Posted in: Movies | Tagged: blu-ray, dennis price, dvd, film, kind hearts and coronets, Review, robert hamer

Kind Hearts And Coronets – Deliciously Callous Comedy

"The most sensational criminal endeavour of the [20th] century" remains one of its most deliciously callous comedies. If there's more to nobility than kind hearts, there's more to vintage Ealing comedy and its enduring vitality than nostalgia; it's the attitude that sells it.

Ealing, in its heyday, understood that you could undercut almost any form of grotesquery with a particular kind of British sensibility; mannered viciousness, deferential death; pictures crafted in hoc to the British Board of Censors whose strict guidelines imposed reservation and allusion upon filmmakers. Robert Hamer, who wrote Coronets with John Dighton and sat in the director's chair, would have known that sex and violence, commodities in which this comedy is rich, had to be presented with a certain degree of inventive caution.

In 2011 we'd balk at those constraints; we've forgotten the advantages; but forced economies bring out the best in creative people and consequently Coronets is bristling with smouldering exchanges, caustic asides and paper cut dialogue. When the hang man visiting the condemned 10th Duke of Chalfont is asked why he's retiring, his reply, "after using the silken rope I'll never again be content with hemp" is the first of the film's many razor sharp witticisms; it's also not bad shorthand for the movie's theme of class envy and social climbing; Dennis Price's polite serial killer has a taste for the finer things; he's never going to be content with less.

Understandably, it's Alec Guinness' virtuoso performance, superb in no less than eight different roles, that's well remembered, but good as he is, it's Price's black sheep with his penetrative stare, rapier sarcasm and misplaced sense of grievance, that's the heart and soul of the picture. It's his story after all, not Guinness' and his first person account, told in flashback as he awaits his fate, might be a movie first; a character undone by his narration. It's not often that the telling of the tale shapes it, but then it's unusual for a supporting actor to play eight parts; Coronets remains unique.

Price's performance is a timeless, sinister pleasure. His Louis is the angel of death, a character that killed his Father, the reason for his depreciated social status, with his first glance. He might see the D'Ascoyne dynasty as "monsters of arrogance and cruelty" but this is the same man that welcomes a diphtheria epidemic when it kills two newly minted heirs to the dukedom and who, despite his modest upbringing, has nothing but contempt for the new suburban sprawls of the early 20th century and the professional classes that occupy them, embodied by the boorish, hapless Lionel.

Louis wants us to hate Guinness' grandees almost as much as he covets our understanding, but it's hard to loathe a bunch of eccentric aristocrats, dolled up with Victorian reservation and blissfully blind to their own limits. They're simpler beasts than Louis, products of narrow breeding. Guinness gives them wonderful life, sometimes in just a handful of scenes.

You don't need to spend too much time with the shop smashing Suffragette Lady Agatha, to get a handle on her character. The saluting, sinking, Horatio, chest brandished with military medals, is vivid; so to the lovable, hen pecked Henry, who takes a secret drink in his dark room shed from a Developer bottle filled with Sherry. When an actor manages to get in eight characters with so much precision, it is any wonder that he'd resent being remembered by the generation that followed for Star Wars?

Now Kind Hearts and Coronets is coming back to cinemas, audiences should take the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with its grandiloquent nastiness. Now we all watch television in 16:9 there's something once again novel about the 4:3 cinema screen and its intimate possibilities. Being locked in a darkened room with Price and Joan Greenwood's femme fatale, Sibella, seems an appropriate way to enjoy the couple's chess game and their poisoned tongues. A clear sound source, free of interruptions from loud relatives, screaming infants and rutting neighbours, allows full appreciation of each cut glass vowel and the perfectly constructed sentences they populate. The film has lost none of its wit or cruelty. As noted by Price's murderer, "Weekends, like life, are short"; Too short to miss this.

Kind Hearts and Coronets, is re-released in a digitally restored print, in selected cinemas from Friday 26th August. The restored Blu-ray and DVD follows on 5th September.

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