Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [49]
The Ladykillers was the Ealing Studio’s last great comedy, a film both of the studio and against the studio. Ealing’s longtime head, Michael Balcon, had envisioned and created a dogmatically British cinema—films that were homegrown, popular, and inconceivable in any other national film industry. Under Balcon’s supervision, the best Ealing directors—Mackendrick among them—developed a style so consistent that by the mid-1950s it had become formulaic: An identifiably British setting (a city block in London, an island in the Hebrides, a manor house in the country) turns out to be populated by crazed eccentrics, or hurled into chaos by some fantastic event, or both. Surface realism meets absurdity—a biting comment on the kingdom.
But with The Ladykillers, Mackendrick set out to satirize not only British society but Ealing’s own internal culture as well. In The Ladykillers, the familiar British setting represented the very studio in which Mackendrick worked: Mackendrick himself was the chief eccentric, who, in this case, was so defeated by Balcon’s enforced conventionality that he left Ealing after finishing the film.
The Ladykillers concerns an elderly, Victorian-throwback widow, Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson). She seems sweet enough at first glance as she walks down a residential London street, but at the steps of a police station she looks into a baby carriage and causes the baby to shriek in terror. The infant’s wail is predictive. In the course of the comedy Mrs. Wilberforce reveals herself to be so profoundly irritating that garroting her, knifing her, and shooting her become increasingly desirable outcomes in the minds of both characters and audiences alike.
She takes in a lodger, Professor Marcus (Guinness, wearing hideous ratlike teeth), who uses his upstairs rooms to plan a heist with four henchmen: a jovial, well-spoken major (Cecil Parker), a dopey, sentimental boxer called One-Round (Danny Green), a frightening thug dressed all in black (Herbert Lom), and a Teddy Boy named Harry (Peter). (The British historian Arthur Marwick defines the Teddy Boy as “the first nationally recognized figure representative of youth’s detachment from the rest of society and representative of the fact that for the first time working-class youth could take the initiative.” The name comes from the Edwardian-style suits the boys wore as a kind of uniform; they got the idea from upper-class spivs of the late 1940s.) The thieves tell Mrs. Wilberforce that they are members of an amateur string quintet and incessantly play a single piece—Boccherini’s String Quintet in E Major—on a record player to disguise their criminal planning sessions.
When casting calls began in the spring, Dennis Selinger arranged for Peter to meet with Mackendrick and the film’s associate producer, Seth Holt—but not for the role of Harry. They wanted Peter to read One-Round. It wasn’t a particularly successful audition. As Mackendrick told Selinger, “Frankly, we can’t see him with a broken nose and a cauliflower ear.”
Holt, however, had the inspiration of casting Peter instead as Harry—the role for which Mackendrick had originally considered Richard Attenborough. Peter may have ended up playing another role or two in The Ladykillers as well; both Guinness’s and Mackendrick’s biographers insist that Peter provided the voices of Mrs. Wilberforce’s two parrots.
Birds aside, Peter could certainly produce a flawless working-class Teddy Boy voice, but his casting in The Ladykillers caused him great anxiety nonetheless. This strange, morbid satire might bomb; his film career might be scuttled; he was terrified of failure. Michael Balcon later described him as being “desperately anxious” while shooting his scenes: “He kept asking: ‘Is it all right? Am I any good?’ ”
Mackendrick’s painstaking directing style, combined with the sheer length of time