comedy

Kind Hearts and Coronets: Ealing’s Shadow Side

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Alec Guinness
Alec Guinness

Robert Hamer’s witty, ironic tale of calculating serial killer breaks the beloved mold of the Ealing comedy.

By Phillip Kent | 2006

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) is an Ealing comedy in name only. True, it’s undeniably a comedy and was made by (though largely not at) Ealing. But in virtually every other respect, it deviates startlingly from the commonly accepted stereotype. Ealing comedies, it’s widely agreed, are cozy, even complacent; Kind Hearts and Coronets is callous and amoral. The humor of Ealing comedy is essentially good-natured and folksy; Kind Hearts and Coronets is cool, ironic, and witty. Sex in Ealing comedies is mostly avoided or, if inevitable, treated with embarrassed jocularity; several scenes in Kind Hearts and Coronets carry a potent erotic charge. In Ealing comedies, the criminals—even the lovable ones, like Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)—eventually pay for their crimes; the hero of Kind Hearts and Coronets is a calculating serial killer who, in the final reel, stands a good chance of getting away scot-free.

None of which is so surprising, given that Kind Hearts and Coronets was created by the maverick Robert Hamer, of all Ealing directors the one who found it hardest to conform to the studio’s upbeat, wholesome ethos. And unlike Alexander Mackendrick, Ealing’s other great maverick director, Hamer never had the patience—or the cunning—to slip his subversive notions into his work under the guise of innocuous comedy. Hamer openly fought for his ideas and, in the cautious atmosphere of post–World War II British cinema, usually lost.

The prevailing mode of filmmaking at Ealing—still, half a century after its demise, the most famous of all British film studios—was largely the creation of production head Michael Balcon, who ran it as a benevolent autocracy. The son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Balcon was fervently patriotic, left-liberal in politics, and prudish in sexual matters. When, in 1955, Ealing was sold to the BBC, Balcon had a plaque placed on the studio wall that read: “Here, during a quarter of a century, many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.” What he most likely had in mind was Ealing’s bent for realism, much influenced by the number of senior Ealing personnel—Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Charles Crichton, indeed Hamer himself—who had joined the studio from the British documentary movement. But more than that, the kind of film that Balcon always preferred, and that he held to be typically British, was essentially conciliatory, with a plot that moved toward final-reel consensus, for the good of the community—an outcome reflected in such mainstream Ealing movies as the drama The Blue Lamp (1949) and the comedy Passport to Pimlico (1949). Continue reading →

My favourite film: Kind Hearts and Coronets

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Liese Spencer continues our writers’ favourite film series with the Ealing comedy that blew away her teenage funk

By Liese Spencer | first published in The Guardian, Dec 22 2011

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

Source: My favourite film: Kind Hearts and Coronets | Film | The Guardian

The Bea List: 5 Top TV Shows starring Aisling Bea

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Here are top 5 shows starring one of Ireland’s finest talents.

No longer a newcomer, Aisling Bea has firmly claimed her place as one of Ireland’s finest TV talents. Here’s a list of just some of the shows that will have you saying ‘Oh My God, What a Complete Legend, Aisling…’

This Way Up

As both programme creator and star, this Channel Four series earned a BAFTA win for Aisling. It’s a comedy-drama following the life of Áine, an Irish woman living in London, navigating her way through life after a breakdown. Some very poignant moments throughout, in particular between Bea and Sharon Horgan who plays her sister. Series two has been promised to us later this year, but the first series is available on Channel Four’s catch-up service 4oD. (Channel Four)

Living With Yourself

Part sci-fi, part comedy-drama, this quirky series stars Paul Rudd (AntMan, Anchorman) as a man on a quest to better himself through extremely bizarre measures. As he tries to rekindle his relationship with wife Kate, played by Bea, we witness the epic dance scene above, a definite series highlight. (Netflix)

The Fall

In the final series of this psychological thriller starring Gillian Anderson (The X Files), Aisling shows off her dramatic chops as the nurse who cares for Jamie Dornan’s serial killer Paul Spector. All series are available on-demand on the RTE Player. (Box set available on the RTE Player) 

Trivia

First broadcast in 2012, here newcomer Aisling Bea stars opposite Keith McErlean, who we know and love from Bachelor’s Walk. The acclaimed series follows the lives and relationships of a quiz team in Co. Monaghan. (Box set available on the RTE Player) 

Quiz 

Starting this Sunday night on RTÉ One, Aisling Bea plays a TV executive working on Britain’s most famous quiz show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Michael Sheen stars as the show’s host Chris Tarrant and Fleabag’s Sian Clifford stars as Diana Ingram, the woman who found herself at the heart of a cheating scandal. (RTE One, Sunday 24th January, 9:30pm)

Source: The Bea List: 5 Top TV Shows starring Aisling Bea