While there is an argument for Kind Hearts and Coronets being Ealing’s most accomplished comedy, certainly their most famous is The Ladykillers (1955). Curiously it was a film that began life as a dream, and when screenwriter William Rose woke up he hurriedly wrote down as much of it as he could remember. The same day he met Alexander Mackendrick, for whom Rose had written The Maggie, for a lunchtime drink in The Red Lion and told him all about his idea of five criminals planning a robbery in the house of a sweet old lady. When she discovers what’s going on, they decide to kill her before she goes to the police, but they haven’t got the guts and end up killing each other. When the two men went to see Balcon to pitch the idea to him, Rose recalled that Balcon never took his eyes off him as he related the story, just occasionally glancing over in Mackendrick’s direction. When Rose finished, Balcon looked at them both and said, ‘As I understand it there are six principal people in this film and by the end of it five of them are dead and you call this a comedy?’
William Rose was an American born in Missouri who came to England after the war to get into films. After completing a screenwriters’ course, he at first struggled to find work. It was after writing Genevieve (1953) for Rank that he came to the attention of Balcon and arrived at Ealing. Following The Ladykillers, Rose wrote three further Ealing films, but none matched the bravura and originality of this dark comedy. In the 1960s he returned to America where he wrote two of his most successful films, the slapstick epic It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and the satirical Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Mackendrick had hoped to cast Alistair Sim as Professor Marcus, the unorthodox leader of a gang of crooks who stake themselves out in an old lady’s attic, pretending to be a string quintet. However, Balcon was against it. ‘We’re making money with the Guinness films, we’re on a run of strength there. It’s got to be Guinness.’ When Alec was offered the role and first read the script, he called Mackendrick up. ‘But, dear boy, it’s Alistair Sim you want, isn’t it?’ It didn’t matter. Professor Marcus became another brilliant Guinness Ealing character.
Guinness’s first approach was to play him as a cripple, dragging his leg pathetically across the floor. ‘In my office Alec gave an imitation of a cripple which was really gruesome,’ Mackendrick recalled. ‘Horrendously funny, but stomach-turning in its effect. So I had to say, no, sorry, Sir Michael Balcon will never, never stand for that.’ Guinness was a bit put out by this and went over to the window as Mackendrick continued going through the script. As he talked, Guinness grabbed a pair of scissors and cut out some paper teeth, which he nonchalantly popped in his mouth, turned round and grinned at Mackendrick. The effect was startling.
The rest of the gang were filled out brilliantly. David Peers, who worked on the film as production manager, recalls them all.
There was Peter Sellers, who was just starting in the business. Cecil Parker, who I knew very well. He was a lovely man, a very good actor but almost too nice to be in the film game. Herbert Lom was possibly the most difficult one of the lot; he had his own ideas. As for Danny Green, who played One-Round, well, he was exactly as you would expect being an ex-boxer. He was very nice, but not endowed with the greatest of brains.
All they needed now was to find the perfect location for the house. Norman Dorme and a few others from the art department went to King’s Cross to scout around. ‘I found a street, with Victorian terraced houses on either side, and a brick wall across the bottom, then beyond that was all the railway lines going out of King’s Cross station. I thought it was an ideal setting.’ This was Frederica Street, long since demolished. Even better, it was a No Through Road so it was ideal for filming purposes. ‘We built the house across that brick wall at the bottom, and that wall went straight through the house, although in the film it looks as if it just came in at the side.’ The house was a composite set with a reinforced roof, as people needed to climb on top of it. It was also perfectly proportioned and sturdily constructed in order to withstand the elements. There was nothing inside except a mass of scaffolding.
With the unit due to film there for several weeks it was David Peers’ job to go round to each house and tell the occupants what was going to happen. ‘The local people were very cooperative and didn’t complain at all. At this one house they were very charming people and used to allow us to go in and have a cup of tea. They also kindly offered their hospitality to the actors to go in and sit there and rest.’
Before starting work in the mornings, the crew would all meet up in a greasy spoon café near Frederica Street for fried egg and bacon sandwiches. Meanwhile the director and other senior types would breakfast across the road at the Great Northern Hotel. However, as the days went by, people gradually defected from the Great Northern, preferring the fry-up at the greasy spoon and the gossiping of the crew.
Dorme visited the location one day in order to measure up a few things that had to be reproduced in the studio. He climbed over the wall and walked down the embankment and across the bridge.
And when I got home, when I took my shoes and socks off, my feet were black – not just dirty, black! It was the soot. Everything around that area was layered in soot. I noticed something else, too. This was in the middle of summer but all the windows of the houses down the bottom of the street were tightly shut. It was fairly obvious why, and they all had that sort of sheen on them that you get with petrol on water. God, to have had to live in a place like that!
