Is Kind Hearts & Coronets The Best Black Comedy Ever?

Is Kind Hearts & Coronets The Best Black Comedy Ever?

Posted on Monday August 15, 2011, 11:43 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States

This week, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts And Coronets is getting a quick cinema re-release before coming out in gussied-up Blu-ray form. The film, starring Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness and Alec Guinness, is (for my money) the greatest Ealing comedy ever and a strong contender for best British film ever made. It is also, I'm arguing here, the greatest black comedy ever made.

A quick catch-up for those among you who have not yet had the pleasure of seeing this 1949-made, Edwardian-set classic: Dennis Price stars as Louis Mazzini, the son of a noblewoman who eloped with an Italian opera singer and was disowned by her family, the D'Ascoynes. The singer (also Price, under a false moustache) dies the moment he first lays eyes on his son, and Louis grows to adulthood watching his mother die in poverty and be refused her rightful place in the family crypt. He's also spurned by Sibella (Joan Greenwood), the heartless girl he adores (think Estella in Great Expectations) in favour of a wealthier man. Gradually he becomes convinced that the root of all his troubles lies with the D'Ascoyne family. And so he sets out to exact his revenge on the lot of them.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, what follows is a comedy of manners and class as much as a chronicle of murder. "It is so difficult," sighs Louis, "to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms." The lower-middle-class Louis, a shop clerk by necessity, gradually insinuates himself into the company of the D'Ascoynes, targeting them (and the occasional innocent bystander) methodically for execution.

All eight of the family are played, famously, by Alec Guinness, from the callow young Henry D'Ascoyne to the doddering Parson and the fierce suffragette Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne ("I shot an arrow in the air / She fell to Earth in Berkeley Square"). They are at worst utter snobs and at best privileged eccentrics, but not a man or woman among them is a match for the determined Louis, who reveals a brilliant mind for murder and a capacity for methodical calculation that makes Hannibal Lecter look like Begbie.

Price's anti-hero is, for my money, maybe the great movie villain*. He's calm, controlled, exquisitely polite and almost unbearably poised even as he murders his way up the line of succession. He goes along on a shooting trip with one of his relations, but won't shoot game himself as "my principles will not allow me to take a direct part in blood sports" (this after six murders).

After conceiving of a way to kill Young Ascoyne D'Ascoyne while the latter is out punting during a dirty weekend, he briefly regrets the concomitant death of the man's lover, but consoles himself that, "I was sorry about the girl, but found some relief in the reflection that she had presumably during the weekend already undergone a fate worse than death."

His way with a bon mot is Wildean - consider the voiceover line, "I must admit he exhibits the most extraordinary capacity for middle age that I've ever encountered in a young man of twenty-four" - and while Louis is, unquestionably, a cold-blooded and ruthless killer, he takes no particular relish in the game and in only one moment displays any personal animosity towards his victims. Killing is merely a means to an end, an unpleasant task to be worked through to achieve some greater goal. It is, in a strange sort of way, a case of noblesse oblige: Louis' birth compels him to overcome these messy obstacles to take his appointed place at the top of the heap.

Louis has only two weak spots, the principle of which - as is so often the case - in his love life. Sibella is a treacherous, vain, untrustworthy snake, so naturally he can't resist her. But he also loves the widowed Edith D'Ascoyne (widowed by his own hand, naturally), a paragon of piety and prudence. And it's his entanglements with those two that threaten his undoing, throwing a cog in the works of all his carefully laid plans to ascend to the aristocracy. But there's another weakness there in the background: the closer Louis comes to the height of society, the greater his confidence and pride grow, and the more untouchable he feels. Why, in those circumstances he might make a silly oversight that proves his undoing (or not - you can really choose your own ending here).

Louis' amorality shapes the whole film, making it all feel deliciously naughty. This is not a black comedy for gore or language or overt sexuality, but for a pervasive sense of values turned upside down. You find yourself rooting for Louis against the relatively innocent D'Ascoynes, and there's something admirable in his composure even when faced with his own death. There's social satire here too - the pretensions of upper, middle and working classes are all neatly skewered - but whether you choose to delve into that or not this is just a delightful tale of mass murder, blackmail, adultery and getting away with it. A few black comedies are nastier, but few are such witty, fizzy fun.

Which other black comedies can stand against Kind Hearts And Coronets? For some reason Grosse Point Blank feels cut from the same cloth to me: there's the same sort of dreadful behaviour going on while society continues, undisturbed by the killer in their midst, in that effort. Dr Strangelove is black of a different sort, where it's incompetence and madness that doom us all - a gallows humour of a different sort and a laugh that, ultimately, could collapse into despair. Kind Hearts And Coronets, strangely, offers more hope for humanity than Kubrick's film: in Hamer's film, there are only a few truly bad eggs, and their deeds may (depending on your take on the ending) ultimately be found out.

But what do you think? Can you offer a more dark-hearted alternative?

*Apart from Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, who I also adore.