For the fragmentary uncoiling of the memories that he had of his childhood, director Terence Davies found with his creation—his stirring British landmark—Distant Voices, Still Lives a form that brought them to vivid and vivifying life. This is cinema as a high-order process of recreating what had been destined to make no sense at all, a mishmash of half-remembered things and yesses and noes and fears and images that sink back into the darkness after stalling beneath the speckled surface; the fragments dredged up by the memory are often indefinite, incoherent, at the very least incomplete, but with the movie camera Davies makes his own incoherence into something digestible, all…
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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…
