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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.
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Sunday, May 5, 2024 © 2024 Box Office Prophets, a division of One Of Us, Inc. |