Louisa Wilberforce (Katie Johnson) is a lonely, old woman. She lives alone with her parrots and passes her time by watching her neighbors and concocting wild stories about them to report to the police. The police politely listen to her tales, but realize they’re just nonsense and don’t act on them.
Louisa’s life starts getting more eventful when Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) comes to her house looking to rent a room. He tells her he is part of a musical group and they would like to use the room as a practice space. She agrees and doesn’t think anything of it when Major Courtney (Cecil Parker), Harry Robinson (Peter Sellers), “One Round” Lawson (Danny Green), and Louis Harvey (Herbert Lom) start showing up at her house carrying instruments. What she doesn’t realize is they are actually bank robbers planning to rob an armored van.
The gang pulls off their heist and even manages to trick Louisa into picking the money up for them from the train station. However, they aren’t able to keep their secret from Louisa for long and even though the gang manages to convince her to not call the police, they decide there’s only one thing they can do — kill her. However, the only thing they manage to kill is themselves. With the gang all dead, Louisa is now left with the stolen money and when she tries to turn it in to the police, they don’t believe her story.
I got a real kick out of The Ladykillers. With my somewhat dark sense of humor, this was right up my alley. It’s very well written and the cast is brilliant — what more could you possibly want? I’m actually at kind of a loss for words about The Ladykillers because I really liked the movie, but I don’t think words can really do justice to how funny it is and how amazing the cast is. It’s the kind of movie you really have to see to believe.
