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Wikipedia
Kind Hearts and Coronets is a 1949 British black comedy film directed by Robert Hamer. It was written by John Dighton and Hamer, and is loosely based on the novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman. The Kind Hearts and Coronets title derives fromTennyson's poem Lady Clara Vere de Vere (1842): "Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood."
Dennis Price plays Louis Mazzini. Alec Guinness plays eight members of the D'Ascoyne family, including an active man in his early 20s, a feeble octogenarian, and a suffragette. Joan Greenwood and Valerie Hobson play Louis' two romantic interests.
Kind Hearts and Coronets is regarded as one of the best Ealing Studios films, and is listed inTime magazine's top 100, and in the BFI Top 100 British films. In 2000, Total Film magazine readers voted Kind Hearts and Coronets as the 25th-greatest comedy film, and, in 2004, named it the seventh-greatest British film.
Plot
In Edwardian England, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) is the son of a woman ostracised by her aristocratic family for eloping with an Italian opera singer. Upon her death, the D'Ascoynes deny her last wish: to be entombed in the family crypt. Louis plots to avenge this insult and to inherit the D'Ascoyne dukedom of Chalfont — but, initially, twelve relatives stand in his way. Births and deaths see the number vary, "Sometimes the death column brought good news...sometimes the births column brought bad. The advent of twin sons to the Duke was a terrible blow. Fortunately, an epidemic of diphtheria restored the status quo almost immediately and even brought me a bonus in the shape of the Duchess," but eventually Louis is left with eight people between him and what he sees as his rightful inheritance.
Louis determines to murder them, and kills six of them in inventive, blackly humorous, ways. Two others (the Admiral and the banker) die without his assistance, and Louis becomes the tenth Duke of Chalfont. (The death of the Admiral is based on a real incident, the sinking ofHMS Victoria in 1893.)
Complications ensue when Louis is torn between two women: Sibella (Joan Greenwood), his down-to-earth paramour, who is the wife of his childhood rival Lionel (John Penrose), and the refined Edith D'Ascoyne (Valerie Hobson), who is the widow of his second victim. He marries Edith. When Lionel goes bankrupt and kills himself, Sibella hides his suicide note. Louis is tried by his peers in the House of Lords, and is convicted of murdering someone he did not kill.
Awaiting execution, he writes his memoirs, describing all his murders in detail. At the last moment, however, Sibella "finds" the suicide note, and Louis is released. As he steps through the prison gate and greets a cheering crowd, two carriages await him: Edith's and Sibella's. Unable to choose between them, he quotes from The Beggar's Opera, "How happy could I be with either, Were t'other dear charmer away!" When a representative of Tit-Bits magazine approaches him and asks for the publication rights to his memoirs, Louis realizes he has left the incriminating manuscript in his prison cell. The original British version ends at this point, leaving it ambiguous whether Louis' guilt will be discovered.
[edit]American version
To satisfy the Hays Office Production Code, Kind Hearts and Coronets was censored for the American market.[1] Some ten seconds of footage was added to the ending, showing the manuscript of Louis' memoirs being discovered before he can retrieve them. (This ending is an extra product in the Region 1 Kind Hearts and Coronets Criterion Collection DVD.) The dialogue between Louis and Sibella was altered to downplay their adultery; derogatory lines about the Parson were deleted; and in the rhyme "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe", sailor replaced the word nigger. The result is a version that is six minutes shorter than the British original.
