Still, I'll wait for t he DVD
Gospel Movies Reveal Myth And Society
Whereas The Fighting Temptations portrayed black religious culture as Sunday morning Dance Fever, the Coens' have consistently examined its often ignored complexities.
By Armond White
Church lady Marva Munson, played by Irma P. Hall in The Ladykillers represents an authentic social type so rarely seen in our contemporary popular culture that writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen have virtually rediscovered a lost American. She's a heavy-set widow who wears flowery-print dresses, broad-brim hats and walks in sturdy, splayed-leg steps that recall Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland's description in the film Freedom on My Mind of those Southern black women who marched during the civil rights era: "They be walkin' heavy with such pride. Look like the earth would catch they feet and hold them."
The Coens have re-rooted the proverbial black church mother — a vanished figure in the hip hop landscape - by placing Marva Munson opposite Professor G.H. Dorr (Tom Hanks), a criminal mastermind posing as a musicologist. In The Ladykillers' caper plot, Prof. Dorr rents a room in Marva's house and brings in four associates to tunnel from her cellar to a gambling casino that they intend to rob without her knowing, but that's only the movie's dramatic hook. Underneath that is a fascinating, at times powerful, film that satirizes the differences between black and white American culture.
