Rent Cultures Network Screening: The Ladykillers (1955)

Wednesday, 17 June 2026, 5.30pm to 8pm

A classic Ealing comedy opens onto questions of tenancy, domestic life, social order, and the strange politics of rented rooms.

Join the Rent Cultures Network for a screening of Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955), followed by a discussion with Dr Chloë Pieters and Professor Ushashi Dasgupta.

The film follows a group of criminals who take rooms in the house of Mrs Wilberforce, an elderly landlady whose apparently fragile home becomes the unlikely centre of a botched criminal plot. With its tilting rooms, railway noises, suspicious lodgers, and quiet domestic stubbornness, The Ladykillers is one of cinema’s great comedies of rented space.

This event will use the film as a starting point for thinking about landladies, lodgers, crime, comedy, and houses that seem always on the verge of falling apart. What kinds of stories gather around rented rooms? Why does the figure of the landlady carry such comic and social force? And what happens when the home is less a stable refuge than a precarious, noisy, shared, and contested space?

Dr Chloë Pieters is River Farm Foundation Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in History at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. Her 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 is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow of English at Pembroke College. Her research explores nineteenth-century fiction, tenancy, architecture, and domestic space. Her first book, Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World, examines the literary imagination of rented rooms, lodgings, and boarding houses.

Speaker(s): Chloë Pieters (St Edmund Hall, Oxford), Ushashi Dasgupta (Pembroke College, Oxford)

Series: TORCH Rent Cultures Network

Venue: Pembroke College - Pichette Auditorium - Pichette Auditorium Pembroke College St Aldates Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 1DW United Kingdom

Organiser: TORCH Rent Cultures Network

Host: TORCH Rent Cultures Network

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com.ar/e/rent-cultures-network-screening-the-ladykillers-1955-tickets-1991357586146