Kind Hearts and Coronets

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) is an Ealing Studios black comedy directed by Robert Hamer. It is loosely based on Roy Horniman's 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal. The story follows Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini (Dennis Price). His mother was disowned by her aristocratic family for marrying below her class, and Louis grows up on the edges of the grand dynasty that turned its back on them.

Louis tells his own story through the memoirs he writes in the calm, witty voice of a man of taste. In them he describes a cold-blooded plan: he will clear away every relative who stands between him and the dukedom of Chalfont. Those relatives are the D'Ascoyne family, and Alec Guinness famously plays eight of them, from a pompous duke to a doddering clergyman to a suffragette.

Louis's scheme gets tangled up with his love life. He is torn between the sharp, scheming Sibella (Joan Greenwood) and the virtuous Edith (Valerie Hobson). The result is a polished, dryly funny film in which murder is handled with perfect manners.

At heart the film is a satire of the English class system. It shows how aristocratic power rewards charm and ruthlessness, and it treats the snobbery of an inherited elite as absurd. Critics have noted that it was made where "old" Britain met "new" Britain. The war had just ended, a socialist government had been elected, and the country was still living through austerity. Against that background, a story that kills off the D'Ascoyne line one member at a time reads as a symbol of the aristocracy's slow decline in the modern age.

Hamer also plays a moral trick on the audience. Louis tells the story with so much wit and poise that viewers end up sharing his point of view and rooting for a serial killer. That shows how easily style can hide cruelty, and how thin the line is between the "respectable" violence of class and the literal violence of murder.

Class-war allegory: One reading treats the film as a symbolic end of the aristocracy. Louis, the half-outsider, wipes out a decaying elite, much as post-war Britain was sweeping away old privilege.

The film came out in 1949, when post-war Britain was changing: the war was over, a Labour government had been elected, and austerity was still in force. It captured the tension between an old aristocratic order and a new, more egalitarian country, and it became one of the defining Ealing comedies.

Its reputation is huge. In 1999 the British Film Institute ranked it sixth in its Top 100 British films, and Time magazine named it one of the 100 best movies of all time. Alec Guinness's performance as eight D'Ascoynes became a landmark of character acting and a showcase for multi-role performances. Douglas Slocombe's matte work, which put six Guinnesses in one frame, was praised as a technical achievement.

The film's clash with the US Production Code, which forced a new ending, has become a classic example of how censorship shaped films that crossed the Atlantic.

Critics received the film well when it came out in June 1949, and its standing has only grown since. Audiences today still rate it highly: it holds an 8.0 on IMDb, and Collider reports a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Viewers most often praise Alec Guinness's eight performances, Dennis Price's witty narration, the sharp, epigram-filled script, and the deadpan black humour.

The criticism that does exist tends to focus on the film's cool, detached tone, which some find more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. Its period attitudes, such as the original counting rhyme cut from the US version, also date it. The overall verdict is that it is one of the finest British comedies ever made.