英文影评: 师奶杀手 The Ladykillers review by Charles Taylor

英文影评: 师奶杀手 The Ladykillers review by Charles Taylor 
师奶杀手,The Ladykillers

The comedies produced by Britain's Ealing studios in the '40s and '50s tend to be remembered as gentle ticklish affairs, epitomized by Alec Guinness' portrayals of the sort of character he deemed "fubsy." Guinness meant the word to describe timid, ordinary men whose minds have seized on some notion that brings an obsessive gleam to their eye.

 

The 1956 "The Ladykillers," directed by Alexander Mackendrick and written by William Rose, was a different story. Blacker and wilder than the usual Ealing comedy, the movie still looks pretty wild today. Guinness starred in this one, too, but instead of playing another of his "fubsy" characters, he was a criminal mastermind, outfitted with a hideous pair of protruding teeth. Pretending to be a musician he rents a room from a little old Victorian lady (the inimitable Katie Johnson) who believes that the cronies who come to visit Guinness (including a very young Peter Sellers as a Teddy Boy crook) are all part of his string quintet. She doesn't have a clue they're using her home to plan a robbery. When she finds out and insists that the robbers must be gentlemen and return the money, the gang decides it's time to dispose of her. Only they're the ones who wind up getting picked off, one by one.

 

The comedy of "The Ladykillers" comes from the intrusion of murder into a genteel Victorian atmosphere of tea cozies and middle-class propriety. The movie is like a daydream in which the ordinary is transformed by an enveloping sense of ominous comic dementia. The contrast still gives the movie a pleasurable jolt (just as another Ealing great, "Kind Hearts and Coronets," does).

 

Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote and directed the new remake of "The Ladykillers," have no sense of the ordinary. The worlds of their movies are one large exaggeration -- and the world of this new "Ladykillers," small-town Mississippi, is so bumptious to begin with that there's not much for the criminal behavior to play off.

 

*小建议*如果你喜欢这篇文章,可以顶上去;或者Copy下这篇文章的链接发给MSN或QQ上的朋友; 我们永远相信,分享是一种美德,Great People Share Knowledge... (130影萍网谢谢您的关注和支持！)

上一篇：英文影评: 师奶杀手 The Ladykillers review by James Berardinelli
下一篇：英文影评: 师奶杀手 The Ladykillers review by David Nusair