Tenth in
a series: Post-9/11 Blues,
Internet-infected Brave New World: A
revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture
Also fits this series: America
through a Coens’-eye lens
For a “directors’ dossier” on
the Coens, see here.
Subsections below:
Background
A little cultural touchstone
of sorts
The rogue’s gallery
(and cast of nicer people)
A fascinating
sequence: when the General tries to kill Ms. Munson
Miscellaneous other typical
Coen features
Playful cross-references
The most conspicuous gospel songs
More-arcane allusions
Actors reappearing in Coens films
“Many done took the low parson.”
—Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), the
elderly widow in this film (and the only person with admirable character, if a
bit naïve), in an early scene (in a police station) where she displays her
religious beliefs; “the low parson” presumably means the devil, and “took”
means “followed” (and if my quoting is off, it shows how the Southern accents
can sometimes be a bit tough to get around, but generally make for fun, colorful
talk in this film; when she says in the same scene, “How can it he’p [help] but
do!,” she’s being more accessible, and shows the fun local color in this film)
[Edits 1/17/16.]
Gwump—gwump—gwump—gwump…. Heard outdoors (from inside a
closed building) and at a distance, it’s the muffled, resonating bass from some
charged-up folk-music performance, and we see a neat white building in a shot:
is this a juke joint down South? No, it’s a modest church, a Baptist facility,
it will turn out. The music inside? Lively gospel, and if you sample the two
performances in extras on the DVD for this remake of The Ladykillers before
watching the film, and if you don’t get a “Whoooop!!”
excited charge out of the first, more rousing number (“Shine on Me”), then you
might not especially like this film as a whole (while I don’t think anyone
would hate it).
That’s because this film is a sort of broad-audience,
pop-culture sampler from the Coens, in some ways on the atypical side for them;
but for me, in particular, if you don’t like its best music (which might lend a
gloss to the rest of the film), then you might not like the rest, which would
go to show you simply don’t share the taste to value the Coens’ way of patching
together bits of Americana, visions of less-than-noble episodes in man’s
behavior, and flights of whimsy, in a stew that for many carefully-watching
people would be often amusing, though maybe sometimes a bit off-putting.
##
This film sometimes gets critically dismissed, as if it were
decidedly lesser fare from the Coens—but I happen to like it, having seen it
several times on DVD (and maybe the first time in the theater). Like a lot of
Coens works, which may seem a bit disjointed (in story) on first viewing, the
more you see this, the more the story comes together and the details add up
amusingly. It may be a patchy film, and it came within a period (~2000-04),
including their Intolerable Cruelty
(2003), when the Coens were usually doing more mass-audience-aimed work (though
in their case, “mass appeal” work is like vinegar and roughage with a little
sweetening added).
(It’s interesting that, as they’ve aged, and perhaps as for
many other fifty-somethings, family concerns [like tuition for college for their
kids] have shaped their aging person’s thinking, they’ve bitten the bullet and,
amid their more preferred work, done remakes—another is True Grit [2010]—and have worked with Steven Spielberg both on that
2010 film and on Bridge of Spies
[2015].)
I think it’s useful to see The Ladykillers as a companion piece to O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and not simply because both are
set in Mississippi
(this while Ladykillers is set in the
modern day, with one of the criminals in a decidedly anachronistic style in his
costume and speech, while for the earlier film the time is a parched 1937). Ladykillers features music produced and
arranged by T Bone Burnett, as does the
earlier film, except with more modern stuff mixed in (and some regular
soundtrack “underscoring” by longtime Coens associate Carter Burwell).
Also, while O Brother
dealt with archetypically Southern topics, it seemed strangely low in its
representation of Black life. Ladykillers
happens to make up for this, with Blacks occupying both bad and, most notably
in Irma P. Hall, good characters. The
gospel music on this film is a special treat, and I recommend you watch the two
extras just mentioned that show a gospel choir (more on them later) singing a
couple songs, to instrumental accompaniment, to whet your appetite for what localized
culture this film acknowledges most heartily. As for the film’s story itself,
it is more farcical than usual for a Coens work, though with their trademark
black humor and occasional stark violence mixed in.