[edit]Cast
- Dennis Price as Louis Mazzini and his father
- Alec Guinness as (in order of death)
| Character | Cause of Death |
|---|---|
| A family ancestor in a portrait | Unknown, before events of film |
| Young Ascoyne D'Ascoyne (son of Lord Ascoyne D'Ascoyne) | Pushed over a weir with his girlfriend in a boat by Louis. |
| Young Henry D'Ascoyne (photographer) | Unintentionally explodes the petrol in his lamp with which Louis had replaced the paraffin. |
| Reverend Lord Henry D'Ascoyne | Louis poisons his port. |
| Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne | Louis fires an arrow into her balloon thus plunging her to earth. |
| Admiral Lord Horatio D'Ascoyne | Dies without assistance by Louis. Sinks and goes down with his own ship having insisted on going Port not Starboard, thus crashing into another ship. |
| General Lord Rufus D'Ascoyne | Louis sends him a bomb posing as pot of caviar that the General sets off by plunging a knife into it. |
| Ethelred D'Ascoyne, 8th Duke of Chalfont | Louis lures him into a mantrap and shoots him with his own gun, making it appear to be an accident. |
| Lord Ascoyne D'Ascoyne (Banker, 9th Duke of Chalfont) | Dies without assistance by Louis. Already terminally ill, he dies of shock on hearing of the death of the previous Duke. |
Originally, he was offered only four D'Ascoyne parts: "I read [the screenplay] on a beach in France, collapsed with laughter on the first page, and didn't even bother to get to the end of the script. I went straight back to the hotel and sent a telegram saying, ‘Why four parts? Why not eight!?' " [2]
- Valerie Hobson as Edith
- Joan Greenwood as Sibella
- Audrey Fildes as Mama
- Miles Malleson as the Hangman
- Clive Morton as the Prison Governor
- John Penrose as Lionel
- Cecil Ramage as Crown Counsel
- Hugh Griffith as the Lord High Steward in Louis' trial
- Arthur Lowe as the magazine representative
[edit]Production
Chalfont, the family home of the d'Ascoynes, is Leeds Castle in Kent, England.[3] The film's musical theme is Il mio tesoro ("My treasure"), from Don Giovanni, by Mozart. The collected correspondence between the novelists Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford record that Ealing studios employed them separately to write the screenplay; none of their contributions are in the final script.
[edit]Radio adaptation
BBC7 broadcast a radio version of Kind Hearts and Coronets, recorded in 1995, featuring Michael Kitchen as Mazzini and Harry Enfield as the D'Ascoyne family (augmented by Colonel Henry D'Ascoyne who was shown in a portrait in the movie). Haydn Gwynne played Edith D'Ascoyne, Lynsey Baxter played Sybella, and Michael Denison played the Crown Counsel. The original music was by Barrington Pheloung, and it also featured music from the film. The ending seems to adhere to the Hays Code ending in that a prison official finds, and reads, the memoirs.
[edit]Related works
The film is loosely based on Roy Horniman's 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal. This novel, out of print since a second edition in 1946, has recently been re-published by Faber Finds.
Simon Heffer writes that the novel is well-written, but darker and more problematic than the film. The central character, Israel Rank, is half Jewish rather than half Italian. Heffer observes of Rank's character that, "... his ruthless using of people (notably women) and his greedy pursuit of position all seem to conform to the stereotype that the anti-semite has of the Jew."[4] Rank's elimination of the six relatives, including a child, who stand between him and the earldom is depicted as cold, ruthless, carefully planned crime. The film, in contrast, is an urbane, black comedy. After his sixth murder, Rank, now Earl Gascoyne, is tried by his fellow peers, the House of Lords, found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang. However a false confession saves him and he survives to enjoy his earldom. But he realises his high-minded wife knows all.[4]
Brian Killick’s 1973 novel The Heralds has a similar plot.
[edit]Literary references
- Louis's line on killing Lady Agatha — "I shot an arrow in the air, she fell to earth in Berkeley Square", parodies Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Arrow and the Song": "I shot an arrow in the air, it fell to earth I know not where".
- In the early story, Louis paraphrases Samuel Johnson's quotation "When a man knows he is to be hanged the next morning, it concentrates the mind wonderfully" as "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully".
- Louis's quip that he sent the "caviar to the general" is from Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2). In Hamlet "general" means the general public, not a military general.
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