Part 1 is on my other blog, here.
Subsections below:
The theft: quite
different between the films
The crooks’
comeuppance is more chaotic in the older film; the dumping-off-bridge nexus is
different but emblematic for both films
The tail-end is
remarkably similar in both films
Conclusion
The theft: quite
different between the films
One big difference between the 1955 and 2004 versions of The Ladykillers is how the theft is
managed. It happens about one-third of the way through the 1955 film, while it
is further along in the 2004 film. The way the Coens have the plot element of
the men needing to tunnel underground from Ms. Munson’s house to a nearby
casino’s underground counting house is, I think, a potent way to introduce a
lot of plot development, and helps beef up the 2004 adaptation. In the 1955
film, the robbery is done with the men causing a traffic tie-up and stealing
the money, in its metal boxes, from a sort of armored car and putting it into a
sort of steamer trunk, loaded onto another vehicle.
Significantly, the 1955 group of crooks transport the trunk
to a local train station, and have arranged that Mrs. Wilberforce pick it up on
the understanding it contains possessions of the professor’s. This means a lot
of different plot aspects, which themselves aren’t so bad, but are at times a
little murky (for instance, we don’t always know quite what’s up at the train
station, at least on first watching); the Coens’ way of doing the robbery, I
think, means a much more engaging, suspenseful set of plot stuff.
A key plot bit in the 1955 film, which the Coens opt not to
include in their own, is that because Mrs. Wilberforce has been implicated in
the crime by transporting the trunk at one point, the men, when she is onto
them, use this fact as a way to try to (gently) blackmail her into doing what
they want. This, of course, adds to some complexities of conscience (hero-like)
for Mrs. W., though only for a short time.
Another part of the theft sequence in the 1955 film—which part
I think is all of being clumsily staged, choppily edited, and not entirely
necessary—is that Mrs. W. momentarily frustrates the crooks, who are (hidden
from her) watching her progress transporting the trunk, when she stops to
intervene in a situation where a street-side vendor is trying to shoo away a
horse that has been eating the man’s vegetables that are his items for sale.
This scene might have seemed promising and entertaining on paper—yes, it could
work in some film—but here it’s
clumsily enough rendered, and enough of a distraction from the larger story,
that I feel it could have been left out. But then, as with other things with
these films, maybe some diehard fans of the 1955 film would staunchly leave
this sequence in.
The crooks’ comeuppance
is more chaotic in the older film; the dumping-off-bridge nexus is different
but emblematic for both films
Another major way the 1955 film is different from the 2004
is in the denouement, how the crooks get vanquished, in what turns out to be a
way both comical and about as over-the-top as some of the earlier doings (i.e.,
the crooks end up getting maybe worse than they deserve), but is also rather
scattered and wandering in structure.
The Coens straighten this situation out, and it also seems
to go rather quickly, when the crooks—resolving to kill the old lady, which
would seem the full fruition of what the story premises promised—first draw
straws (this situation is pretty
similar between the films), and then, one by one, they go to try killing the old
woman, and each meets a bad end in an almost Rube Goldberg-mechanism–caused
way. The professor, as it happens, gets “offed” in a way seemingly almost a
ludicrous accident not dependent on his making a strong effort specifically to
kill the old woman.
In the 1955 film, perhaps as appealed to viewers quite
nicely in its day, the group starts to disintegrate as a group, and their
efforts shift to one or another trying to get away by himself with the money,
and/or (maybe with a welling-up of goodwill and good sense) shirk his
“responsibility” to kill the old woman. And it isn’t that just one (or two) tries to kill one or more of the others, as is
true of the 2004 film. Still, various men in the 1955 film die in ways that
seem quite unexpected, but in keeping with the ludicrous potential of the comedy
for this film.
##
The general idea of dumping bodies off a bridge—which has a
memorable visual impact—is handled both similarly and differently between the
films. The 2004 film has the crooks dump the bodies off a high, river-crossing
bridge—a lot of this seems CGI’d, maybe built on some “root” footage taken of
some real infrastructure—onto garbage barges that are patiently towed by
tugboat underneath, and down what seems the Mississippi River to an island
landfill project ahead near the horizon.
The Coens even, in their own script, rhetorically sketch a
wider-cognizing set of premises for this, with the lively minister partway
through the film including in his sermon references to, for the damned, a
“garbage island” and scavenger birds feasting off their bodies, etc. This might
be considered in line with the general-concept pessimism that seems to lace
much of the Coens’ work, and leads some critics to call them “misanthropes” or
the like (though, in a discussion that could be maybe done later on this or my
other blog, the Coens could be considered an heir to Woody Allen in weaving
delightful comedy with a sort of underlying philosophic pessimism, even though
they don’t, probably, have a total lack of hope about Man/Woman and his/her
ends).
