Kind Hearts and Coronets

[JMorton]

LadyKillers remake! Mmm...Who will play the part of the chirpy constable hanging on the side of his cops car dashboard.... singing old macdonald had a farm accompanied by sirens belting out... eeyi eeyi ho... all this whilst racing across London in answer to an emergency 999 call



Or have I got the wrong film

[will.15]

Thanks very much for that, Captain. I don't think I'll get it, then.

So, basically, the American studio thought that people wouldn't 'get' that he had written his own signed confession? It had to be spelt out?

Or did they just want to clarify that he didn't turn around and say "Sorry - forgot my gloves." or something, and nip back in?


When I first saw this that ending was thrilling - in part because you can say to each other "If I were him, I would simply turn around ..." "But that wouldn't work because ..." and so on. Tacking that bit on the end is tantamount to being a killjoy. Very silly.



Do I owe you 32 dollars now?

The American ending for many years was lost as when the the theatrical run was done it went back to Ealing, which didn't preserve it. What us Americans have been seeing all these years in the version released to television was the original British ending.

[Nick Dando]

LadyKillers remake! Mmm...Who will play the part of the chirpy constable hanging on the side of his cops car dashboard.... singing old macdonald had a farm accompanied by sirens belting out... eeyi eeyi ho... all this whilst racing across London in answer to an emergency 999 call



Or have I got the wrong film

Yes, you have as it's The Lavender Hill Mob you're thinking about.



Nick

[will.15]

I think, Nick, JMorton was having a little fun.

[will.15]

Israel Rank | Roy Horniman | Review by The Spectator

This book review discusses the novel's plot in detail. I'm convinced after reading this it is not an Anti-Semitic book. I read on another site that an introduction from the 1940's edition implied the author was gay. If so, it may explain why the protagonist is an outsider who feels resentment against a society that has rejected him.

  Spoiler:

In the novel, he gets away with it and suffers no punishment at all. That is not an ending an Anti-Semite would come up with, but it does make sense coming from an author who himself feels ostracized.

[Alan]

Some years ago I telecined this for the Anchor Bay release, I think they used the same transfer for the UK release as it was all done in PAL . I did a lot of stuff for Anchor Bay, always in PAL for some reason. I did the telecine from a fine grain pos found at the BFI. I don't think it had ever been used, as it had been mis-printed & was very dark, but it came up a treat on telecine.

[roroldam]

Has anyone seen any exact markers in the film of the years in which it is supposed to be set?

'Edwardian', yes, but is there anything that narrows it down from 1901-1910?

thanks, roroldam

[Euryale]

According to this website it is set in 1902:

Carry on Ealing


E.

[Elaine]

I thought the 1890's. The fashions seem to say so.

[CaptainWaggett]

The book on which it's based (and it's a much closer adaptation that used to be said in the days when the book was near impossible to get hold of) was published in 1907 if that helps.

[DB7]

My favourite film: Kind Hearts and Coronets

In the latest addition to our ongoing writers' favourite filMy favourite film: Kind Hearts and Coronetsm series, Liese Spencer shares her love for the dark, whip-smart Ealing comedy that blew away her teenage funk

Liese Spencer
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 December 2011 09.50 GMT

Sat in front of the gas fire one Sunday afternoon during my neverending adolescence, I didn't pay much attention to the black and white film starting on BBC2. As its lace-trimmed credits rolled I knew exactly what was coming: a comfortably dull period drama. A couple of hours later, as its neat ending was undercut by a final, fiendishly clever twist, my 14-year-old funk of know-it-all boredom had been blown away. How exhilarating to see a bunch of well-dressed, well-spoken grown-ups behaving despicably – and getting away with it. For a cosy Ealing comedy it was incredibly black. Unlikely as it seemed, apparently there were adults – even as far back as 1949 – who understood that most people were disgusting and the world sucked.

Set in 1900, Kind Hearts and Coronets tells the story of Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), a Clapham draper's assistant and distant heir to the D'Ascoyne dukedom who decides to murder everyone standing between him and the family title in revenge for their cruel treatment of his mother. From the opening scenes, in which a hangman frets about the "proper" execution of his titled victim ("the last execution of a duke was very badly bungled. That was in the days of the axe of course"), Robert Hamer and John Dighton's whip-smart screenplay and economical direction sweep you up and speed you along.

We catch our first glimpse of the debonair Mazzini from behind – lustrous curls gleaming above the padded satin collar of his smoking jacket as he pens his memoirs in his well-appointed cell. We then follow him in flashback as he drinks port in country vicarages, punts along the Thames and takes tea on sunny home-county lawns, all the while killing off his relatives one by one.

Busy as he is "pruning" his family tree, Louis still finds time to conduct an adulterous affair with his equally worldly childhood sweetheart Sibella. (How fantastic, I thought, that she was allowed to be just as nasty as he was.) "Louis, I think I've married the most boring man in London," she purrs about his better-off rival, Lionel. "In England," he replies. "In Europe," she sighs.

If Price's beautifully modulated voiceover creates much of the film's spell, then Joan Greenwood's fruity delivery is also funny and seductive. Always pouting from beneath some complicated hat, Sibella is poison in petticoats. Louis describes her as: "Vain, selfish, cruel, deceitful. Adorable."

The film is best known now as an early showcase for Alec Guinness, and his cameos as eight variously jolly, arrogant, mean and stupid D'Ascoynes are acting genius – I especially like the vim with which the suffragette Lady Agatha punches in shop windows with her brolly. In the famous funeral scene where we see the remaining D'Ascoynes together, Guinness inhabits each of his Edwardian establishment gargoyles completely – general, admiral, banker – before the camera finally comes to rest on the clergyman leading the funeral service (Guinness again) and Mazzini rounds off his inventory: "And in the pulpit, talking interminable nonsense, the Reverend Lord Henry D'Ascoyne."

Kind Hearts and Coronets is a brilliantly sustained attack on what Hamer called "established, although not practiced, moral convention". Silkily subversive, his amusing comedy of "20th-century homicide" not only makes you root for a serial killer but delight in the ingenuity with which he dispatches his victims. Its witty script can still feel disarmingly dark today. "I was sorry about the girl," Louis muses coolly, after sending playboy Ascoyne D'Ascoyne and his mistress to their death over a weir, "but found some relief in the reflection that she had presumably, during the weekend, already undergone a fate worse than death." In another he erases infant twins from the D'Ascoyne family tree – explaining that "fortunately, an epidemic of diphtheria had restored the status quo".

From a fairly privileged background himself, Hamer won a scholarship to Cambridge before being sent down for a homosexual affair and going into films. This was his first as director, and his most perfect. (In different ways, drink does for two of the D'Ascoynes and it did for the alcoholic Hamer too, aged just 52.)

Knowing that backstory, his disgust at the callousness and hypocrisy of Britain's class system seems more pronounced. Take the scene where the Duke finds a poacher caught in one of his mantraps and sends in his gamekeeper – to collect the bird; or the assassination of the general at his club with a booby-trapped tin of caviar: "If there's one thing the Ruskies do well … " the pompous old bore tells his dining companion before being obliterated by Mazzini's homemade bomb. (The others, of course, being molotov cocktails and the communist overthrow of a feudal system.)

Kind Hearts and Coronets may not be the most cinematic film – there are others more spectacular, more thrilling, more moving, more romantic, – but watching it was such a delicious surprise to my 14-year-old self. Like hearing an elderly relative swear, its sophisticated cynicism shocked me awake.