KINDHEARTSANDCORONETS
DIRECTED BY: ROBERT HAMER - WRITTEN BY ROY HOMIMAN, (NOVEL) JOHN DIGHTON, MICHAEL BALCON
STARRING: DENNIS PRICE, ALEC GUINNESS, VALERIE HOBSON, JOAN GREENWOOD - RELEASED: I949

Alec Guinness was the kind of man who could blend in anywhere. He could go to the cinema and not worry about being recognized, because he seldom acted without a makeover. His brilliance traveled to America Films in Star Wars.

Guinness is up to his usual impersonations in this wry comedy, as he becomes all the variations of the Victorian upper classes of England’s stratified society in Victorian times. His ability to change energy and voice inflection as he changes looks and clothes was his stock-in-trade. The film was made in I949, the heyday of class warfare in Britain; British filmmakers are at their best when they are acidly skewering people, preferably the upper class, businessmen and the military. The ground was prepared by decades of books, films, and newspaper columns castigating the class system in England, after hundreds of years of rule by kings and the rich. That the murdered in the film are upper class snobs gave immense satisfaction to war-weary Brits still going through rationing from WWII; which basically bankrupted the country.

"Kind hearts and coronets" is a line from Tennyson, which is quoted by one of the two women in the picture, Edith (Valerie Hobson) who plays the Madonna of the "Madonna-whore" duo in this film. Playing the sensualist, Sibella, is the charming Joan Greenwood, whose silky voice purrs it’s way towards money as a compass points north. Women in the film are not given much to do, and stereotypes abound; it's really a comedy of manners made by, for and about men. But the women at least supply some emotional charge in what is a somewhat arid film.

The story centers on Louis, son of one of the D’Ascoyne women, disinherited by her priggish noble family because she married beneath her, and to an Italian. Louis, who seems to have no volition of his own, is driven by Mama and events to want to revenge these wrongs, and gain the title himself by murdering all the D’Ascoyne family. Every member of the D’Ascoyne family bears a resemblance to Alec Guinness, whether naval officer, feminist, banker, or parson.

To fully enjoy the movie, you must understand the British view of murder; great sport in fiction; not conceived of in real life. They exported the idea to America in the form of Alfred Hitchcock. Strangely, at nearly the same time, the British board of censors was prohibiting such American films as The Wild One (I953) as too violent, although only one man is killed. American violence was always more shocking than homegrown violence to the British, and still is.

Perhaps the filmmakers had read George Orwell's essay Decline of the English Murder (1946), in which he criticized the then-current film fashion of shooting people to death. He more admired the creativity of an earlier generation of fictional English murderers, who used poison or even huge dogs to off punks. Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles will live forever. If unusual ways to murder people is your cup of tea, then Coronets will please.

Dennis Price, who plays Dennis Louis, is price-less as the stuffed-shirt social climber who becomes what he once despised. As he narrates his adventures, his bone-dry detached manner contrasts nicely with the grisly work he’s performing. He's actually better than Guinness, who always had a bit of the the ham in his portrayals; he never quite disappeared inside his characters as much as he believed he did.

The film is set in Victorian Britain, and Price gets the affected way that upper-class people spoke and wrote in that day, the medium as part of the message. With the lack of manners as now practiced in the USA and Britain, it's almost refreshing to see that at one time manners were taken seriously by one segment of society, although they're woodenly and mockingly portrayed in this film.

The American practice of setting a film in the past with characters that are of the present wouldn’t have occurred to the Ealing folks. Other droll Ealing comedies that don’t depend so heavily on murder are The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suite, all impeccably made crime comedies of the Golden Age of Ealing. This is certainly one of the funniest comedies ever made and uses the British art of sarcastic understatement effectively.

Scenes: Louis murdering the D’Ascoyne family members --- "Financing Sibella's extravagances" --- As a Colonial Bishop --- "...a matter of some delicacy..."





"Kind Hearts and Coronets", "Alec Guinness", "Valerie Hobson", "Joan Greenwood", "Dennis Price", Ealing,