movies. And Kind Hearts and Coronets is this kind of goofy story about this poor relative of this wealthy family, the D'Ascoyne family. And...they treat his mother horribly and she dies horribly at a young age and he plots to inherit the title of the Duke of D'Ascoyne by murdering all eight people who are ahead of him in the line of succession. So, he proceeds throughout the movie to murder the D'Ascoyne beginning with Ascoyne D'Ascoyne and then he kills there's a Duke an Admiral a General Lady Agatha, Lord Reverend and all of them are played by Alec Guinness. Guinness is not the character who's murdering them off. That's Dennis Price, but Guinness plays all of this eccentric family.
SVW: And you know, Dennis Price and Joan Greenwood, they're great in this movie, but all of the scenes with Guinness are just wonderful.
DH: They're hilarious.
SVW: They're hilarious, but they're also like, there's all so much subtleties that he gives to each of these characters. And there's only the one scene where you see all eight of them sitting down together all in a row. There's just the one scene. And it'd be interesting to know how they were able to do that back then, you know, in terms of the technology that they did.But then afterwards, it's his interaction with all of them or his actions in terms of murdering them.
DH: Yeah, it is interesting. I wonder how they did it. It's probably just the old school in-camera effect of you shoot one character, then you rewind the film, then you... move have the character you know him in the other costume as one of the other family members sit in the next seat over and you just shoot that everything else is black and so you just in the background never changes so you just keep
SVW: And that is the scene, the funeral after he's murdered the D'Ascoyne and the interesting thing and for me was that how Dennis Price's character he's just so nonchalant and he actually seems like this this nice guy at the beginning and it's like with as each after each murder he becomes more evil like you see more and more like wait a minute no he really is evil, even if you didn't believe it already because he's murdered people
DH: Right but he's it's subtle he's not portrayed broadly this is that British humor. We should talk about the other couple in between, let's talk make sure we talk about the lady killers.
SVW: Well, that's my favorite before we finish with the Kind Hearts and Cornets. It was really interesting. It was written by William Rose and he claimed that he dreamt the entire film woke up and then wrote the story down to write the screenplay. It's loosely based on a 1907 novel Israel ranked the autobiography of a criminal by Roy Hart Horniman and which goes back…and it's so very loosely and then this year it was remade as how to make a killing it was released in February with Glenn Powell playing the price character and a very modest film it only had a 15 million dollar budget and it's so far this year made 26 million dollars and critically, it's not been well received. So it looks like it wasn't a worthy remake for this film.
DH: You said Glenn Powell plays the Dennis Price role? So what do they do for all the desk coins?Do different actors play them?
SVW: Well, it's loosely based and actually went back more to the novel. So it's, and I think it's played more seriously than it is a comedy.
DH: Well, I don't mind that one as much.I objected to the Ladykillers being remade because it's just this tiny little perfect gem of a comedy. It really is. Why mess with it? know?
SVW: So yeah, the Ladykillers.
DH: So the Ladykillers is it's a rare one in color. They did mostly black and white. Most of those Ewing comedies were black and white. It's a story of these five criminals that are planning an armored car robbery and they rent a room from this old lady and she gets involved.Well, they actually purposely involve her to pick up the loot unbeknownst to her but then everything goes wrong.
SVW: And the one thing that that I don't think they really said anything in terms of they didn't show that the Alec Guinness character actually knew who she was. It's almost as if he just wanted maybe he wanted that particular house to rent that house and rent a room in that house. But the very first scene it establishes that this woman is an eccentric elderly woman who the police know, she comes she comes to the police on a regular basis with some outrageous thing to talk about and they just sort of humor her. That's set up in the first scene.
DH: Right, which becomes important at the end when she comes to them and tells them something and they don't believe her. But it's just these five eccentric criminals who, their whole goal, they rent this room from Mrs.Wilberforce, who they refer to as Mrs. Lopsided, behind her back. They pretend they're musicians. So they all have these cases, which we find out later they're like cello cases and things or what they're going to carry the cash out in after they've armed the rob the armored car. They pose as musicians and go upstairs to plot the heist and they just play a record of a string quartet playing. So she thinks they're actually musicians, but they're they're hilarious little stereotypes. One of them seems like a total gangster. He carries his his violin case like it's a machine gun. One of them is a punch drunk boxer called One Round. And one of them is a sophisticated former Major kind of guy who acts so sophisticated, but he's a crook too. Alec Guinness, just hilarious. Like his teeth are the best thing in the movie, the way he has these odd-looking teeth.
SVW: His teeth and his hair. And his hair, and he, like, you know, we talked about how he looks, you know, he portrays these eight characters in Kind Hearts and Coronets and they're all different.And here he's yet different again. You know, it's not, you know, it's him, but he approaches the role like he transforms himself.
DH: He's one of those he's, you know, we have to talk about character actors and often a character actors, a kind of actor you see over and over. They often play the same kind of character.Guinness is one of these ones that can play any kind of eccentric character,
SVW: But he also was a Shakespearean actor.
DH: Oh, of course. Yeah, that's where he started. I'm sure. But he plays of he's pretending he's a professor, Professor Marcus. One of the joys of this if you're a fan of say Peter Sellers you know the Pink Panther movies and so forth this is Peter Sellers first movie and he worshiped Alec Guinness because Sellers was a comic actor he knew he was going to be a comic actor he came out of like sketch comedy and he adored, of course, Alec Guinness's performance doing eight roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets, and lo and behold, later in his career, in 1964, he does maybe the greatest example ever of an actor playing multiple roles.