In the 1955 film, the bridge-dumping situation is nicely
specific and colorful (not in the sense of “bright colors” but in the sense of
a rich array of details), and may be a good part of what roots this, for some
viewers, as the “gold-standard film” for any “take” on a Ladykillers-type story. In an environment that seems classic
coal-country England, Mrs. Wilberforce’s house, at the end of a dead-end
street, backs up to a semi-undeveloped area of land that, with maybe a couple
hundred feet between them, abuts a sort of bridge or trestle over a multi-track
railway that runs under the bridge; the rail lines are very roughly parallel to
the direction the house faces (which is away from the railway), with the bridge
perpendicular to these lines. So if you went outside Mrs. W.’s back door, you
would trundle down some declining, greenery-covered ground, walk among concrete
structures of whatever sort, and come to the railing (or balustrade, or
parapet) at the edge of the bridge. You could very easily, say, dump a dead
body over the edge of this railing/parapet, let it fall into the cargo car of a
passing train, and get an inconvenient result of your murderous deed nicely out
of the way.
The setup is much dirtier in the 1955 film, one way being
that the coal-burning trains, as they pass under the bridge, belch up a ton of
smoke, which momentarily obscures the men who have been dumping off the body,
the corpse feet-up in ludicrously comic style. (While the Coens’ situation is
cleaner, it allows them more vivid, detailed images, and occasional Coens-style
comedy involving details. For instance, when Garth Pancake’s and Mountain
Girl’s bodies are dumped off the bridge, one after the other, they both seem to
have remarkably hair legs, don’t they? At least the latter one does.)
In the 1955 film, the situation first seems echoed in the
neater, every-crook-gets dumped situation of the 2004 film, where first the
Major is dumped, and then Mr. Robinson (a wheelbarrow is used to carry each).
The men turning on each other happens in a more messily complex way than in the
Coens film; and in a 1955 bit quite unparalleled in the 2004 film, dopey
“One-round” ends up in a situation where he has the other two crooks at bay
near the bridge with a gun, with “Who looks stupid now?”…and a mad scramble
ensues covered with train smoke….
The tail-end is
remarkably similar in both films
I won’t reveal all the details of the remaining denouement,
but suffice it to say it reaches its end in a more complex way than in the 2004
film (with Lom’s character and the professor dueling it out); and with the
billowing of train smoke (and train-whistle hooting), and other haphazard ways
the men deal with each other, sometimes the situation is murky and a bit
confusing, not just because of the photography. There is something about this
almost like a scrambling war/action film.
This flavor, when you consider the horror-film touches
earlier in the film, show that in those days, there was no surefire recipe for
making a black comedy; it borrowed from other genres, and maybe it was by sheer
luck combined with a sort of creativity in making the film that what comes off
is not an off-putting mishmash but a patchwork of borrowed tropes and tones
that synthesize into a gritty forerunner of what would later be seamless standard
fare (and easily pulled off, whatever the plot elements), black comedy with an
edge to it.
##
The final scene in the 1955 film is almost copied very
closely by the Coens. After the professor has been “offed” with an accidental
clunk in the head, we quickly cut to Mrs. W. in the police station, where she
tries to do her duty as a citizen to report on what she could of what happened
with the bank robbers. The police, of course, already confirmedly skeptical
about Mrs. W., respond as if she is just talking more fantasy, and when she
asks what do they want her to do with the money, the policeman says she can
keep it. Which surprises her, but which she assents to, reasoning (similar to
the Coens’ version) that the stolen money only means “one farthing” is added to
each of the insurance policies of the underwriters of the bank.
As she heads home, she hands a big-denomination bill to a
panhandler, who is shocked at what he got.
Conclusion
The 1955 film is like an old photo album, some of it
degraded and murky with age (with clumsy or low-budget production aspects,
maybe OK for audiences in their day, looking more cloddish with time), but
somehow conveying a bright new idea, a sort of cross between horror, crime
drama, and sharp comedy, some of which (like a con-artist “professor” whose con
isn’t as foolproof as he thinks) could still tickle audiences almost 50 years
later when the Coens fashioned their own twist on it.
So like I said (as I spelled out carefully in Part 1),
compare it with the 2004 version, and enjoy what works in both. To condemn the
Coens’ version as if they defiled an old treasure is an off-base judgment.
