It is remembered for the grand stunt of casting the great Alec Guinness as eight members of a largely imperious and callous noble family, and making each so distint as to erase the label “gimmick” from what became a quintessential screen tour de force turn.
By reputation, “Kind Hearts and Coronets” is “the greatest British screen comedy,” a withering and witty triumph of wordplay, classism and mass murder.
But move past what sticks in the memory — Guinness at his most shapeshifting, star Dennis Price never more droll and a few clever killings, the cleverest presented in one amusing montage — forget its reputation and consider it as it is, a 1949 comedy from the Ealing/Brit era of “Whisky Galore,” “Passport to Pimlico,” “The Ladykillers,” “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Man in the White Suit.”
It is really the best of that lot? Or is there a reason we revere and remember Ealing filmmakers such as Charles Crichton (“Hue and Cry,” “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “A Fish Called Wanda”) and Alexander Mackendrick (“The Ladykillers,”“The Maggie,” “The Man in the White Suit”) and that “Coronets” director and co-writer Robert Hamer (“School for Scoundrels”) is either consigned to a lesser rank, dismissed or forgotten?
You know where this is going, because the answer to those two questions is “No” and “Yes,” and in that order.
Watching the class killing comedy anew I was struck by how slow-footed it is, how ponderous the endless voice-over narration by our killer — writing his memoirs on the eve of his execution — plays.
The dialogue still draws blood.
“I must admit he exhibits the most extraordinary capacity for middle age that I’ve ever encountered in a young man of twenty-four.”
The idea of Guinness as a boorish general, arrogant admiral, entitled toff, brazen suffragette, tippling priest etc. still tickles, as do the dispassionate, quipping killer — “I shot an arrow in the air; she fell to earth in Berkeley Square.” — and a poet/hangman who frets over clients who “tend to be very hysterical – so inconsiderate.”
But this classic has a creaking quality it never shakes. It’s a period piece that grasps for its cobwebs, a farce that never gets up a head of steam.
Based on an obscure 1907 novel about a Jewish striver murdering his way into British nobility, Hamer’s adaptation makes the anti-hero half-Italian, son of a noble daughter (Audrey Fildes) of the D’Ascoyne clan who married an opera singer and casts Price (“A Canterbury Tale”) as both the singer/father and his son, a young man who vows revenge on the family that would not acknowledge her mother’s marriage or himself, the progeny of that union.
Taught from childhood of his rightful place among the D’Ascoynes, Louis Mazzilli is twelfth in line to the title of Duke when his mother dies, denied the right of burial among her family and class. Louis, passably educated and well-spoken but forced into work as a draper’s assistant (women’s wear clerk), will murder his way up the pecking order and force British nobility to accept him.
Starting with a chance meeting with one of the more boorish cads of the clan, Louis sets up a drowning, and then poisons, shoots and bombs his way through the chain of succession — each victim, from the dull and doddering priest — “The D’Ascoynes certainly appear to have accorded with the tradition of the landed gentry, and sent the fool of the family into the church.” — to the stern banker, photography buff, obstinate admiral to defiant suffragette, played by Guinness.
The script/and-or novel’s cleverest touch is a “Great Expectations” twist. Louis pines for the daughter of the doctor who was a friend of his mother’s. His crush since childhood, Sibella is Britain’s class system’s real villain, the “commoner” determined to marry “rich” and who teases and dismisses Louis to marry “the dullest man in London!”
“In England,” Louis counters.
“In EUROPE” she says, topping him once and for all.
Sibella is given a cloying, calculating edge by Joan Greenwood, later to appear in “Tom Jones.” She is as nakedly ambitious and unscrupulous as Louis. But rather than murder her way into comfort and station, she’s determined to marry to make that happen. If that “dull” first husband won’t do, perhaps Louis and his ever-improving prospects will.
In Sibella, we and Louis see that the entitled, inherited top tier of British society are bad enough. But those who keep them in their high places are the fawning commoners who idolize them and will do anything to join their ranks.
I remember seeing “Kind Hearts” — which takes its title from a line by Tennyson — at a university film society and laughing at the comical calculation and callousness of it all, at the array of upper class twits Guinness created for the screen, idling men and women who dabble and dally and are never challenged in life until Louis comes along to take away their status and their lives.
Some of the film’s sluggishness is erased by an audience laughing over the dead spaces at the end of scenes. But many of those scenes aren’t exactly knee-slappers. And the “creative” killings are terribly tame by today’s standards.
Hamer removed the novel’s antisemitic edge, but thought nothing of leaving a “catch a n—er by the toe” joke or two, reminding us that all the best racial slurs are British in origin, and by jove they were bloody slow to let go of that one.
Hamer’s best films are more dependent on performances than anything he brought to the pacing or situations. I’d say the later, less ambitious and much broader “School for Scoundrels” plays better.
But for all its class-crushing messaging and odd bursts of wit, “Kind Hearts and Coronets” strikes me as a film classed above its station, coasting on a title and reputation that really aren;t merited now, if they ever were.
Even Guinness’s feat has its issues, as each of his eight character “types” is just shy of laugh-out-loud amusing.
Hamer made some good films, but no great ones. And that’s “Kind Hearts,” a good film praised and passed down, by repuation, as “great” when it was never more than arch, passably daring and lightly amusing, and isn’t aging that well either.
Rating: TV-PG, off camera violence, racial slurs
Cast: Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood, Valerie Hobson, Miles Malleson and Alec Guinness.
Credits: Directed by Robert Hamer, scripted by Robert Hamer and John Dighton, based on a novel by Robert Horniman. An Ealing Comedy on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers.
Running time: 1:46
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