215. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Directed By Robert Harner

Synopsis

A duchess runs away with an opera singer, and so her son gets left out of the succession. He plants to rectify the situation by eliminating everyone between him and the duchy. But hell hath no fury...

Review

This was one of the most brilliant films I've seen lately, well more to the point, ever! This was great, fabulous, fantastic, fantabulastic, gay adjectives fail me. The whole film is a delight from beginning to end. With one of the best anti-heros ever put together with what is probably Alec Guiness' best part, or parts as he plays 8 people here.

The film is very funny, but also very wrong, you find yourself rooting for this mass-murdering fuckhead and you know you shouldn't. But all the people he kills kind of have it coming, most are mean some are just upper class twits and others (i.e. the reverend) are just wasting precious oxygen.

Of course everything he does in the film is wrong, but he has such panache and humour while doing it that you can't help but empathise with him and that makes for a brilliant film. But the plot is not just flimsy black comedy, it is also an interesting comment on class. Alec Guiness plays all the upper class twits, even the woman, because they are all inbred, they are also rude, stupid and insensitive. The mass-murdering sociopath is smarter, more polite and has a better understanding of human emotion than any of them, maybe due to the merit of his mother having escaped with an Italian opera singer. Just amazing.

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film is generally regarded as the one of the best made by Ealing Studios and appears on the Time magazine top 100 list as well as on the BFI Top 100 British films list. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted Kind Hearts and Coronets the 25th greatest comedy film of all time. In 2004 the same magazine named it the 7th greatest British film of all time.

Three D'Ascoynes meet their fate: