Reading the Coens "The Lady Killers"

“To smite is to go upside the head! To smite is to remind we got to stop that decline and scramble back up to the face of the Almighty God! Instead of worshiping that golden calf, that earthly trash on that garbage island. That garbage island in the shadowland, way outside the Kingdom of God!”

If O Brother, Where Art Thou? filtered Homer’s Odyssey through Southern Gospel and folk mythology, The Ladykillers (a remake of the 1955 British comedy) takes on a distinctly American form of religious and moral hypocrisy. It is a film about a clash between true faith and empty piety—between a widow who walks with God and a gang of criminals who only invoke His name when it suits them.

The plot is straightforward. A group of conmen, led by the loquacious and pretentious Professor G.H. Dorr, pose as a classical music ensemble in order to use the basement of a churchgoing widow, Marva Munson, as a front for a heist. Marva, a woman of deep and simple faith, spends her time railing against the corruption of the modern world and making donations to Bob Jones University. Dorr, on the other hand, drapes himself in flowery language, literary references, and high culture to mask his utter lack of virtue.

The heist itself, like nearly every Coen Brothers crime plot, is doomed from the start. Each member of the crew embodies a particular sin or vice: greed, lust, pride, sloth, wrath. Dorr is a false prophet, cloaking his selfish ambition in a veil of sophistication. His downfall, and the downfall of his gang, comes not from outside forces but from their own corruption. One by one, they are undone—by their own incompetence, by betrayal, and, most ironically, by divine providence.

The film leans into its Old Testament themes, especially with Marva Munson, who functions as a righteous instrument of judgment. She is entirely unaware of the heist but, through her unwavering faith and moral certainty, she unwittingly becomes the means of the criminals’ destruction. The gang perishes one by one in ways that feel eerily predestined—each death as darkly comedic as it is fitting. By the time Marva discovers the stolen money, she assumes it is a miracle from God and promptly donates it to the church.

If the Coens are often accused of cynicism, The Ladykillers complicates that critique. On the one hand, the film revels in the hypocrisy of religious posturing, showing the absurdity of empty, performative faith. But on the other hand, Marva Munson is no fraud. She is the real deal, a person of conviction in a world full of liars and crooks. And in the end, she triumphs—not because she is clever or powerful, but because, in the great cosmic reckoning, righteousness wins out over deception. Whether by accident or divine design, the wicked are cast down, and the humble are lifted up.