Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the 1955 British black-comedy, crime film "The Ladykillers".

It was directed by Alexander Mackendrick for Ealing Studios from a screenplay by William Rose.

"The Ladykillers" stars Sir Alec Guinness, Katie Johnson, Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom and Danny Green.

The story concerns a widow in her mid-seventies, Mrs. Wilberforce who owns a house at the end of a London Street that backs up onto a railway tunnel at King's Cross.

She keeps three parrots for company and regularly reports fanciful suspicions about her neighbors to the local police, who kindly regard her as a harmless eccentric.

Mrs. Wilberforce has a room to let and happily takes on the rather sinister Professor Marcus as a boarder.

He tells her he is part of a string quintet and will occasionally be joined by four other men for rehearsals.

They duly arrive carrying their instruments.

And soon Mrs. Wilberforce hears music coming from Professor Marcus's room.

But what she hears is in fact a record playing on the phonograph.

While the five men, all of them career criminals, make plans for an armored car robbery.

Under Professor Marcus's strict guidance and with each man playing his specific part, the robbery goes off without a hitch.

With Mrs. Wilberforce herself unwittingly playing a key role in securing the loot.

Afterwards the five men are ready to divide up the money and go their separate ways.

But what if something were to happen to alert Mrs. Wilberforce to what they have done?

What might the perpetrators decide to do to protect themselves and their ill-gotten gains from the police?

"The Lady Killers" was one of the last and considered by many to be the best of all the post-war comedies produced by Ealing Studios in London.

In the 30s and 40s, Ealing made comedies featuring British entertainers who were already well known to the public from performing on stage.

These included Gracie Fields, a musical singer and comedian, and George Formby who became famous for playing the ukulele while singing comical songs.

But after the Second World War Ealing produced a series of satirical comedies that captured the distinctive spirit of the British post-war era.

The Ealing comedies featured a virtual repertory company of screenwriters, directors and actors including Stanley Holloway, Alastair Sim best known in the states for his portrayal of Scrooge in the 1951 film version of "A Christmas Carol" and Alec Guinness.

The most celebrated of the Ealing comedies appeared during the seven years between 1948 and 1955.

The five best of the lot are widely agreed to be "Whiskey Galore" and "Kind Hearts and Coronets".

Both released in 1949.

"The Lavender Hill Mob" and "The Man in the White Suit" both released in 1951 and tonight's film, "The Ladykillers" released in 1955.

I earlier called "The Ladykillers" a black comedy.

This means it is a comedy that deals with serious subjects that are usually expected to be treated seriously.

In this case, crime and death.

Black comedy or black humor is a subset of satire and was identified as a specific genre by the French surrealist critic André Breton in his 1940 "Anthology of Black Humor".

His earliest example was Jonathan Swift's cutting 1729 satire "A Modest Proposal" which suggested the best way to relieve poverty in Ireland was for Irish children to be sold as food for the English gentry.

Black humor appeared in American literature in the work of writers such as Nathanael West and Vladimir Nabokov.

And became a staple of American movies in the mid-sixties, fitting in with the spirit of the times.

But there are strains of black humor in motion pictures almost from their inception.

For example, Alfred Hitchcock suspense films often have an element of black humor in them.

And you'll notice that "The Ladykillers" sometimes resembles a Hitchcock film in its style and tone as well as its production design.

In fact, Sir Michael Elias Balcon, who led Ealing Studios when "The Ladykillers" was made, had been a mentor to the young Alfred Hitchcock when Hitchcock was first beginning his work as a director in Great Britain.

"The Ladykillers" was a popular and critical success and is usually considered the best of the Ealing comedies.

It has variously ranked over the last 25 years as the 29th best British film ever and the 36th, the 13th and the 5th greatest comedy film of all times in different polls obviously.

The story's been adapted for the stage as an opera in 1966 and as a play in 2011.

The Coen brothers offered an undistinguished American remake in 2004 that starred Tom Hanks as the criminal mastermind.

William Rose's screenplay for "The Ladykillers" was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay and won the BAFTA Award for best British screenplay.

Critics characterized the script as a first rate example of British comedy that effectively portrayed post-war British manners in society.

In fact, William Rose was an American born in Jefferson, Missouri who served in Britain with a Canadian infantry regiment during the Second World War.

He settled in England after the war to work as a screenwriter and married an English woman, Tania Price who became his writing partner as well.

Rose claimed the story of "The Ladykillers" came to him in a dream and all he had to do was write it down after he woke up.

Rose wrote the part of professor Marcus for Ealing Studios' stalwart Alastair Sim who was unable to accept the role.

When Alec Guinness read the script and was offered the part he wrote to the producers, "But this is meant for Alastair Sim surely."

So Guinness adopted the humorous but sinister manner he felt Sim would've brought to the part.

And Guinness's makeup with the hairpiece, the oversized teeth gave him in the end an uncanny likeness to Alastair Sim.

The character of Mrs. Wilberforce recalls that her 21st birthday party was cut short by the news that the Old Queen had died.

Queen Victoria died on January 2nd, 1901 making Mrs. Wilberforce 75 years old.

The film's director, Alexander Mackendrick chose Katie Johnson for the role of Mrs. Wilberforce.

Johnson had played lots of small parts in other movies but "The Ladykillers" was her only starring role.

The producers originally rejected her for the part of Mrs. Wilberforce because they were afraid that Johnson at 76 might prove too frail to complete the film.

They cast a younger actress instead but she died before filming began.

So Johnson was given the part after all.

Before the film was released, Mackendrick asked the distributor to give Katie Johnson star billing above the title reasoning that her turn as Mrs. Wilberforce might be her only starring role.

Ealing Studios said Sir Michael Balcon later wrote, "It was curious to see Katie Johnson accept her elevation of stardom quite calmly in her seventies while it was Peter Sellers still in his twenties who was unsure of himself."

Sadly, Katie Johnson's only big part was her last but that is surely the way for a pro to go.

Peter Sellers who played Harry Robinson already had a national reputation as one of the four men responsible for BBC Radio's brilliant comedy series "The Goon Show".

Sellers created a host of bizarre characters for the Goon shows, each with their own distinctive voice.

But he approached his early film acting with trepidation.

He later said "The Ladykillers" was the first real film I made.

"I used to watch Sir Alec Guinness who was an absolute idol of mine do everything, his rehearsals, his his scenes, everything.

It was fascinating not that I could hope to be as good as Guinness but he is my ideal and my idol."

For his part, Guinness felt that Sellers was withdrawn and melancholic during the shoot.

Herbert Lom who played the sinister Louis Harvey later recalled how a nervous and insecure Sellers was worried about finding further film work.

And asked Lom to recommend him to any casting directors who were looking for bit players to perform in films Lom might be cast in.

Lom's character, Louis Harvey wore a black hat during most of "The Ladykillers" to cover his shaved head.

While he was making the film, Lom was also playing King Mongkut of Siam on stage in "The King and I".

The same role that first led Yul Brynner to shave his head in 1951.

Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom would go on to appear together as Inspector Clouseau and Commissioner Dreyfus in five of the Pink Panther films between 1975 and 1982.

And just for your information, the five pound note Mrs. Wilberforce gave the street artist at the conclusion of "The Ladykillers" would be worth 107 pounds or about $138 today.

And it was Peter Sellers who provided the voices for Mrs. Wilberforce's three parrots.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.