Kind Hearts and Coronets

British film comedy came into its own in the years following the Second World War. Maybe the extremity of that experience caused something to shift. In any case, there was a new spirit of satire in movies, a flippant disregard for the old values of class snobbery and the stiff upper lip. In the late 1940s and continuing into the ‘50s, the Ealing Studios in west London produced a series of comedy films that are still admired today, many of them featuring an up-and-coming new talent. Alec Guinness.

A good example is a film from 1949, directed by Robert Hamer, called Kind Hearts and Coronets. A summary will give you an idea of how outrageous this film was for its time. A young man, a minor figure in an aristocratic family, wants to become a duke. But there are eight family members ahead of him in the line of succession, so he decides to kill them one by one in order to inherit the title. And here’s the kicker: all eight of them are played by Alec Guinness.

Dennis Price stars as our murderer, Louis Mazzini, a man of refined culture, suave and sophisticated, trapped against his will in the English middle class. His mother was a D’Ascoyne, a family whose eldest member is a lord, the Duke of Chalfont. Mama was disowned by her family after she eloped with an Italian named Mazzini, who died shortly after the birth of their son. She brought Louis up with a consciousness of his noble heritage, cruelly robbed from him, and tells him that her final wish is to be buried in the D’Ascoyne family vault. But the Duke rejects this request with contempt. After the burial of his mother in an ordinary graveyard, Louis’ mind is bent on revenge. His plan to eliminate all the D’Ascoynes ahead of him in line begins at that moment.

In a subplot which becomes important, Louis is staying at the house of a local acquaintance, a doctor, and his daughter Sibella, played by Joan Greenwood, she of the marvelous husky voice that sounds a little like a cat’s purr, or as I read somewhere, like someone gargling champagne. Louis wants her, she loves him, but she decides to get married to a boring but very wealthy rival. So in this way as well, class—which more often than not, also means money—prevents Louis from attaining what he’s sure he deserves.

Dennis Price’s performance as Louis is great. We first see him in prison, awaiting execution for murder, while writing the memoir that explains everything he did, and his narration of this memoir becomes the narrating voice of the film. Louis is witty, yet impeccably polite. Because of his manner of behaving, scenes that might be horrifying in a serious drama are hilarious here. The calmness and aplomb with which he disposes of his rivals is strangely funny in itself, and then much more so because of Alex Guinness’s portrayal of each victim. Guinness has a distinct voice and appearance for each character, one of whom is a woman, and all of which satirize the silliness of the upper classes, the idiocy concealed behind the pretentious veil of dignity. Secretly we enjoy seeing them getting bumped off.

The movie’s title, Kind Hearts and Coronets, is a quote from Lord Tennyson, England’s most respectable poet. The film actually respects no one, except the audience. It is a classic.