Rent Cultures Network Screening: The Ladykillers (1955)

 

The Rent Cultures Network is delighted to invite you to a screening of Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955), followed by a discussion with Dr Chloë Pieters and Professor Ushashi Dasgupta.

 

This classic Ealing comedy follows a group of criminals who take rooms in the house of Mrs Wilberforce, an elderly landlady whose home becomes the unlikely centre of a criminal plot. With its suspicious lodgers, railway noises, unstable rooms, and quiet domestic stubbornness, The Ladykillers opens onto questions of tenancy, domestic life, social order, and the strange politics of rented space.

 

The screening will be followed by a discussion with:

 

Dr Chloë Pieters, River Farm Foundation Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in History at St Edmund Hall, whose work examines family, domestic life, and the relationship between private households and the state in wartime and post-war Britain and Belgium.

 

Professor Ushashi Dasgupta, Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow of English at Pembroke College, whose research explores nineteenth-century fiction, tenancy, architecture, and domestic space.