DVD: Kind Hearts and Coronets

Still disconcertingly dark, Robert Hamer’s 1949 classic receives a handsome remastering for this reissue. It’s still very, very funny, and the bleak tone sets it apart from the other Ealing comedies. Dennis Price oozes cool charm as Louis Mazzini, an Edwardian draper’s assistant plotting macabre, murderous revenge on the aristocratic family who ostracised his mother for marrying below her station. Price is in almost every scene, and his performance is a miracle of refined understatement. Every tiny gesture tells, and his first-person narrative still sounds fresh and innovative, ostensibly a reading of his confessional memoir penned in prison before execution. It’s compared by Peter Bradshaw on the audio commentary to Ray Liotta’s, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster...” from Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

Price never received the credit that his performance deserved, his thunder stolen by Alec Guinness’s portrayal of eight different members of the D’Ascoyne family. Guinness’s turn is technically impressive, but several of his impersonations are so brief that they barely register. Best is his dozy country vicar, listening to Price’s dubious improvised Matabele dialect before expiring after a glass of poisoned port. After six murders, the irony is that Mazzini ends up being tried for the one death he wasn’t responsible for, deservedly framed by Joan Greenwood’s spurned childhood sweetheart. Greenwood’s seductive purr of a voice still works its magic, set against the refined, clipped tones of Valerie Hobson’s Edith.

Generous extras include an entertaining audio commentary with Bradshaw, Guinness’s son Matthew and director Terence Davies, whose enthusiasm for Hamer’s film is infectious. There’s a sweetly rambling interview with cinematographer Douglas Slocombe and an alternative ending cut for the film’s US release, with Mazzini’s impending fate spelt out a little too bluntly. The restored print is exquisite. Is the film a cry of protest against a stuffy, rigid class system, or what director John Landis describes as “a piece of poisoned chocolate in a beautifully wrapped box”? Kind Hearts and Coronets is both, and it’s also the wittiest serial-killer comedy ever made.

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