Now This Should Be Interesting...

      I don't quite know how I stumbled upon this, but apparently Tom Hanks will star in a Cohn brothers remake of the classic 1955 Ealing comedy The Ladykillers. It should be interesting watching Hanks play an out-and-out caricature-villain, and, especially watching how he fills the shoes once occupied by the late Alec Guinness. For those of you who've not seen the original film, Guinness' Professor Marcus is a brilliant (and hilarious) piece of acting bravura, with Guinness channelling bits of Shakespeare's Richard III, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, and horror-star Boris Karloff in such a way that, as Leonard Maltin once put it, "even his [Guinness'] teeth are funny." If you've not seen the film, do, and not just for Guinness: there are great bits by Katie Johnson as the indomitable and apparently harmless Mrs. Wilberforce that the gang tries to kill, Cecil Parker as the Major, and a very young Peter Sellers (whose comedic idol was Guinness, with whom he later appeared again in Neil Simon's Murder By Death) as the easily-cowed Mr. Robinson.

      I don't know how Hanks will do in this role, nor do I know quite what the Cohn brothers will do with this project, though they certainly have the necessary macabre tendencies to make such a project work, at least in theory. For Hanks, though, it'll be a real trick to see if he can successfully subvert his 'good guy' image in the same way that Guinness did. It looks, though, like the Cohn brothers are changing a fair bit, including the name of the Professor. One wonders if Hanks will retain the teeth. But I look forward to it, very much in fact. Hanks is probably one of the few that could actually do the part. But let's just hope the Cohn Brothers keep true to the spirit of the original film, and not try too hard to super-modernize it.