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This article is about the 1955 original. For the 2004 remake, see The Ladykillers (2004 film).

The Ladykillers
original film poster
Directed by	Alexander Mackendrick
Produced by	Seth Holt associate producer Michael Balcon producer (uncredited)
Written by	William Rose
Starring	Alec Guiness Cecil Parker Herbert Lom Peter Sellers Danny Green Jack Warner Katie Johnson
Music by	Tristram Cary
Cinematography	Otto Heller
Editing by	Jack Harris
Distributed by	Continental Distributing Inc.
Release date(s)	1955
Running time	97 min.
Country	U.K.
Language	English
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

The Ladykillers is a 1955 British dark comedy film. It is one of a series of classic post-war Ealing comedies. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, it stars Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers, Danny Green, Jack Warner and Katie Johnson.

American William Rose wrote the screenplay, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and won the Bafta Award for Best British Screenplay. He claimed to have dreamt the entire movie and merely had to remember the details when he awoke.

In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted The Ladykillers the 36th greatest comedy film of all time.

A comically sinister criminal, "Professor" Marcus (Guinness), rents rooms in the gradually subsiding "lopsided" King's Cross house of an innocent and eccentric old lady, Mrs. Louisa Wilberforce (Johnson) - a widow who lives alone with her parrots. The Professor has put together a curious gang: the gentlemanly con-man "Major" Courtney (Parker), the Cockney spiv Harry Robinson (Sellers), the slow-witted ex-boxer "One-Round" Lawson (Green), and the vicious continental gangster, Louis Harvey (Lom). The Professor is in fact plotting a sophisticated armoured car robbery, but convinces Mrs Wilberforce, by having the gang members carry musical instruments and by playing records of chamber music during their planning sessions, that the group are amateur musicians using the room for rehearsal space.

Mrs. Wilberforce confronts Professor Marcus and his "ensemble"

After the successful heist, in which Mrs Wilberforce plays an unwitting but crucial role by escorting the loot through the police cordon, the real conflict of the film begins. As the gang leaves her house, One-Round accidentally spills his cello case full of banknotes in front of Mrs. Wilberforce. Realising the truth, she informs Marcus that she is going to report them to the police.

The gang, it seems, has no choice but to do away with her. However, no one volunteers to be the one to dispose of "Mrs. Lopsided". The Major draws the short straw requiring him to do the deed, but instead tries to make a run for it with the cash in hand. In quick succession, the criminals double-cross and kill one another, with the bodies dumped into railway wagons passing behind the house. Through all this, the marvellously oblivious Mrs. Wilberforce remains asleep.

In the end, the gang members are all dead, and Mrs. Wilberforce is left with the money. The police, familiar with her strange stories, pretend to believe her account of the robbery but jokingly tell her to keep the money. Ironically, Professor Marcus had earlier assured her that, because the money was insured, any effort on her part to return it would only confuse things. She is therefore finally persuaded that keep it she must.

The British comedian Frankie Howerd has a cameo role as an agitated market fruit seller, along with Kenneth Connor as a taxi driver. Jack Warner, who for many years on British television embodied the avuncular policeman "Dixon of Dock Green", plays the superintendent. A young Stratford Johns (Charlie Barlow from Z-Cars) plays the driver of the lorry that gets robbed.

The piece which is played repeatedly to deceive Mrs. Wilberforce is Boccherini's "Minuet (3rd movement) from String Quintet in E, Op.13 No.5".

A radio adaptation of the film was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 13 January 1996.

• The Ladykillers at the Internet Movie Database
• Then and now photographs of locations