The Ladykillers

The late, great film director Billy Wilder was credited with saying:

'An audience is never wrong. An individual of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles--in the dark--that is critical genius.'

While watching the latest cinematic production from the Coen Bros. (which one is which, again?), "The Ladykillers", I realized an important fact: More than a few years have passed since Mr. Wilder made those remarks, which he was credited with saying, and I wonder: Do they need an update, a revision? After all, in Billy Wilder's day the movie-going experience often involved going to a structure on par with a religious cathedral, where more than a thousand could easily be seated, to share in a common experience: Dreams spun of celluliod, made of flickering light and shadow. Nowadays, a movie theater is more like a broom closet with stadium seating which rarely, if ever, is booked to capacity, and while there are, no doubt, a sufficient number of imbeciles seated therein, a thousand, gathered therein, are hard to find.

So, perhaps, this observation, this equation should be re-jigged: An audience is never wrong. A given member of it may be an imbecile but it is that imbecile who can make or break a given film or movie at the box office, for it is the imbecile who understands or does not understand jokes and humor within a given film or movie, and laughs appropriately and accordingly at them.

This particular imbecile (as a reader of this space recently suggested, is what I am) was seated in "The Ladykillers", as directed by the aforementioned Bros. Coen and had a good time, for this particular imbecile laughed accordingly and appropriately, and gave no notice to a certain fact therein: He was alone in the theatre.

Critical genius? Why not?

Such oddity, I suggest, goes to explain the overall and individual appeal of the works from the Bros. Coen.

Even the remakes.

In their version of "The Ladykillers" the Coens Bros. have Tom Hanks in the lead role, once mastered by Alec Guinness, and have made this presentation so bizarre that one has to leave and miss the fun certain to come, or stay and wonder why others don't understand the humor of said Coens: Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, a self-professed professor of Latin and Greek, who comes across as Col. Sanders of KFC gone bad, owing much to his attempts at channeling the likes of Tennessee Willaims, Edgar Allan Poe, and Vincent Price, (with the latter apparently doing a Shakespearean riff).

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