Double Dose: The Ladykillers + The Ladykillers

 (Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple. This week, continuing my Coen Bros. rewatch and checking in on their source material.)

The Ladykillers (2004, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - dvd)
The Ladykillers (1955, d. Alexander Mackendrick  - hollywoodsuite)

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Easily the most maligned entry of the Coen Bros filmography (although Ethan's recent solo efforts are giving it a run) The Ladykillers is not all that bad of a picture, the problem is it is not all that good either.

It's easy to see from the vintage British film starring Alec Guinness what attracted the Coens to the story. Alexander Mackendrick's version, from a script (or a partial one, apparently) by William Rose, is an arch dark comedy about a rag-tag group of swindlers and heist men who befall upon a kindly old widow.  In the original the old lady is Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), who we meet as she ventures into the police station to update them on her previous report that the UFO that her neighbour saw was actually the neighbour boys performing a play. She's sweet and sees duty in being responsive to the law, but it seems clear she's just a little lonely. So when Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness in chonky false teeth giving a very The Man Who Laughs-style menacing grin on the regular) darkens her doorstep, arousing her parrots, but gracing her with eloquent diction, she's happy for him to take up her room for let. He, naturally, is up to no good. He brings in his crew, posing as a musical quintet, and they plot an armored car heist at the train station, not all that far away from Mrs. Wilberforce's abode. Unbeknownst to her, she is also an integral part of the heist.

The first half of the film is about keeping Mrs. Wilberforce at bay, while the second half, following the heist and Mrs. Wilberforce discovering their ruse, revolves around the complexities of murdering a kindly old lady.

The classic film has its eccentricities which are quite inspired for the time. The composite imagery that is used to make Mrs. Wilberforce's house at the end of a lane, ending at a ridge overlooking the train yards is a visual wonder. It's surreal but has purpose, especially for the finale when bodies need to be disposed of by dumping them over the edge onto the passing trains. The interiors of the house make for an equally clever set, with the house all askew due to the bombings during the great war. It doesn't seem like there's a single vertical line in the place that isn't off 90...pictures don't hang right. It feels more like something that would influence Tim Burton than the Coens.

But the Coens do feast on dark comedy and on crime, so the story, moreso than aesthetics certainly had an impact on them. Their rendition of the story transposes the events from London to modern day American south, in a small, quiet town in Mississippi. The kindly Mrs. Wilberforce is now the less kindly, but devoutly Christian Mrs. Munson (Irma P. Hall), who again we meet as she traverses to her local police station (a sleepy little place with cobwebs on it jail cell) to complain about a local boy's loud music playing the hippety-hop.  Tom Hanks, himself in prosthetics and full dapper garb, is The Professor, darkening her doorstep to take up her room for let, and inquiring about space, perhaps underground, where his quintet could perform.

The Coens hew pretty closely to the structure of the original, but bringing in their own flairs and improvements. They give each of the five members of the crew more distinct personalities, and more conflict between them. They justify the crew meeting in Mrs. Munson's basement and the ruse of being musicians as a means of disguising their need to burrow into the ground in order to tunnel to the underground safe house where a local riverboat casino stores its money before weekly transport. And when it comes time to start disposing of bodies, they have already established that there's a trash island off the coast of this sleepy town and a bridge under which the trash barges traverse. The best shots in the film are those Roger Deakins' composed overhead shots of the barges passing and bodies dropping down onto the trash heaps. There's beauty in all that refuse.

There are definite positives to both films, but fundamentally the story doesn't work in either case. In both films, there's an assumption that the elderly lady cannot tell the difference between live instrument playing and the playing on a phonograph or boom box. And when the lady of the house comes knocking, the men have to scramble into position that requires a lot of disbelief that the old lady wouldn't think something is up. In the Coens, there's two incidences of explosions, and it's only after the second that Mrs. Munson discovers their secret. I know it's all part of the farce of it all, but the suspension of disbelief, especially when both Missus Wilberforce and Munson are a bit of busybodies, is too much to bear.  The heists themselves have their cleverness, but despite being in the middle, they aren't the big centerpieces they aught to be. Then again, these aren't actually heist films proper, we don't want these guys to get away with anything, and we certainly don't want them to kill the old lady.

But the fact of the matter is, how can these men have seemingly little compunction for killing each other and yet can't seem to off a fragile old woman standing in their way? 

The Coens don't have a lot of Black characters in their films historically, nor do they regularly do contemporary productions (even things like Fargo are set a few years back in history from its production), so it is strange to me that they would try to centre a film in Southern Black community in modern day. I think there's a timelessness to deeply religious elderly church-going folk, but the Coens stabs at then-modern urban dialect, a lot of it coming out of Marlon Wayans' mouth, doesn't hit right...as much as Wayans tries to sell it. There's discord in the film between its gospel and gangsta influences. The Coens probably could have done better placing it in the early 1990's with a more boom-bip hip-hop soundtrack and the then already antiquated language of the streets of that era. I can just imagine how much more amusing Hall's bow-legged gait walking to the kick-drum rhythms of "I Left My Wallet In El Segundo" during the opening sequence would be, especially as she references the song at least three times (which by that point no youth would probably be playing vintage A Tribe Called Quest anyway).

I didn't get many laughs or a lot of joy out of either version of The Ladykillers. The performances are all pretty good-to-great, visually the classic has a grain to its film that gives it a lovely grit, while Roger Deakins is a master at play so frequently in the Coens version, but many good parts to not make for a good whole. It's not that something is missing from the recipe, the recipe is just flawed to begin with.