My DIY film/writing school

Two Ladykillers

The Ladykillers (1955):

• I had to stop myself thinking "That's Obi-Wan!" every time Alec Guinness had a line. What a great voice. What a great actor! He was genuinely creepy in this one.
  
  
• Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom together, 20 years before the Pink Panther sequels. How cool is that!
  
  
• What a delicious black comedy plot! And this plot most definitely comes from well-defined characters, ie if the characters weren't like they were, the story wouldn't happen. That's a good story.
  
  
• Makes great use of genuine suspense. One of the best surprise endings I've ever seen - and so quick!
  
  
• Very nice nuanced acting from all the main players - quite unusual compared to other British 50s films I've seen that come across like stage plays.

The Ladykillers (2004):

• Brilliant remake. Just enough of the original, and just enough brand new material to make it work. For me, anyway.
  
  
• The music was fantastic. Eerie, and suffusing the whole story with a bit more depth and spirituality than the original. While the original was just a dark comedy, this version is a cautionary moral tale of divine order triumphing over human will. Or maybe it's just that our new surround sound system made the negro spirituals sound really really good...
  
  
• Tom Hanks is great. He plays a character who is a bad actor - the character is, not the actor playing him. That's good acting!
  
  
• I note from IMDb's trivia that Tom Hanks deliberately didn't watch the 1955 version, so as not to be influenced by it. Good call.
  
  
• While the 1955 version showed a fairly uniform culture in England, the 2004 version fairly went out of its way to show us a multi-cultural society - and not just black and white either, but black hip-hop (or hippity-hoppity!) and black church, and southern gospel vs. classical studies gospel (the Professor's conversations and cross-purposed misunderstandings with Murva). Very interesting and funny in a funny way.
  
  
• Recurring imagery of the barge under the bridge, like they did with the train in 1955. Interesting that it's okay to show a body fall into a pile of garbage now, but it wasn't okay in 1955 to show a body falling into an empty train cargo carriage.
  
  
• As well as extra spirituality, this had a whole extra dose of culture, with quotations from Shakespeare and, most notably, Poe.

All in all, both versions of Ladykillers were very satisfying film viewing experiences.

posted by Simon @ 9:58 am