The 1955 Ealing Studios classic The Ladykillers, a very British movie in almost every way, does not seem like an appropriate vehicle for a remake by Joel and Ethan Coen, known for their offbeat take on pop-Americana and their love of the South. At least not at first.
Both movies (the original was written by William Rose and directed by Alexander Mackendrick) are about an eccentric, alleged mastermind of a criminal and his band of odd minions, who try to hoodwink a little old lady in the course of a heist and getaway. If necessary, they plan to do her in — hence the amusingly ambiguous title. Well, in the Coens’ version, she’s not a little old lady: the bird- like frame of Katie Johnson in the 1955 film has been replaced by the generously proportioned Irma P Hall. And she’s black.
The little old lady of the original movie is surely practically a figure of English folklore, familiar in her tut-tutting to the police about apparent irrelevances, in her properness, even in her unconscious guile. She is not placed, in the 1955 movie, in the country village that would seem her natural habitat; she is now somewhere in urban anonymity, but she remains herself — the definitive little old lady.
To then give her as antagonist this eccentric criminal (about whom nothing is known, who is evil but in a sniggery sort of way) is brilliant. So is the fact that it is all a case of dramatic irony, in which we know more than she does; the radical curtailment of her view of matters is the bass note of the humour. To set the whole thing in a grey, toned-down post-war Britain, one that is also a kind of cosy Little England, and then to plot the whole thing as a black farce, is genius.
So it is odd, then, that the Coen brothers should end up remaking The Ladykillers, let alone transposing it to the American South. The original seems so specific to a particular time and place. As one watches the Coens’ version, however, it makes more and more sense. If you’re going to remake a good movie, make the transformation bold, and put your own spin on it. This is an intelligent, playful reworking, fun for someone who’s seen the original (as always, the Coen brothers are very allusive), and doubtless also for those who haven’t.
Instead of Alec Guinness, marvellous as the 1955 villain, we have Tom Hanks. Guinness is creepy in a way Hanks is not, though just playing Hanks against nice-guy type is a frisson (it works much better here than in Road to Perdition). And Hanks’s little “rat quiver laugh”, as it was nicknamed on set, is rather scary. Hanks claims he hasn’t seen the 1955 film, but it’s hard not to see a reference to Guinness in the way Hanks, doing his nervy laugh, sticks out his front teeth, looking both sinister and pathetic. Instead of a rather shabby-genteel Guinness in a flasher’s mac we have an orotund, overdressed professor of something unspecific, a Southern gentleman from another era, trying to pull the wool over an old lady’s eyes. In its own terms, it works.
Because we are told nothing about the master criminal’s past (though there is a hint of the loony-bin in the original), the character, if he is to compel, has to be constructed out of weird mannerisms and an air of unctuous menace. The menace is more distant in Hanks’s performance, though he manages the mannerisms very well. You even forget it’s Tom Hanks in there.
Making the old lady black is, of course, in the context of the American South, to add another layer of irony. Or perhaps it makes the story more predictable. At any rate, the tone of the thing, in the Coens’ cartoony South (one might almost call it Little Mississippi or Little Alabama), is so jokey, the film so much more a laugh-out-loud comedy than the ambivalent original, that it’s difficult to imagine that any harm could really come to the God-fearing Mrs Munson.
And it is, above all, a comedy. The style of the Coens’ film is lush where the other was bleak, which seems a logical and fruitful transposition, but it does decrease the sense of threat. Other things, like the fate of the manipulative professor, though carefully prefigured by the Coens, lack the dramatic punch of Guinness’s apparently God-ordained comeuppance.
Mostly, the Coens have set out to make us laugh, and they have done so, as they did with Intolerable Cruelty — when was it, a few weeks ago? The Ladykillers is funnier than many other American comedies, whether “adult” Ã la Intolerable Cruelty, or gross-out “teen” Ã la American Pie. Worryingly, though, in what may be a nod in the direction of the latter, deliberately debased genre, the Coens include here a plot-point involving irritable bowel syndrome.