The Ladykillers · reception & legacy

How The Ladykillers has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A hit from day one — one of the last and darkest of the Ealing comedies, it earned William Rose an Oscar nomination and has never really left the canon; if anything its stock has risen as the black-comedy strain that once seemed shocking now reads as its greatest asset.

What's debated

The perennial fight is twofold: is this or Kind Hearts and Coronets the supreme Ealing comedy, and just how badly did the Coen brothers' 2004 remake miss the point of the original?

Its footprint

Alec Guinness's Professor Marcus — the fright wig, the ghoulish teeth, the too-polite menace — is one of British cinema's indelible comic images, and the film keeps getting reborn: a Coen brothers remake in 2004 and a hit West End stage adaptation by Graham Linehan in 2011.

Where it stands

Firmly canonical — it placed #13 on the BFI's Top 100 British films poll — and it's the standard gateway drug into Ealing comedy for new cinephiles.