SVW: In Doctor Strangelove. Right. Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.
DH: Right. When he plays the president, the British Air Force officer, and the insane scientist, Doctor Strangelove.
SVW: And also, Herbert Lomb is one of the the bad guys.
DH: Right. He's the gangster type guy.
SVW: And he was the foil for Peter Sellers in all of the Pink Panther movies.
DH: Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And he's in some of the other Ealing comedies as well.
SVW: And this is the film, The Lady Killers, was it was written by William Rose, the story in the screenplay, and he claimed that he dreamt the entire film, woke up, wrote down the story, and that's where the screenplay came from, whether that's true or not.
DH: I can imagine it's a super simple idea. Bunch of crooks take a room, pretend they're musicians, use the old lady to help them rob, and then everything falls apart. That's not in their ideas. The other couple…have you seen the man in the white suit or the lavender hill mob?
SVW: I'm not sure. I would say no. I would say no. Now maybe, you know, I saw so many movies as a kid on TV as a teenager and of course in my twenties watching them in in film school and also again on television all the time maybe I did I know that I know the titles they're familiar to me the title familiar but looking at the actors and also the plot lines I don't think I saw the film.
DH: The man in the white suit is kind of a social satire because that's about he plays this this chemist to nobody notices really and he gets himself a job and then he invents this perfect fabric, he invents a he's wearing he's wearing it in the latter part of the film a white suit completely white but the fabric is completely impervious to stain or dirt. It doesn't get dirty and it never wears out. So of course He does this, you know because he thinks it's the greatest thing to invent but of course the industry realizes we have to stop him because he'll never sell any clothes anymore.Everybody will get a few pieces of clothes and they'll last forever.So that's a bit of a British social satire.The other one, The Lavender Hill Mob, is another heist movie. In this one, he plays this sort of meek bank clerk, and his job, like once a week or once a month, is he accompanies an armored car load full of gold bullion. Big gold bars, like millions of pounds worth of gold bars. And he's done this for 30 years. And of course, he's the loyal bank employee, but he decides to rob it. And they robbed all the gold bullion, and then they melt it down. When he finally knows he can do the heists is when he finds a way, because let's say you had a bunch of gold bars. What would you do with them?
SVW: That's the question, right?
DH: Right. So and how would you ever, you know, get them somewhere else. So they figure out this plot to melt them down and make these tourists what look like tourist souvenirs in the shape of Eiffel towers.Those two movies are both delightful but the great ones are I mean from my way of thinking the Lady Killers is one of the greatest comedies ever made and Kind Hearts and Cornettes is right up there too. Should we talk a little bit about Ealing Studios? It's kind of interesting.
SVW: Yeah well I should say I should preface this by saying until we started talking about doing this episode. I had never really studied Ealing Studios. I don't remember hearing about Ealing Studios when I was in film school.I had not. I mean, you know, obviously seeing the Ladykillers. It was just a film, a British film that I'd seen. And so I didn't know about the importance of the Ealing Studios.
DH: You had never heard the term Ealing Comedy?
SVW: No.
DH: The Ealing Studios actually made.a lot of more dramas than they did comedies, today they're completely remembered for the comedies, the Ealing comedies. Ealing Studios was this little studio in London. It opened in 1902. I mean, that is the absolute beginning of film history, right?mean, there were barely any movies longer than a minute long made by 1902. So it's at the dawn of movie history, and it is still in business today. It is the longest continuously operating movie studio in the world. It's heyday was in the thirties, forties and fifties when it was run by a producer named Michael Balkan, who produced or supervised all the films. And he's one of the most important figures in British history. I had to research him a little, I knew about Ealing comedies, but I didn't know specifically about Michael Balkan. Michael Balkan made Alfred Hitchcock into who he was, I mean, he, Hitchcock, he produced Hitchcock's very first two or three features. And then he went on to produce the 39 Steps, Sabotage, Secret Agent, The Man Who Knew Too Much, all the great Hitchcock British films, or many of them, were produced by this Michael Balkan. And that was before Ealing. But then he got this job with Ealing Studios, and they made these wonderful films in the 40s and 50s with a strongly identifiable style.
SVW: Do you know how many Ealing comedies there are?
DH: You know, it was a small studio.I read they only on average produced about six movies a year, even during this height. There are six a year times, let's say 20, 30 years. So I don't know, there's probably 40 Ealing comedies. There's a few others that I've seen that are not. We only looked at today at Alec Guinness films, right? And maybe the most famous, but there's a few others that are really fun to one's called Passport to Pimlico one's called Whiskey Galore the Titfield Thunderbolt and the Maggie, so I mean it's the kind of thing where you can you know most of these movies are in the 90 minute range if not shorter some of them and just a kind of thing if you like this kind of movie just find the Ewing comic a lot of them were on available on places like canopy where you can watch them for free
SWV:And what is the do you remember when do you know when that when Ealing Studios ended?
DH: It hasn't ended.
SVW: Oh, it's still going.
DH: Remember I said it's still going, I'm sorry. I don't have a tip of my tongue, but there have been some recognizable names in movies produced recently that were healing. I mean, it's different ownership and everything, but that studio never closed down. It has not closed down since it opened in 1902. Well, thanks, Scott.
SVW: Well, thanks for joining us.