After a few years working as Balcon’s personal assistant, Michael Birkett had landed his first job on a film. ‘I was the third assistant tea boy on The Ladykillers,’ he jests.
And I had a motor car in those days – not everybody did – so I used to put the cast into it, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom and Cecil Parker. I used to drive them about and of course any insurance company would have had a heart attack if they found out, but in fact I didn’t crash into anything; I was quite a good driver. I used to drive them to and from location, we moved around quite a bit.
One of Michael’s jobs on The Ladykillers was unorthodox to say the least.
Sandy was very keen that there should be big puffs of smoke covering this house. So I was sent up onto the roof to see when the trains were coming. I sat up there and as one began to approach would shout, ‘Stand by’, and then finally, ‘Roll ’em, action’, which was the cue for Alec to start off down the path. And it worked, very successful I was. I had to duck behind the chimney when I said action so the camera didn’t spot me.
Michael remembers Katie Johnson, who played Mrs Wilberforce, the old lady the gang try to dupe, as enchanting and very sweet. The insurance company, however, were extremely worried due to her advanced years (she was in her mid seventies) and the possibility that if she died or fell ill the filming would have to begin again with another actress, and that would mean an increase in the budget. What they proposed was an enormous fee for her insurance. ‘Katie got to hear about this,’ recalls Michael. ‘And she came up to me one day on location and said, “I hear they’re having a little trouble with me on account of the insurance, so I’d like to help,” and she reached inside her purse. The actual premium was £1,500, something colossal like that, so the idea of Katie reaching into her purse for a couple of shillings to help was so sweet. I said, “Katie you’re not to do it, I won’t have it. It’s something the studio pays for so don’t worry yourself about it.” She was a darling lady.’
The whole crew adored her. The studio had put Katie up in a boarding house on Ealing Common, which was about half a mile away from the studio, and organised a car to pick her up in the morning and bring her in. ‘Oh I don’t need a car,’ she said. ‘I can walk.’ Another memory of Katie is that she had one of those old-fashioned sweet jars full of Fox’s Glacier Mints that she would bring onto the set with her and insist on giving one to Michael Birkett every day. ‘There you are, my dear, that’ll keep you going.’ The last thing Michael wanted at seven in the morning was to suck on a Fox’s mint. ‘So I used to put them back into a jar myself, and at the end of the picture I had a full jar of Fox’s Glacier Mints and Katie had an empty jar.’
In real life Katie was not at all like her screen character, who is rather absent-minded and an innocent in a changing world. ‘No, she was much brighter than that,’ reveals Michael. ‘She was entirely naive in the sense that she was a bit batty about things, but she wasn’t as dim or gullible as Mrs Wilberforce.’ In fact, David Peers remembers Katie as being quite cunning. ‘Alec Guinness was the star but Katie very nearly stole the film from him and in the scenes played between them it was amusing to watch each striving to upstage the other.’
As for the rest of the cast, Michael found himself particularly drawn to the young Peter Sellers. ‘We all thought he was a star in the making. No doubt about it.’ Sellers himself didn’t think so. Balcon revealed that during filming, Sellers ‘was desperately anxious. He kept asking, “Is it alright? Am I any good?”’
Sellers was on the cusp of becoming quite famous. He’d done The Goon Show and was beginning to make films, although The Ladykillers was his first film of distinction. According to Michael, he had just bought his first second-hand Rolls-Royce.
But after a few days we noticed he was looking very carefully at the paintwork, and had decided that it wasn’t up to scratch. He used to stick little bits of sticky tape anywhere on the paintwork where he thought it was imperfect. We all thought this was neurotic to a degree, and we said, ‘Peter, you’ll go bananas if you carry on like this.’ But he told us that he was going to write to Rolls-Royce saying, now look here. We tried to persuade him to be more rational, but he wasn’t.
David Peers can remember a very real sense of rivalry between the members of the cast, but Sellers had an ace up his sleeve; his gift of mimicry.
One day whilst on the King’s Cross location it was pouring with rain and we all sat around, glumly waiting for it to stop. Peter came in with a tape recorder and played a tape in which he had mimicked everybody on the set, especially Alec and Sandy. It was brilliant and from then on we all took much more care of what we said within Peter’s hearing.
