A short appreciation, from old review-notes, of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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9 October
A short appreciation, from old review-notes, of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Somehow, when a restoration by the Britifish Film Institute (would that they could be known as that, not as BFI!) was released last year, I failed to turn a few notes from seeing Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) into a review. Here ‘tis now…
One cannot argue with the description of this film, in Picturehouse Recommends, having 'the most articulate and literate of all Ealing screenplays'. It is not just dialogue, but Louis Mazzini's (Dennis Price's) sinister narration and how he delivers it as if what he planned and did is the most reasonable thing in the world, wherein, of course, lies the wonder of the piece. If the film gets you to laugh quite naturally at children dying of diphtheria (and their mother dying, too), then that is skilled writing, but even the best writing depends on delivery, and that of the principals is impeccable.
For me, the fact that Alec Guinness transforms himself into eight varyingly inbred members (including one woman) of Mazzini’s mother’s family is the lesser thing, and it is in this connection that I have alluded to it in my review of Holy Motors (2012) (for anyone who believes that even the resources of the limousine suffice, and not a great deal of assistance beside would be needed, is deluding him- or herself). The costume is not the least part not only of the impersonations, but of the whole film, most notably for the two leading ladies:
The character parts are cute, but it is Mazzini interacting with these crucial women that counts, Joan Greenwood as childhood chum Sibella Holland, and Valerie Hobson as Edith d’Ascoyne, the woman whom he has widowed and in favour of whom Sibella just becomes something on the side. The planning just gets a little too clever for its own good, and Mazzini ends up tried before his peers (who are peers), under the darting eyes of Hugh Griffith, and brings us crucially back to a document that he has written whilst telling his tale, and which could unwittingly end up as his confession.
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