One Particular Thing I Love About The Ladykillers

SPOILERS

In some sort of weird "critical pile on," it seems that The Ladykillers remake (of a 1955 British film) stands as "the Coen Brothers worst movie."

First of all, filmmaker-writers as great as the Coen brothers cannot HAVE a "worst movie." They operate at that "high auteur level" where even "the worst" is better than a lot of other people's best.

Second of all -- and it is clearly a matter of taste -- but I prefer The Ladykillers to these Coen movies:

Intolerable Cruelty
Hail Caesar
The Hudsucker Proxy
Raising Arizona(yes, I mean it -- Holly Hunter's character drives me nuts)
The Man Who Wasn't There(just not as memorable)

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Anyway, something great about this Ladykillers -- to me -- is this:

The gimmick of both the original and the remake is that a gang of crooks decide that they must kill the old woman who has discovered their scheme(a tiny white haired British lady in the original; a Big Mama African American in the remake).

But "the ladykillers" all end up killing each other instead, one by one.

In the original, the bodies of the killers --one by one -- end up dumped into, or falling into, the open coal cars of passing trains under a bridge near the house of the old lady. Often an obscuring burst of smoke from the engine obscures the action. But it is all filmed in a most realistic, rather cheap manner in the 1955 British film tradition.

In the Coen remake, state of the art CGI technology converts the bridge over passing trains into a bridge over passing "river garbage scows" that are taking piles of trash out to a "garbage island" not far off the Louisiana shoreline near the old lady's house.

Thus, what was "funny but cheap and realistic" in the original (a bridge over passing trains) becomes "fantastical and darkly magic" in the remake. We view from above as each successive body of a ladykiller plummets down into the garbage pile of the passing boat en route to a Hell-like island of garbage.

With a bonus: the great 1920's/30's a cappella gospel music accompanying each body's fall.

But wait, there's more: how the opening credits highlight these garbage scows(before we know their value to the story) and show off the "big rock eagle gargoyle" that stands atop the bridge -- and that will end up killing Tom Hanks(our hero/killer) as the final victim of the plot.

The Gothic titles coupled with the gospel music is the stuff of Classic Movie, to me, and the title "The Ladykillers" in Gothic type over the island "sets the stage" for the modern day Black Comedy that this new "Ladykillers" will be.

I love everything about that bridge and those garbage scows -- even how slowly yet fast the scows move.