The Ladykillers (1955): from Victorian dream to neo-Victorian nightmare

Abstract

Most critical readings of Alexander Mackendrick’s black comedy The Ladykillers (1955) focus either on the political satire it displays, its mythical and dream-like undertones or, chiefly, its appropriate place in the canon of Ealing comedies. This article presents a new critical approach to the film. The essay submits that The Ladykillers can be read as a forerunner of neo-Victorian comedy, as it replicates, through strategies of humour, the tensions inherent to the ‘story of difference’ the neo-Victorian ‘project’ attempts to devise. By pitting a set of modern British stock-characters against an impossible embodiment of the Victorian ethos (the character of Mrs. Wilberforce and her house), The Ladykillers both allegorically and metafictionally underlies the contradictions inherent to neo-Victorian comedy. On the one hand, it stages the comic objectification of the Victorian subject, which creates a sense of superiority on behalf of present-day subjectivities; and, on the other, it unfolds its reversal, i.e. the incongruous subduing of the purportedly superior subject to the overpowering Victorian element. The article concludes by assessing the consequences of this reading onto the broader context of cultural identity work.