In the antepenultimate stanza of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere”, published with an anthology of his work in 1842, Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes that “Howe’er it be, it seems to me, / ’Tis only noble to be good. / Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood,” commemorating the humanity of its author as much as the honorable sentiments of civility and altruism. The protagonist of Kind Hearts and Coronets, contradicting these sentiments with psychopathic charm and hauteur, exhibits a cunning exacting revenge on the hypocrisies of British classism.
Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini, heir to the dukedom of the majestic Chalfont, is the psychopathic protagonist intent on acquiring the inheritance that his mother’s family has denied him. The story first reveals that Louis has been imprisoned for murder, having killed eight of the heirs preventing his rise to the dukedom. In a sumptuous flashback, he relates, “I was a healthy baby, born of an English mother and an Italian father…who succumbed to a heart attack at the moment of first setting eyes on me,” this death being portentous for a man whose future is that of a homicide.
Delivering countless comedic pleasures, Kind Hearts and Coronets excels as black comedy and social satire because of its detached devil-may-care narration, its verbal panache, and the multiplicity of characters that Alec Guinness brings to life with versatility and ingenious talent.
The narration of Louis Mazzini is detached because it is in voice-over and in flashback, and because it it presents a tone remaining both articulate and cold-blooded. Both flashback and voice-over, by providing distance between the murderous events and our learning of them, trivializes those events while lending them caprice and style. The detached narration echoes the temporal distance because of the tone that Louis Mazzini takes when reading his memoir; it is cold-blooded, using elegant diction and a superciliousness containing a madcap arrogance that would otherwise be condemned.
This tone begrimes every word of the narration, one instance of which is Mazzini’s saying in a mode of reverie, “did poor Mama’s silly dreaming plant in my brain some seed which was afterwards to grow into the most sensational criminal endeavor of the century? If so, I was not conscious of it at the time,” the last portion betraying the nonchalance of his criminality. The narration contributes to both the blackness of the comedy and the social satire, which benefit not only from the narrative choices but from the hypocrisy of someone presuming to murder eight people for “arrogance and cruelty”, being himself charmingly cruel. Ahem.
The verbal panache derives from a screenplay written by both the director, Robert Hamer, and John Dighton, the former of whom “observed his class villains with the intimacy of a man who, if not quite an aristocrat, was no stranger to privilege,” this privilege appearing in the posh aspirations of Louis Mazzini.[2] Clashing with the barbarity of his serial homicides, the verbal panache exemplifies the understatement that has long been the trademark of British humor, of which Kind Hearts and Coronets is an undeniable paragon. In one striking instance of this panache, Louis observes of Sibella’s spouse, “I must admit that he exhibits the most extraordinary capacity for middle age that I’ve ever encountered in a young man of twenty-four,” meriting a wincing chuckle; in another, having poached from the sky the balloon that carried yet another of his victims, Louis says in voice-over, “I shot an arrow in the air, she fell to earth in Berkeley Square.”
This language compensates for its comedic dryness with trenchancy and poetry; for Louis is a literate and psychopathic man. The achievement of Hamer and Dighton is the novelty of their adaptation, in that “they have transformed an Edwardian melodrama, whose only humours are of the unconscious variety, into a high comedy.” It is an achievement appreciated as much for its ingenuity as for its effects–legion, shocking, and splendid.[3]
And Alec Guinness, playing nine characters of the D’Ascoyne lineage, is nothing if not astounding; his versatile accomplishment, its subtle variations, have long been remembered as a career highlight. Playing Ethelred, 8th Duke of Chalfont, a man of no less skullduggery than he who murders him, Guinness also plays all the characters who are as ridiculous as they are distinct: Reverend Lord Henry, a rector and tremendous bore, long a dotard; Young Henry, the callow husband of Edith, a photographer tippling in the darkroom; General Lord Rufus, orotund, bellicose, recounting before his dumbstruck peers at the dining table the exploits of his heroism, of which Louis says, “it seemed appropriate that he who had lived amidst the canon’s roar should die explosively.”; Admiral Lord Horatio, also bellicose, dying with his sinking ship; Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne, a bumptious suffragette who vandalizes, and whose liberties, often curtailed by authority, are at last terminated when Louis punctures her balloon; and the pair of Lord Ascoyne, the bank executive for whom Louis works, and his son Young Ascoyne, floundering with his paramour until Louis dispatches him over a weir.
The final character that Guinness plays is the seventh Duke of Chalfont, a placeholder in the familial history of Louis’ mother, who has been ostracized by her family because she married a pauper (of Italian ancestry). Accompanied by subtle variations of body language, facial expression, and makeup, these performances are amusing because Guinness is detectable in every guise; his actual appearance, nondescript for an actor, absorbs the foibles and idiosyncrasies of the characters, aiding his seamless transformation. Lovable in the glory of their farcical banality, the characters of the D’Ascoyne family afford the viewer a delight that replenishes the comedy and completes its tapestry of psychopathic merciless murder. And this eternal delight would be nothing without Alec Guinness.
Writing a retrospective of Robert Hamer, whose filmography comprises more than Kind Hearts and Coronets, James Harrison nonetheless substantiates the influence of this admirable film: “if there is one key British film that sticks out in Hamer’s filmography (and it isn’t much of a filmography compared with others) it would usually be the classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949),” attesting to the popular viewpoint that has assured Hamer’s immortality.[4] By creating a black comedy and social satire that is as unsettling as it is wry and delightful, Robert Hamer has delivered a paean to the derision of arrogance, tyranny, and pretension that will long remain a forerunner of British style and intelligence.
- Kevin Jackson. “Ealing tragedy,” theguardian.com, 17 December 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/dec/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview7 ↑
- R.P.M.G. “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” telegraph.co.uk, 18 December 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/10511820/Kind-Hearts-and-Coronets-Telegraph-1949-review.html ↑
- James Harrison. “The Talented Robert Hamer,” watershed.co.uk, 29 June 2016, https://www.watershed.co.uk/articles/the-talented-robert-hamer-a-forgotten-figure-of-british-cinema ↑
