The Cinematheque

“Going to see something like The Ladykillers when I was 10 or 11, you didn’t get the subtleties of it, but you felt it—that wonderful house that they built … It works at a very simple level, but if you see it as an adult, you see something very subtle.”

Terence Davies

A heist thriller where the pinnacle scene is an extended, courteous invitation to afternoon tea, The Ladykillers is full of danger, yet it’s a danger constantly undercut by an impish delight in contrasts. ​“Mrs. Wilberforce, I understand you have rooms to let,” intones Alec Guinness, a moment borrowed for the opening of Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes. Guinness is posing as a music professor who loves to play violin with his friends. What he’s actually up to is a smash-and-grab van robbery, one that includes his new landlady as the perfect alibi. Guinness was one of the most popular actors anywhere at the time, and he’s joined by a nearly cartoon crew, including a young Peter Sellers. (When they gather to plot the job, it’s as if they’re transformed into boys making mischief in an attic hideaway.) But it’s Katie Johnson as Mrs. Wilberforce who steals the show. Whether surrounded by parrots, cops, or thieves, she is imperviously eccentric.

“The ultimate fractured fairy tale, one in which a first-act robbery is directed with all the cross-cutting suspense of a Hitchcock film, while the second act [is] the height of farce.”

Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

“A revelation … [The film’s restoration] does justice to its rich, bold use of Technicolor.”

Dave Kehr, The New York Times