Classic Movie Review:
Kind Hearts and Coronets
By Josh Spiegel
June 21, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
What’s more, we should take comedy seriously enough to appreciate its roots. Think, if you will, of Eddie Murphy. I know, you’re not thrilled at the prospect, but think about his many roles in the Nutty Professor films or even in the excrescence that was Norbit. Even if it’s so heavily associated with Murphy now, and is something of a major crutch for comic actors including him and his Shrek co-star, Mike Myers, the idea of an actor playing multiple roles goes back very far in film history. Yes, you’re thinking, I’ve seen Dr. Strangelove, too, and I know that Peter Sellers plays multiple roles. While you are correct (and if there are readers out here who haven’t seen Dr. Strangelove…I mean, come on, get to it), I’m going to go a little further back, to 1949, in Great Britain, to a movie called Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Kind Hearts and Coronets is a notable comedy, as it comes from Ealing Studios, which was responsible for some of the great British comedies of the 1950s, including The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers. Kind Hearts and Coronets came a little early, and is about as dry as a comedy gets, but it also features one actor playing eight roles, as various members of a very well-off family in the Victorian Era. Though Peter Sellers would show up in The Ladykillers, he doesn’t appear in Kind Hearts and Coronets. The actor in question is Alec Guinness. You have paused. Yes, Alec Guinness. You know, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Of course, it’s well-known that Guinness, while making a bundle on his appearances in the Star Wars franchise, loathed the fact that most people from my generation and the previous one only knew him for his role as the wise old Jedi.
Guinness, of course, had a long and varied career, having been a major collaborator with David Lean in films including The Bridge on the River Kwai, Great Expectations, Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India, and many more. He also worked in future Ealing comedies, getting an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in The Lavender Hill Mob; he also starred as the nefarious professor in The Ladykillers (for those of you who’ve only seen the American remake, he played the role Tom Hanks played), and spent many years on the stage. The point being: Alec Guinness had a hell of a career before George Lucas came along. And yet, it’s a little shocking to see him at such a young age (he was 35 when Kind Hearts and Coronets was released) playing so many characters, from a slow-moving old reverend to a young and brash royal to a elder feminist. Watching him perform in Kind Hearts and Coronets is breathtaking, because you have to remind yourself you’re watching one actor do so much unthinkable work.
It’s unfortunate, then, that Kind Hearts and Coronets just about slows to a standstill when Guinness is not on screen. I suppose I’m as much to blame for my experience here; having heard of the film, I’d always assumed that Guinness was, in effect, the main performer. While he obviously has the flashiest work in the film, Guinness is a supporting performer, to say the least, and his characters are merely a catalyst for the main character, Louis Mazzini (played by Dennis Price). Louis is trying to exact revenge on the D’Ascoyne family (all members played by Guinness) for mistreating his recently deceased mother. Louis’ mother was once a D’Ascoyne, but was exiled for having an affair with an Italian opera singer, so they will not let her be buried in the family plot. The entirety of Kind Hearts and Coronets is about how Louis attempts to become the next Duke of D’Ascoyne: by killing them.
The best thing about the Ealing comedies is their matter-of-fact blackness. The plot doesn’t sound particularly funny, even if one actor is playing eight roles of varying ages and genders. What makes the movie stand out is how blank-faced the performers play the story and deliver their lines. Unlike movies from the past few decades, I can’t tell you some of the best lines in the film, mostly because the movie, directed by Robert Hamer and written by Hamer and John Dighton, isn’t structured as a laugh-out-loud, quotable comedy. Not that quotable comedies became the norm only in the last 30 years, mind you. Put on any Marx Brothers comedy, and you’ve got yourself a movie filled with great one-liners. This was the first time when I realized that I was watching a movie that is virtually laughless, but is still mostly good for what it wants to be.
The main problems with the movie are that Guinness is acting circles around everyone else in the movie. Yes, he has the advantage of playing eight roles as opposed to one, but even when he’s facing off with Price, it feels like an accomplished actor facing off with a high-school student who just got the lead in The Iceman Cometh and hasn’t memorized all the lines. It’s disappointing, because Price was absolutely solid in one of his other major films, 1944’s A Canterbury Tale, from the filmmaking duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. In that film, Price also played another character firmly dedicated to the ideals of right and wrong, but he was so strongly contested by other characters that there was a strong enough balance. Not so here. Price isn’t bad, but it’s so much more fun to watch Guinness on screen.
Louis also has a love triangle, which would be more fascinating to me if I felt like the women in the picture were more well defined, as opposed to just being pretty ideas from beginning to end. Even in the film’s last scene, Louis is faced with the choice of which woman he wants to be with—Sibella, who’s more down-to-earth, and Edith D’Ascoyne, a woman Louis makes a widow early on in the film—and he’s unable to do so. I’m not really against love triangles in films, but you have to make your audience feel like there’s something to invest in. Yes, this is a comedy, but we should care about the fates of the characters; since we never get the satisfaction of watching Louis get justice for his evil scheme, just a hint, we’ve got little to hold onto.
All that aside, there’s no question that Kind Hearts and Coronets is a film worth seeing, if only to watch the majesty and grace that Alec Guinness exudes here. There’s a joke from an old episode of The Simpsons, where Lisa watches a new friend play an anagram game with her father, who names Alec Guinness as a phrase to make an anagram from. The new friend says, “Genuine class”, which is appropriate for the man in more ways that we initially realize. In science-fiction films, he had class. In war films, he had class. In a black comedy where he played men and women both young and old, where one of his characters dies via an arrow to their hot-air balloon (yes, really), he had class. Watch this movie for Alec Guinness. He deserves the attention.