London - A gang of thieves rents a room in a pivotal location from a dotty old hen whose lonely, social instincts are a source of constant irritation to everyone. Director Alexander MacKendrick's strength is to supply a very clear sense of space to the movie, which continually pays out dividends. The location filming here is both picturesque, and supportive; as in the God's-eye view that begins the movie. The shot joins the locations the characters will need for the entire plot - a train terminal, a dead end street, a granny cottage, an untrafficked no-man's land behind some residences, and a bunch of traintracks. It gives viewers a very precise spatial logic which will be exploited for the rest of the movie. It's also decorated with opportune, real-life architectural/urban events; an imposing late Victorian water tower watches over the heist, the loopy disorder of Kings Cross provides an engaging maze for the shenanigans. The heist itself is physicalized and depends on the elbow turns of Kings Cross. MacKendrick is either a genius of storyboarding, or extremely original on a set, incorporating little details when he sees the chance. I can't imagine this film being half as good without this sense of location.
Just where you might expect the movie to run out of energy, or hit the wall, the climax arrives and it's even better than everything before it. The sequence, with characters running around yards and a hillock dispatching bodies and trying to kill each other, makes the movie almost like a Euro-noir. The wheel-barrel commute of the first body to the trainyard is an awesome composition. The shot of a doomed hood falling to his death on a ladder (into a cloud of steam) but determined to get off one last shot, will stay with me for a long time. The compositions aren't simply beautiful, but smart & striking; which is pretty rare for a comedy.
After a recent viewing of The Lavender Hill Mob, I popped this in dutifully, expecting that it had aged badly also. I definitely preferred this. It has much more humor; some is good (ripping the headlights off a car), some is weak (the phone booth gag). But at least it's trying, and you can recognize it's a comedy. I think Lavender Hill Mob got one laugh out of me. Ladykillers breaks up nicely into about 5 major movements. If you don't care for any particular space/segment, you only have to wait - at most - twenty minutes for the next one to begin. Thus, the heist which is clever enough, is over mercifully fast before it can hog the film (I hate elaborate heist flicks). In this case some plot-points are missed, but I didn't care. I've never been sold on a heist because of its persuasive setup. MacKendrick is terrific at inserting subtly-observed silliness which had me laughing out loud; the final, half-hearted cosh on Lawson's head with a blackjack, or the nuisance of a too-long scarf. The only strike against the film is that the color process looks like a hangover feels. And an insert shot of a cop on a rear-projected street at night may be the ugliest visual I've ever seen. The setup is similar to Arsenic and Old Lace except that it's actually funny. Alec Guiness's voice here sounds remarkably like the Grinch (Boris Karloff).
You can anticipate the London the Beatles will be tearing up in '64 in A Hard Days Night. After having little interest in England my whole life, the specificity of this geography made me want to go explore. This is the best thing I've seen in months. Fabulous movie. So clever it reminds me of Blood Simple, or, given that the Coens made a terrible remake of The Ladykillers, they borrowed from this to make the somewhat similar Blood Simple.
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