Art & Hue had the pleasure to create six artcards, based on “The Ladykillers” pop art collection but in colours exclusive to the new release, which will be in the 4K UHD Collector’s Edition, featuring “The Ladykillers” gang and Mrs. Wilberforce.

“The Ladykillers” follows the criminal capers of a group of small-time crooks, taking on more they can handle in the form of their sweet, but slightly dotty, elderly landlady Mrs W.

When Alec Guinness and his crew turn up at Mrs Wilberforce’s to rent rooms in her rickety Victorian house next to King’s Cross station, she’s unaware that the crew are planning a heist.

Masquerading as an amateur string quintet looking to rehearse, Mrs W. soon cottons on to the gang’s crime and threatens to report them to the police, at which point it’s decided one of them must become a lady killer to keep her quiet.

The restoration began by scanning the original 1950s Technicolor three-strip camera negative. The three strips then had to have their colour separations combined to produce the final colour image.

One of the biggest issues to overcome was aligning the colour separations together, initially an automated process, but also requiring a huge amount of manual tweaking on a shot by shot basis. Some sections also suffered from scratching. In total, the film benefitted from over a 1,000 hours’ worth of 4K manual and automated digital restoration.

A 35mm Technicolor print was used as a reference for the colour grade to ensure the new HDR Dolby Vision master stayed true to the films original 1950s “Colour by Technicolor” look.

“The Ladykillers” World Premiere took place at the Odeon on London’s Leicester Square on the 8th of December 1955 and, 65 years on, the black comedy endures as a cinema classic.