Background
This film is based on an old (1955) Ealing Studios farce, which
featured the likes of Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers (and even Herbert Lom,
who would later be a comic foil to Sellers in the Pink Panther films). I
haven’t seen the older version, and thought I would try to locate it and check
it out, after a friendly librarian at a New York State library where I often
borrow DVDs said the older version was her father’s favorite film (and judging
from her apparent age, he, if still alive, would be of a
generation that would mean the older Ladykillers
is definitely of older-times tastes, but still might be fine for me to check
out).
The Coen brothers’ version updates things, of course—with
colorful curse words, occasional rap music on the soundtrack, and their smart,
tightly edited way of maximizing a sort of pinpoint satire. But it is amusing
for taking a sort of droll story—featuring a Southern con man (Tom Hanks) with an elaborately loquacious, pretentious way
of talking, and some henchmen he randomly gathered through an ad in a
newspaper, who all pursue an almost Looney Tunes plot of tunneling from an
elderly woman’s house toward the Mississippi River, to get into the land-based
safe room, where money is kept, for a riverboat type of floating casino.
While this is another Southern-locale story, it is not a
highly mimetic “slice of old-time life”; here there is not the careful visual
styling (the sepia-photos look) or the thoroughgoing, fastidious attention to
amusing Deep South accents, idioms, etc., as in O Brother. Hanks’ character seems a cross between a florid
eccentric and an anachronism, but this is a modern-day story whose being
“old-timey” lies largely in the impeccably old-values manners, decency, and
illusions of the old widow, Marva Munson (Hall), whose house the criminals use
(fooling her at first, of course) as a base for tunneling to their quarry. And
while the soundtrack features a lot of tasty, old music (per T Bone Burnett),
this story in good part gets its humor and some of its situational premises
from the loser-on-the-street modern day.
A little cultural touchstone
of sorts
Another aspect of this film’s take on certain Americana and
tradition is to look at a culture—Black and Baptist in particular—while accepting
it in its colorful style, and holding it as a sort of location for comic doings
that are not inevitably the result of that culture. (Indeed, in their films
including Fargo [1996] and O Brother, the evil that some people
seem a bit too “simple” to comprehend at first seems something from “beyond”
any particular local culture. Even their seemingly very personal A Serious Man [2009] depicts a local
Jewish mensch grappling with Job-like travails, but this suffering seems an “evil”
that was not inherently a part of his very particular culture. Anyway, this
whole theme, seeming worthy of a chunky term paper, seems like it should be put
aside here.)
Anyway, there was some old saying, or poem (which I first
heard about in The American Scholar
years ago), commenting on the socioeconomic differences between the different
Protestant denominations in the U.S. It included, “A Methodist is a Baptist
with shoes…. An Episcopalian is a Presbyterian living on dividends….” Or
something like that (there was more to it, climbing the ladder of all the major
Protestant denominations from poorest to richest). Well, the Baptist
congregation where Marva Munson goes for rousing services (including music) has
no problem about having shoes. Everyone is dressed nicely, and….
I will limit myself in this entry on this film, pending my
locating (as may take a lot of time) the older Ladykillers and viewing it, and comparing the two. Some of the
whimsical humor here seems to take off from the older, which would possibly
have been overall a bit of dry, black-humorous British whimsy. But don’t
consider this entry a Part 1, with a Part 2 taking a little too long to come;
consider a later entry on the old and new Ladykillers
a “spring robin” that shows up weeks from now, like a delightful surprise.
The rogue’s gallery
(and cast of nicer people)
* Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, Ph.D. (Hanks) is a wordy man
who claims to be a professor of classical languages (Latin and Greek) who also
has a fondness for Edgar Allan Poe; he is the leader of the crooked group, and
Hanks seems to have a fun time trying to wind into Dorr’s loquacious talk displays
of varying emotion and rhetorical (or devious-minded) angles. For instance, he has
Dorr show his dubious side as he gets a bit strained when talking with Ms.