Michael has never forgotten the occasion when Mackendrick asked Sellers to improvise something in the scene where his character Harry, a retarded teddy boy, draws the short straw and has to bump off the old lady. ‘OK, I’ll see what I can do,’ said the comic actor. Mackendrick had set the camera up at the far end of the set and Sellers had to walk towards it, turning over in his mind how he was going to commit the murder. ‘He went through a whole catalogue of how to assassinate people,’ says Michael. ‘He did strangling, shooting, drowning, knifing, everything, a whole array of assassination techniques, as he made his way down to where the camera was and then at the very end just gave a despairing look that meant, can’t do it, don’t know how. It was an absolutely brilliant shot, but for some reason it wasn’t used in the final movie. It was all completely off the top of his head.’
Michael could tell that Sellers was very much influenced by Alec Guinness. On the set he’d watch him like a hawk, derive inspiration from him. According to Michael, ‘Alec was without doubt the most inventive film star I ever met. You could rely on Alec to think of all sorts of clever ideas. Any shot you care to set up, Alec would improve it, he was marvellously inventive and clever about things.’
There was someone else, too, that Sellers had picked up on, not a fellow actor this time, according to Michael, but a member of the crew.
Ealing had a frightfully active union situation and Peter Sellers loved listening to them. I’m sure he got all sorts of ideas for when he played the ultimate union steward Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack (1959). He borrowed all sorts of dialogue from them. I used to say, ‘Listen out for the boom swinger, Peter, he’s a union man and he makes marvellous union remarks.’ One wonderful phrase of his whenever we did something he thought went against the work force, he’d say, ‘It’s barefaced provocation of the workers,’ which went into I’m All Right Jack. Peter delighted in this boom swinger.
One of the highlights of the film was the robbery itself, again shot around the King’s Cross area. On an early recce, Mackendrick had spotted one of those huge gasholders and thought it an ideal place for a high-angle shot. Grabbing David Peers, he wanted to go up and have a look. David followed rather gingerly behind.
I hadn’t reckoned on the fact that you climb up a gasholder by a vertical ladder fixed to the side. Nor did I realise that the top is curved and there are no railings. So you stand at a hundred or so feet on this slippery curved roof and if you should slip you just go over the edge and that’s it … curtains. I was absolutely terrified. And Sandy seemed to be totally ignorant about this and had no fear whatsoever, walking around, went to the edge, went back to the centre, talking all the time. I stood there numb with fear.
Eventually Mackendrick said, ‘Yeah, I think this’ll do very well.’ All David wanted was to get back on terra firma.
Once down, David told Mackendrick that there was no way on earth he was going to risk sending a crew with a heavy Technicolor camera up that blasted thing. With some reluctance Mackendrick agreed and a cherry picker was used instead. ‘Sandy was one of those men for whom anything was possible,’ says David. ‘If he wanted it, he would get it, even if it meant killing half the crew. But he came round eventually and saw sense.’
After the robbery, the gang stash the money in a cello case as they make their departure from Mrs Wilberforce’s house, only for the case to get stuck in the door and for Danny Green’s One-Round to give it too much of a heave so it breaks open and pound notes flutter out onto the pavement. While planning the shot, Mackendrick and others debated just how much money could actually fit into a cello case. As it happened, Michael Birkett got in touch with his bank manager to see if he could solve this dilemma. The answer was something in the region of £60,000, which disappointed Mackendrick somewhat since he was hoping it might be nearer £200,000. Still, £60,000 was a hefty figure back in those days.
Mackendrick then faced another challenge. He wanted to use real notes. David Peers was dispatched to a bank to see what could be done.
It was agreed that we could have just the top layer made up of real notes and all the rest would have to be fake. We must have had something like £1,000-worth of real notes lying on the top layer and the props department were told to look after them. I remember having fun with the property master saying, ‘I think at the end of the day we ought to count the notes and make sure they’re all there. I’ll look after them overnight and bring them back in the morning.’ There was always one or two missing but I wasn’t too concerned about that, you know, that’s life.
The Ladykillers is really Ealing’s last hurrah; certainly it’s the last film they made of any real distinction and art. The critics lapped it up. Alan Brien in the London Evening Standard thought it, ‘undoubtedly the most stylish, inventive and funniest British comedy of the year’.
It also proved to be Mackendrick’s Ealing swansong. Sensing that the studio was in decline, he left for Hollywood where he made the classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957). But his career faltered after that and he only made a further three movies, none of which matched his undoubted creative talent. He ended up teaching Film at the California Institute for the Arts almost up until his death in 1993. It’s Betty Collins who can probably best sum up what kind of man Mackendrick was.
I can remember once when Sandy was nominated for an Oscar for Man in the White Suit and I was more excited than he was. I pinned the notice that said he’d been nominated onto the wall of the office, and he came in and looked at it and he was so embarrassed. ‘You can’t put that up.’ ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Because you can’t.’ He wouldn’t have it and I had to take it down.