I have never actually seen this particular Ealing movie.” Tom Hanks is being honest, a trait for which those who run Hollywood and those who write about it have come to admire him. But maybe, in this context, it is a little too honest. ”That being said,” he continues, ”I’m certainly aware of it. I know it the same way I know the Carry On films — I’ve never seen any of those, either. But between reading old film catalogues and seeing [American Film Institute] documentaries on TV, I’m aware of it. Alec Guinness and all that.”
The film Hanks is comparing to the Carry On series is Alexander Mackendrick’s Sunday-on-the-sofa standard of 1955, The Ladykillers, which has stood for half a century as a near-perfect blend of film noir cynicism, grotesque, character-based comedy and high polish — complete with indelible performances by Peter Sellers, Katie Johnson, Herbert Lom, Danny Green and Alec Guinness.
Hanks is discussing it for a reason: under the auspices of the writing-directing team of Ethan and Joel Coen, he has remade it. And, to give him some credit, he is aware of what he has got himself into. ”I know that when the time comes to talk to English papers, they’ll just crucify us for doing it,” he says. ”But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. It’s not like we were gonna remake Jaws. But nor is it Scaramouche. It’s this other kind of thing.” Is it? Perhaps.
The Coen-Hanks version of The Ladykillers follows the original surprisingly closely. A louche and perhaps quietly insane fellow, alleging himself to be a college professor on sabbatical (Hanks), hires a room from a daft but morally upright old woman as a cover for a robbery.
He and his cohorts, operating under the guise of classical musicians, plan to tunnel from the landlady’s house to a vault, empty it and then abscond. Despite the serial ineptitude of the robbers, the first half of the scheme goes off without a hitch. It is the absconding — specifically, getting away from the old gal, who catches on to her lodgers’ true purposes — that proves troublesome.
The Coens’ version is set not in a small 1950s London street but in a one-horse, backwater town in contemporary Mississippi. The differences from Mackendrick’s film are sufficient, in fact, that one of the players in the Coens’ remake, comedian Marlon Wayans, who plays a member of the gang, was confused at his first exposure to the original.
”I didn’t know who I was,” he recalls. ”I was sittin’ there watching the original thinkin’, ‘There ain’t no black people in this! Who am I?”’
So the new Ladykillers is a remake and it is not — call it a variation on a theme. As it happens, both Hanks and the Coens have made remakes before (none so close as this to the original) and all three confess that the idea of doing it at all didn’t exactly leap out and kiss them.
”In the abstract,” says Joel Coen, ”we never would have said, ‘Let’s remake The Ladykillers.”’
Ethan continues: ”We wrote it for Barry Sonnenfeld, who was going to direct.” When Sonnenfeld (the Coens’ former cinematographer, now a director in his own right) bowed out, the brothers stepped in. But there was a moment of indecision when they were forced to think about the casting. ”As we wrote it,” Ethan says, ”we didn’t do our usual thing of thinking of actors who might do specific parts.” And for some reason, Hanks popped into their heads.
Hanks, too, initially had his doubts. ”If someone had said to me, ‘Listen, I’m sending you a script that’s a remake of The Ladykillers that Disney is making’, there’s just no way,” he says. ”I never would have got to reading it. But I was sent a Coen brothers script, and I leapt into that to see what it was like. It’s wonderfully Coenesque, yet at the same time it had this very specific story, a caper, and, as a selfish actor, I said, ‘Do they really want me?’ And that was that.”
Movies make strange bedfellows: although they are not sitting to-gether in the same room, the three men participate in a verbal group hug as they talk about the film — even if they don’t use exactly the same terminology. Take the matter of the laugh. Hanks’s character, the overeducated, seedily aristo-cratic southern gent GH Dorr, has a nervous, breathy laugh that emerges now and then like an embarrassed expletive of joy.
Hanks describes the origin of this strange gesture of mirth: ”By the time we had done a speech five or six times, we were all bored. Professor Dorr realised he had stumbled upon a joke; he had made a witticism that had surprised even him, and he had delighted himself probably a little too much. I had this vision that he’s a college professor of a very, very boring subject, and every now and again he would make these witticisms that he’d be the only one laughing at, up at the lectern. And it made Ethan laugh, so I just tried to make him laugh again and again over by the monitor.”
The Coens, though, in the curious tag-team fashion in which they complete one anothers’ thoughts, have a more technical explanation of Dorr’s strange chortle.
Joel says: ”We called it ‘the rat-quiver laugh’.” And the question was: How many times can you go to that well? How many times is too many for the rat-quiver laugh?
Ethan: ”There’s no formula, unfortunately.” (Later on, a comment elicits a laugh from the brothers, and a wheezy, staccato, croupy rasp comes pulsing out of them both. You wonder if Hanks hasn’t channelled the sound of his directors’ laughter into his character’s in so subtle a way that they themselves didn’t recognise it.)
Then there’s the dialogue — Dorr speaks in grandiloquent, rococo sentences stuffed with allusions and rhetorical flourishes. ”The first time I read it,” says Hanks, ”I said, ‘Okay, this is very intimidating because this is just a shitload of stuff that you’re gonna have to say.’ But on further study I realised, ‘This is beautiful because it is just a series of boxes of ideas and one does lead right into the next’.”
And the Coens?
Joel: ”Another person who speaks like that, who we mentioned to Tom, is [conservative pundit] William F Buckley.”
Ethan: ”He doesn’t have that regional thing, though.”
Joel: ”But he has that command of complicated and yet precise locution.”
Ethan: ”Each sentence is choreographed.”
Joel: ”And a very impressive vocabulary.”
Ethan: ”Yeah, the big words … Tom could pull it all off.”
Unlike Hanks, whose career has seen him bounce from lowbrow shenanigans to dark melodrama to historical epics to romantic comedy, the Coen brothers tend to stick to a noirish milieu in which traces of old movie genres adorn stories of criminals who aren’t quite as clever as they believe themselves to be. As Joel puts it: ”The criminals in our movies are, generally speaking, knuckleheads, so there is something amusing about them. You know what I mean? Their sins can sort of be looked at in an amusing way.”
Just as there is a thematic similarity to the items in their oeuvre, the Coens rely on a consistent body of collaborators — cinematographer, composer, production designer and so on. It has been the same team, the two explain, for most of the 20 years since Blood Simple.
Joel: ”Nothing’s really changed. It’s depressingly similar to the way we started.”
Ethan: ”It’s like going to work at the bank now. It’s all a routine. ‘Good morning, Marjorie.’ And Marjorie opens your cash drawer and gets you a cup of coffee.” He adds: ”Somebody once asked us about [John] Turturro, if we developed a shorthand with him working together over the course of all these movies. And we said, ‘It’s beyond shorthand. We don’t even talk to him!”’ — Â