Munson, showing his crooked intent through his pandering ways (while she doesn’t
always catch him “tipping his hand”); other times, he just shows (in any number
of settings, including his cohorts) eccentricities through his more “astute
man’s” surface, such as a weird way of laughing.
The main problem viewers may have with Dorr is that some of
his talk is so elaborate, it may be hard to follow at times (and some lines I
still haven’t fully gotten, either). (Also, though he seems to have some level
of education, in his ruse with Ms. Munson, he can’t be consistent with the
details of his pretense of having his musical group play Renaissance-era music;
at a few points there are references to his doing music from the “Rococo,”
which was a different artistic period entirely—about [correction] 225 years later,
perhaps.)
* Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons)
is the improbably-named handyman and factotum of the group, and is able to
determine which tools to use, and will use them; he is able to access
explosives (he says he has a “pyro” license), etc. (We wonder why he doesn’t
get a legitimate job, with all his qualifications.) We first meet him working
as a sort of prop manager for a filming company for TV commercials. At times he
speaks somewhat ponderously, but in the way of a can-do sort who thinks aloud
to solve a problem. He is a transplant to the South, originally from Scranton,
Pennsylvania.
At one point Garth, addressing Gawain, is a bit pompous (even
while trying to appeal to Gawain reasonably) in recalling his 1960s civil-rights
work (having consorted with the Freedom Riders); but with Gawain (at numerous
points, throughout the film) he ends up having a lot of heated quarrels. The
sparks flying between the two characters are actually among the acting/comic
highlights of the film (if you like salty, curse-laden comedy). Garth also
consorts with a female companion, Mountain Girl (Diane Delano), who works with
him so closely (he says she helps him with “ordnance, damned near everything”)
that she is unexpectedly allowed (if with some resentment) to become a junior
member of the group.
The Coens weave in some multiple uses of the topic of “IBS”—irritable
bowel syndrome—which Garth suffers from. No surprise, a lot of low/midbrow
jokes are mined based on this—Garth had met Mountain Girl at an “IBS singles
weekend at Grossinger’s up in the Catskills”—but the script also weaves in, via
Garth’s earnest explanations, some educational info on this chronic disorder.
Less academically, Gawain sums up the comic sides of the
couple when he refers, in various arguments with Garth, to Mountain Girl as the
“Swiss miss” and (later) as a “60-year-old with pigtails” with whom he
derisively remarks Garth is consorting (to paraphrase nicely), with Garth thereupon
heatedly retorting (in a physical fight) that she is only 53. “Professor” Dorr
also, a couple times, mistakenly refers to Mountain Girl as “Mountain Water.”
* Gawain (Marlon Wayans)
is the most comically heated and boisterous member of the group, and provides
the “hippest” humor. He has gotten a housekeeping job at the casino whose
office/counting house the criminal group is aiming to tunnel into, so he is the
group’s “inside man.” A lot of his routines have to be seen to be appreciated.
His effusive vocalizing after the group has had a mishap with explosives is
funny but in a sort of manic-jabber way.
* “The General” (Tzi Ma) is a nearly-wordless man whose
expertise brought to bear is tunneling, which he learned in Southeast Asia
during guess which 1960s-70s war. Having come to the robbery project from
running a small, no-name donut shop, he seems efficient but is dour, and one
repeated comic bit has him repeatedly trying to sneak a cigarette in the root
cellar in which the group is, with Marva Munson’s permission, camped out for
their supposed instrument-playing practice. As a speedy spur-of-the-moment
thing, the General has a way of tipping a lit cigarette in his mouth to hide it
from Ms. Munson (which, in real life on the set, Ma must have had a safe way of
doing, but how, I don’t know). His cigarette-“swallowing” trick will end up
leading to his demise.
* “Lump” (Ryan Hurst) is an incompetent football player who
is among the others because he answered an ad in a local-city newspaper that Dorr
had run to get accomplices. He is on hand as, per Dorr’s appreciative
characterization, a “hooligan,” a “goon,” a “brute,” a “battering ram” (some
kind of qualifications for filling a job, right?)…and amusingly, though he often seems
borderline “developmentally challenged,” he sometimes provides moments of
unusual smarts to either help the group (coming up with the idea of bribing
Gawain’s boss) or heroically hinder the professor (near the film’s end).
