Kind Hearts and Coronets DVD is a 1949 British black comedy film starring Dennis Price, Alec Guinness (as eight members of the D'Ascoyne family), Joan Greenwood and Valerie Hobson.
A classic of British cinema, hatched from Ealing's Golden Age, Kind Hearts & Coronets is the hilarious tale of a distant poor relative of the Duke of D'Ascoyne, who plots to inherit the title by murdering the eight other heirs who stand ahead of him in the line of succession.
Oscar® winner Alec Guinness (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) expertly portrays the eight unsuspecting members of the aristocratic D'Acoyne family – targeted one by one by outcast cousin Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) who has a sinister grudge against the family. Desperate to avenge the honour of his dear departed mother, Louis will not stop until her position in the family is given the respect it duly deserves.
In the wicked tradition of Ealing classic The Lady Killers, Kind Hearts and Coronets is a genteel comedy of class and circumstance – a witty tale of outrageous revenge.
Awards
- Nominated BAFTA Award, Best British Film (1950)
- Won NBR Awards (US) for: Best Actor Alec Guinness, Top Foreign Films (1950)
- Nominated Golden Lion Award, Venice Film Festival (1949)
Kind Hearts and Coronets Movie Review
By The Guardian, UK
“The Ealing genre reached utter perfection with this superb black comedy of manners, made in 1949, directed by Robert Hamer and adapted by Hamer with accomplished farceur John Dighton from the 1907 novel Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman. Dennis Price gave a performance which he was, sadly, never again to equal as Louis Mazzini, the suburban draper's assistant who becomes the most elegant serial killer in history. Finding himself by a quirk of fate distantly in line to a dukedom, and infuriated by this aristocratic family's cruel treatment of his mother, he sets out to murder everyone ahead of him in line to the ermine. Alec Guinness gives a miraculously subtle and differentiated multi-performance as all eight members of the noble clan. Joan Greenwood is in her element as the honey-voiced siren Sibella, with whom Louis is briefly entranced, and Valerie Hobson is utterly convincing as the morally pure Edith D'Ascoyne, whom Louis is to marry. (In 1963, Hobson was poignantly to find a similar "loyal wife” role in real life, standing by her husband, disgraced politician John Profumo.) This was Robert Hamer's masterpiece, and though his troubled life and career were sadly brief, it surely entitles him to be mentioned in the same breath as, say, Max Ophüls, and to be considered one of the great British directors."