Dead Funny

Looking about for a cheering film for a friend in trouble, I came upon a boxed set of Alec Guiness' films which included 'The Ladykillers'. Shot barely ten years after the end of WW2, the film centres around an old lady living in a charming but bomb damaged house near a railway tunnel.

The fifties produced a flowering of british films which sprang up despite the drabness still shrouding London and the leading character, Mrs Wilberforce is one of its rare, exotic and completely charming blooms. Every day she turns on her tap(cold water only),bangs the pipes with her hammer(hanging by ribbon),and fills the enormous kettle which she puts on a gas stove. Despite living in a damaged house with several floors considered unsafe by the surveyor, she is keen to rent out the liveable space to the disgraceful bunch of seasoned british actors (Guiness,Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers, Danny Green)who turn up to apply for it. With a woman like this, they hadn't a chance.

Katie Johnson had been working on stage since 1894 and had just the right pair of steely,rose coloured glasses guaranteed to out do the most extravagant comic. She walked away with the film and was greatly mourned when two years later, she 'upped and died' as my father put it. Perhaps she is a good model for the current decade. Neither she nor her character appeared full of pills or self pity and let's hope her death was not the passing of another era.