* Other characters include Sheriff Wyner (George Wallace), whom we meet at the beginning and end of the
film, and appears briefly at Ms. Munson’s house midway through. The Wikipedia
article on the film calls him lazy, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I
think he and his white deputy, as can be seen in the opening scene and as can
be seen near the end, are continually skeptical of her, not as if they feel she
is mad or a crank, but just that she is an old, no-longer-streetwise widow,
steeped in her religious life, who is subject to a lot of illusions and
fantasy, so they are unapt to come to her help (except for getting her cat out
of a tree, and the chore of advising a local youth on his use of a “[ghetto]
blaster”) when she reports a problem.
The scene where Sheriff Wyner is at her house and Dorr hides
under the bed is directed to make it seem almost as if Dorr was a fantasy of
Munson’s, hence the sheriff’s “judicious” inclination not to want to meet Dorr.
In fact, as we see near the end, it is the police’s continual skepticism (but
not contempt) toward Ms. Munson that allows them to tell her to keep the money
that was stolen from the casino.
But the charm of the film is that, however much the local
lawmen don’t take her seriously, and though she was taken in by the crooks at
first, she has enough character and common sense (and “influence” from her dead
husband) to stand for the right and good in the film.
* Mr. Gudge (Stephen Root, who played Mr. Lunt, the
funny/grotesque radio-station owner in O
Brother) is Gawain’s low-key but colorful-enough, Southern-accented boss.
Root seems like a resourceful character actor, from evidence in both the Coen
films he’s in.
Among the film’s many amusing details, both Mr. Gudge and
Garth, in separate situations, refer to Gawain (to his face) as “McSam,” though
neither of the white men would have met each other. I don’t know whether “McSam”
is a racist type of reference, or racially indifferent, but it is among the
many slang and earthy instances of manners in this film.
A fascinating
sequence: when the General tries to kill Ms. Munson
The Coens may be considered similar to Stanley Kubrick in
that, while there is evident technical mastery in how the films are assembled,
there can be a certain off-putting coolness about them. I was rather surprised
at first to hear a famous actress on TCM one time saying that, as a measure of
Kubrick’s later films, she found parts
of The Shining (1980)
interesting/pleasurable, but not the whole thing. I found this a bit odd—why
not either like or dislike the whole thing?—but then I could see the point.
With the Coens, even if you like the overall comedy of a
given film, there may be some parts that come off better than others—or the
tone plus the execution can make a part stand out from the rest of the film
(and sometimes the tone of such a case may depart from that of the whole film).
With Ladykillers, a fascinating
sequence comes near the end, in the last segment of the film where it seems to
rush through the one-by-one demise of all the evildoers. When it is the General’s
turn to try killing Ms. Munson—which the film’s overall evident premise allows
us to assume won’t happen—he approaches her at night, as she sleeps in bed; he
is holding taut a wire, as if he’s going to strangle her. The whole scene is
quite well executed, and mixes a different batch of tones that might, in the
abstract, seem incompatible. Many shots of Ms. Munson’s quaint home and her in
bed, with cap on, seem charming and almost sentimental, even while the sinister
General is sneaking up on her (shots of her husband’s painting are
interspersed, with him seeming to register alarm [the playful details of the
facial expressions in the portrait changing to reflect what is going on is
apparently a detailed borrowed from Preston Sturges, an influence on the Coens).
The whole scene is underlain by what is to me a haunting and delightful bit of
a cappella gospel music, apparently courtesy of T Bone Burnett.
Just as the general is about to get her—after he has (as he
usually does easily) enclosed his cigarette in his mouth as a precaution—a
cuckoo clock sounds off, and he is startled. He accidentally gets the cigarette
caught in his throat—he didn’t mean to swallow it—and starts to gag. He reaches
for a glass of water, but it has Mr. Munson’s dentures in it. The dentures
slide grotesquely through the glass, and the general is put off wildly. He
hurries off, and the cat squeals by, disconcerting him even more. He falls down
the stairs almost like a flimsy Halloween dummy. He ends up dead at the bottom,
his face still and his body slid into the shot almost as if by a machine. The
next shot is of Dorr, in the cellar, looking up suddenly as if wondering what
the hell has just happened.
