Sara Batkie
Sir Alec Guinness was never the type to sugarcoat his feelings about his most famous film role. “I just couldn’t go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines,” he said in a 1999 interview where he claimed he gave George Lucas the idea to kill off Obi-Wan Kenobi. “I’d had enough of the mumbo jumbo.” While he was too gentlemanly to make any direct comparisons, Guinness might have had one in mind: his work with writer-director Robert Hamer. “We spoke the same language and laughed at the same things,” Guinness wrote in his autobiography Blessings in Disguise. Of the four films they made together, the most linguistically punch-drunk is 1949’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this month. It’s arguably the best black comedy to come out of Britain, which puts it in the running for arguably the best black comedy of all time.
Released just four years after the end of World War II, Kind Hearts and Coronets was a product of England’s famed Ealing Studios, at least in name. But fans of such light-hearted comedies as The Lavender Hill Mob might be taken aback by the corrosive humor running through the film’s veins. Hamer’s script was based loosely on the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, though the end result bears little resemblance to the self-conscious tone of its source material. Hamer relished the opportunity to write something that used the English language in a “more varied and, to me, more interesting way.” There was also the appeal of “making a picture which paid no regard whatever to established, although not practised, moral convention.”
The key to the film’s lacerating satire is the “although not practised” portion of that phrase. Save one or two minor exceptions, there isn’t a character in Kind Hearts and Coronets whose exceedingly proper exterior doesn’t conceal a rotten soul. The first of these we meet is Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini (played by a supercilious Dennis Price), who is sitting in a prison cell awaiting his imminent execution for murder. The majority of the plot is told in flashback as Louis recounts via his memoirs what brought him to this point.
It’s one of the rare cases where the use of voiceover proves indispensable: Louis isn’t unreliable because he conceals his crimes from the audience. He’s quite open, even dispassionate, about his plan to off the eight people in line ahead of him for a dukedom his late mother, exiled from the family for marrying a commoner, instilled in him as his birthright. He’s unreliable because his priggish insistence on keeping himself above the fray blinds him to just how down in the muck he is. Every curl of his lip betrays a chilling entitlement but his truly fatal flaw is believing a gentleman is something you can become if you act the part well enough. The D’Ascoynes of the world know you have to be born to it.
From the start, Hamer mines humor from the disconnect between the veneer of polite society and the ugly machinations that prop it up, particularly in Britain where class status is hardwired into the citizenry. “A difficult client can make things most distressing,” the executioner announces when he arrives at the prison before double checking to ensure he addresses the duke correctly (it’s “Your Grace”). Louis, meanwhile, keeps an abridged family tree on the back of a painting of the D’Ascoyne castle, ritualistically turning it over to cross out names as he makes his kills or – in the case of a lucky few – nature takes its course.
In an inspired bit of casting, Guinness plays all eight of the presumptive heirs in Louis’s way, whether old or young, male or female, and takes an infectious glee in the slight differentiations in snobbery that each requires. There’s Ascoyne D’Ascoyne, a haughty (and adulterous) banker dispatched by an unmoored punt that Louis sends over a waterfall. There’s General Rufus D’Ascoyne, who is on the unlucky end of an explosive jar of caviar. And there’s Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne, a notorious suffragist, who is riding in a hot air balloon when Louis eliminates her. “I shot an arrow in the air. She fell to earth in Berkeley Square,” as he eloquently and succinctly puts it. Hamer may not be the most artful of directors but the bluntness with which he stages each murder only enhances their comedic sting.
Whether or not they’re deserving of their fates is beside the point. In Hamer’s acrid vision of high society, everyone is a hypocrite with a target on their back, Louis included. Here all misdeeds are flattened out so the prejudicial treatment of the poor is on the same par as cold-blooded murder. It’s a ruthless view of the world, and one that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to Britons recently traumatized by the horrors of the Nazi’s Blitz campaign. Ealing Studios feared as much, but Kind Hearts and Coronets proved to be a hit both in its homeland and abroad. Watching it seventy-five years on, Hamer’s willingness to risk his audience’s ire looks even more admirable. Like Louis’s memoirs, there’s also something confessional in it. Don’t waste time becoming what you hate, Hamer counsels through his antihero’s fate. One can only wonder what he’d make of our ruling classes today.
“Kind Hearts and Coronets” is streaming on Kanopy and available for digital rental or purchase.
