Hamer had been a film editor, then a writer, then - as one of Michael Balcon's bright young men at Ealing - a director, making his debut with an episode in the composite picture Dead of Night (1945). He had followed it with a couple of solo features, Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), a period murder story, and It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), a downbeat study of working-class life which he also wrote; the elegance of the first and the social preceptiveness of the second retrospectively provide a hint of what was to come. No-one, however, could have guessed what Hamer was up to when he discovered and began to adapt the little-known Edwardian novel, Israel Rank - a rather self-consciously decadent piece written by Roy Horniman (a follower of Oscar Wilde) - having decided that it had the makings of a film comedy.

In adapting it Hamer remained true to the period of the story and to the allegiance to Wilde. Otherwise, only the basic plot of the novel was retained: the plight of a young man whose mother has married beneath her and been cast out by her family, and his determination to get revenge and repair his spoilt fortunes by murdering his way through a whole family of unspeakable relatives on his way to a dukedom. In the novel this involves a lot of Nietzschean attidinizing on the part of the self-styled superman hero: in the film it is all distilled into an exquisitely subversive comedy of manners, decorated with a constant sparkle of verbal wit such as Wilde would not have disowned.

But that is not all. The film's visual wit perfectly complements the verbal. If the tone is established primarily by the dialogue and by the ruthless Louis' voice-over commentary on the action, it is still true that the best effects are produced by a knowing counterpoint of word and image. A typical example of this is when Louis' tea-time conversation with his cousin's chilly wife (soon to be his) is accompanied by the gradual appearance of a column of smoke indicating that something nasty has happened to his cousin in the woodshed. Elsewhere Hamer's precise selection of what details to show us in the behaviour of his characters lets the audience know just how to read every move in this cool but by no means unemotional game.

The performances are, of course, superb. Dennis Price as the dandyish, but under it all slightly demonic, Louis was never better, and neither were Joan Greenwood and Valerie Hobson, perfectly cast as the two contrasting women in his life. Alec Guinness' extraordinary feat, playing eight members of the d'Ascoyne family, has been much remarked on, but the most remarkable thing about it is virtually unnoticeable. So exactly is each of member of the family portrayed that, while seeing the film, the spectator is aware only of the diversity and believability, not of the one actor who achieves it. But, first and foremost, the film is the personal creation of Robert Hamer, as close to a genuine auteur filmas the British cinema has ever come.

Though some of Hamer's later films were enjoyable - notably Father Brown (1954), which reunited him with Guinness and Greenwood - he never had another comparable chance to express his elegant, uncomfortable wit in the context of a generally conservative British cinema. A pity - but at least Kind Hearts and Coronets remains a masterpiece of its kind, and unique.

plot

When the younger brother of the Duke of Chalfont runs off with a penniless Italian singer her family disowns her.

She tells her son Louis (Dennis Price) about his grand forbears but, denied any aid from her family, he has to work in a draper's shop.

Stung by the family's refusal to recognize kinship with his mother - even when she dies - he determines to get his own back and to impress his suburban girlfriend Sibella (Joan Greenwood) by disposing of all who stand between him and the family title.

First, he murders his most obnoxious cousin (Alec Guinness) during a dirty weekend at Henley, and then blows up another cousin (Alec Guinness), an amateur photographer. A cleric uncle (Alec Guinness) is poisoned; a suffragette aunt (Alec Guinness) is shot down in her balloon; a soldier uncle (er, Alec Guinness) is booby-trapped while recounting his most famous campaign; and a sailor uncle (you guessed it: Alec Guinness) goes down with his ship after a collision at sea.

This makes Louis heir apparent to the Chalfont title, and the accepted fiance of Edith (Valerie Hobson, the photographer cousin's widow).

Just as Louis is achieving his goal by shooting the present duke - whereupon the last remaining uncle expires on hearing he has succeeded to the dukedom - Sibella's husband dies in suspicious circumstances and he is charged with the one murder he didn't do.

Sibella agrees to get him acquitted if he will dispose of Edith and make her the next duchess. All goes according to plan, but there is still the problem of Louis' compromising memoirs which he had absent-mindedly left in hs prison cell on being freed...

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making | cast | plot | ealing dvds | ealing videos
kind hearts
and coronets
charlie chaplin | alfred hitchcock | fritz lang | f.w. murnau
erich von stroheim | wim wenders | robert wiene