Vixens & Floozies & Sexy Chanteuses

 Your typical "heist" movie or "crime caper" tends to have typical stock female characters: 

The Temptress. 



The Shady Lady. 



The Hussy... 



…who of course is No Better Than She Oughta Be.


These are the Bad Girls; the Femme Fatales (Femmes Fatale?) who are there to seduce the men, and Lead Them Down The Wrong Path.

It's practically a requirement of the genre; for every man (or group of men) planning a heist or any other criminal endeavour, there will be a woman on hand to destabilise things, lead them away from the straight and narrow, and just generally Cause Problems. 


When everything inevitably goes wrong at the end (remember, crime must always be punished) it's usually the Vixen's fault. Everyone (by which I mean "men") would have been much better off if they had just avoided her in the first place.

Allow me to introduce Mrs. Wilberforce. 

In The Ladykillers, Alec Guinness leads a group of rogues and vagabonds in a daring Armoured Car Robbery near Kings Cross Station. As cover while planning the job, they pretend to be an amateur string quintet renting a room (purely for rehearsals!) from Mrs. Wilberforce, a sweet little old lady who would surely never suspect a thing.


Mrs. Wilberforce is no Shady Lady, she is no Femme Fatale and she most assuredly isn't a Chanteuse. She is, however, completely unstoppable, and certainly more than a match for Alec Guinness and his henchmen.

In a genre dominated by Bad Girls and Harlots, Mrs. Wilberforce is unique. She isn't there to be a sex object, or a temptation for the male characters. Nor is she that other stock character in crime drama, the "Good Girl": the faithful wife, girlfriend or mother who stands by the man through thick and thin, swearing to be loyal to him even as he breaks the law and her heart (not necessarily in that order).


In fact, Mrs. Wilberforce does not exist in relation to men at all, which is one of the reasons why the gang are so powerless against her. She is her own person with her own story, and heaven help any gangsters who presume to take her for granted. 

We will be screening The Ladykillers on Thursday, the 23rd of June at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. If you have never seen it, this is your chance to see why it is consistently rated one of the great British comedies of all time.

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