The whole sequence seems to mix charming sentiment, a bit of
dim-light horror, improbable Looney Tunes action, and an overall sense of
“moral comeuppance” that seems amazingly well combined and executed, from
close-up to more distant shot. People might overlook this sequence as it comes
in the rather-quick overall denouement of the film, but this sequence has
always had a grip on me whenever I’ve seen it. It shows what fine technicians
the Coens can be, even if the story is rather awful in minor respects (or other
parts of the film seem also-ran-ish for the Coens).
Miscellaneous other typical
Coen features
Playful cross-references. It’s amusing the way the Coens put
cross-references between their films—a sort of thing Stanley Kubrick did, in
his case with such bits as number sequences (e.g., something said in the
script) and an allusion to his 2001 in
A Clockwork Orange, etc.—which also
is a way of “cross-marketing”—presumably trying to get people to see the other
films, perhaps for them to catch the references in common between the films. As
with other stuff about the Coens, fanboys would have a bigger knowledge of
these than I do. But in Ladykillers,
the heroine, Marva Munson, has the same name as the no-nonsense Black female
judge in Intolerable Cruelty.
Also, Gawain says to his boss Mr. Gudge that a female patron he was ogling in
the casino had “an ass that could pull a bus”—an odd description, actually, and
amusing as being something admirable; but a similar line is in Burn After Reading (2008), when a female
says (to her doctor) that her ass is like this, without meaning it to be an
admirable feature.
The most conspicuous gospel songs. The main, live gospel
numbers—shown by a group in church scenes, but with full performances as DVD
extras—are performed by the Abbot Kinney Lighthouse Choir, with Rose Stone and
the Venice Four. (The instruments include acoustic guitar, and—less able to be
seen—electric bass and clunky but just-right drums.) I don’t know anything
about these singers beyond what the DVD provides, but they sound fine to me.
The two songs they do (sampled in the film) are “Shine on Me” and “Troubles of
This World.” (The extras versions have the sound strangely muted, but the sound
is fine in the film.) Not only are the live choir’s performances used in the
film, but instrumental or adapted voiced versions of the songs (in more
film-soundtrack style or in a pop-music vein) are also used on the soundtrack
(with these alternate versions presumably produced either by T Bone Burnett or Carter
Burwell, or both).
More-arcane allusions also pop up. At one point, there is a
riff between Professor Dorr and Ms. Munson on how a “Jew with a guitar” had
once appeared at her church, as she is relating how her church accepts
attendance by people of all denominations. This obviously is a playful
allusion—more obvious to some in the audience than to others—to Bob Dylan, whom
the Coens would much more extensively address (as a cultural touchstone) in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), where even
the look of the film was said to have been modeled after the cover of Dylan’s
first album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
(1963).
There is also a goofy exchange between Dorr and Munson, when
they are seated in her charming living room, which seems to have little more
purpose (as far as the larger story is concerned) than to allow a wordplay
joke—the sort of thing that fiction writers like Joseph Heller, John Barth, and
Thomas Pynchon used to engage in (especially in 1960s work). Munson wants to
show Dorr the “kali” [sp?]—a sort of hand-carved wooden fife—that her husband
Othar used to play. She remarks that, as a historical matter, its use went all
the way back to the Biblical Hebrews. Then Dorr raises a question, which seems
all but irrelevant (unlikely to have a positive answer): Had Othar ever played
the shofar, the ceremonial ram’s horn (as he says) used by Jews (in certain
religious proceedings)? Munson says no, seeming a bit vexed by the question.
She gives a slight cross edge to her line that seems the whimsical punchline of
this whole exchange: “Othar never blowed no shofar.”
Actors reappearing in Coens films. Again, Coens fanboys would
have a better handle on this, but J.K. Simmons appears again in Burn After Reading, and Stephen Root, as
I said above, also appears (memorably) in O
Brother.
