Kind Hearts and Coronets

1949 black English comedy

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Young Louis Mazzini feels cheated by his D'Ascoyne heirs who he feels robbed his mother of her family rights after she married out of love rather than because of social reasons. When his mother passes on, they won't even let her be buried with the family. That's the last straw for Louis who, already in a bad mood when childhood sweetheart Sibella decides to marry their childhood peer instead of him, decides to get his revenge by killing the eight members of the family standing in his way of becoming the Duke of D'Ascoyne. May the Force be with the D'Ascoyne family.

That "May the Force by with you" joke covers a lot of movie nerd ground. Alec Guinness isn't given a lot to do with any of the individual parts, but he does get to play all eight members of the D'Ascoyne family, including Lady Agatha the suffragette, who Mazzini either kills or who just die before he can get to him. This movie's actually in the Alec Guinness Book of World Records for having the most Alec Guinnesses in it. That's a fact, and you can look it up. Dennis Price as the emotionless, calculating killer is about perfect, too. It's a fine line of a character, and if stretched too thin or chewed on too much, it just wouldn't have worked. But Price, like the irony-soaked script, is perfectly suave. He delivers these wonderfully ironic lines (My favorites might be the one about how his principles wouldn't allow him to hunt and how it's difficult to kill people when you are not on friendly terms...oh, and the one about why he decides to kill the priest next...oh, and...nevermind. Just watch the movie yourself.) and you almost expect him to give you one of those big exaggerated winks afterwards. You almost have to root for a villain who's this funny and who recites poetry after he strikes. Kind Hearts and Coronets is one of those films where you don't really feel like you've watched a movie after you're finished. It's so literary and the script is so clever and well written that it feels like you've read a book instead. And I appreciate any movie that makes me feel smarter after I've watched it. I don't laugh very much at all when I watch Kind Hearts and Coronets, but I'd still call it one of my favorite black comedies.

Another thing for those of you who have had the pleasure of watching this one: I read that they had to change the ending slightly in America to fit with The Code. What the heck? How stupid did they think the average American was in 1949?