Movies to See Before You Die - "Kind Hearts and Coronets"

[angelophile]

Robert Hamer's 1949 classic is set in Victorian England, and sees Dennis Price playing Louis D'Ascoyne, the would-be Duke of Chalfont whose Mother was spurned by her noble family for marrying an Italian singer for love. When his father dies upon setting eyes on him for the first time and his mother is forced to raise him alone after the family refuse to recognise him as a true D'Ascoyne, Louis merely seeths in repressed resentment. After his mother dies in near poverty and is refused burial in the ancestral vault, young Louis vows to avenge her and murderous ambition drives him to claim the dukedom for himself via a thorough pruning of the privileged and elitist family tree. And so begins Louis' plan to dispatch every one of his relatives in line to the Dukedom and attain the high status himself -for, as Louis observes, "revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold".

The strength of the movie is both its black, black heart and wicked humour, and its wonderfully well-observed performances. Dennis Price's off-handed and suave callousness gives Kind Hearts its coolly amoral humour. He's delightfully cool and genteel, even as he's maliciously plotting to bump of yet another family member. He is a true anti-hero, but the role is played with such discreet charm and cool manners it's pitch perfect.

Valerie Hobson and Joan Greenwood play the two women in Louis' life – the prim wife of one of the unfortunate D'Ascoyne's and the childhood sweetheart with whom he continues to have an emotionally cold affair.

But it's Alec Guinness who rules the roost by playing every member of the doomed D'Ascoynes – eight roles in all. And they're all played with such subtlety and a wonderful resistance to making even the most minor of walk on roles into caricatures, that makes his performance so celebrated. The family members are all individuals, ranging from the youthful and enthusiastic Henry, hiding his fondness for port from his wife by disguising it in bottles of developer for his photography, to the doddery, tedious clergyman, to the peppery Duke and even Lady Agatha, who floats high above London in a hot-air balloon to rain down Women's Rights pamphlets; Louis punctures her balloon and quips, "I shot an arrow in the air; she fell to earth in Berkeley Square." As proper for a dry, wry comedy that's "droll" and "brittle" rather than merely "funny," there's nothing ostentatious or look-at-me! about Guinness' multiple D'Ascoynes.

And so, Kind Hearts and Coronets earns its reputation as a superlative comedy, not by being laugh-out-loud funny, but with rather more subtlety and morbid tone. The perfect demonstration of good manners and homocide.