The Ladykillers is a 1955 British black comedy film made by Ealing Studios. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, it stars Katie Johnson, Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers, Danny Green, and Jack Warner.

American William Rose wrote the screenplay, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and won the BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay. He claimed to have dreamt the entire film and merely had to remember the details when he awoke.

PHILIP FRENCH, THE GUARDIAN

Ealing Studio’s two greatest directors, Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick, both made near flawless black comedies on the state of the nation starring Alec Guinness and involving multiple murders, and there is little to choose between the former’s Kind Hearts and Coronets and the latter’s The Ladykillers, a special edition of which is being released this week to mark its 60th anniversary.

The heist (or caper) movie began with The Great Train Robbery in 1903, and enjoyed its classic decade in America and Europe between John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen (1960). The greatest comic example is The Ladykillers.

Four years earlier, Guinness had appeared in Charles Crichton’s Ealing excursion into the genre, The Lavender Hill Mob, as a withdrawn bank clerk planning a heist in south London. In The Ladykillers he crossed the Thames to play the sinister Professor Marcus, who emerges, so we infer, from a madhouse to lead four seedy social misfits in a robbery at King’s Cross St Pancras station, an area of decaying Victorian splendour, bustling platforms, goods yards, steam trains entering and leaving grimy tunnels, all beautifully captured and charmingly integrated into the plot.