A masterwork of irony

Kind Hearts and Coronets is the quintessential Ealing comedy: it satirizes the British class system with a simple plot, wicked writing, and terrific comic acting.

The plot is told in retrospect: the daughter of a British peer is shunned by her family, the D’Ascoynes, because she eloped with a certain Mazzini, an Italian opera singer. Mazzini died the day their son, Louis, was born. After his mother’s own untimely death in penury in Clapham, Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini takes up his mother's unrequited ambition to be accepted by the D’Ascoyne family. 

What makes this particular recipe for revenge so tasty is that it is a dish served sufficiently cold to the accompaniment of a continual patter of mannered snobbery.

Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini (Dennis Price) pens his mémoires in prison. 

The patter is the calm voiceover narration of the archly ironic mémoires of the same Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini, 10th Duke of Chalfont (Dennis Price), penned while awaiting execution for a murder he did not commit. This chef d’oeuvre details Louis’s coolly-laid ‘campaign’, resolved at his mother’s 'common' graveside, to avenge the ‘wrongs’ her family had done her and himself. (It should come as no small surprise to see Nancy Mitford listed as having made uncredited screenplay revisions.)

'It was no more than a piece of youthful bravado,’ Louis tells us, ‘but it was one of those acorns from which great oaks are destined to grow. Even then I went so far as to examine the family tree and prune it to just the living members. But what could I do to hurt them? What could I take from them, except, perhaps, their lives.’ And, of course, their title.

'I shot an arrow in the air; she fell to earth in Berkeley Square.'

Louis’s quarries, the eight D’Ascoynes that stand between himself and the Dukedom of Chalfont, share a strong family resemblance because all are played by a young Alec Guinness: the Duke, Lord Ethelred D’Ascoyne; a banker and his son, both Ascoyne D’Ascoynes; young Henry Ascoyne; Admiral Lord Horatio D’Ascoyne; General Lord Rufus D’Ascoyne; Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne; and the Reverend Lord Henry D’Ascoyne.

Alec Guinness as seven lordly (and one lady) D'Ascoynes

Guinness, to repurpose one of Louis’s mots, ‘exhibits the most extraordinary capacity for middle age that I’ve ever encountered in a young man of twenty-eight.’ He makes eight individuals of stereotypical privileged snobs, hemming and doddering and blustering with his characteristic lilt and the light of mischief in his eyes, playing an ideal foil to Price’s precious pretentiousness.

A less pleasant D'Ascoyne (Alec Guinness) confronts Louis (Dennis Price) 

Early in his campaign, Louis stalks one of the younger, more unpleasant D’Ascoynes, the son of the private banker, on a weekend getaway with his mistress. After taking an action that results in both their deaths, Louis muses: ‘I was sorry about the girl, but found some relief in the reflection that she had presumably during the weekend already undergone a fate worse than death.'

Of subsidiary concern to Louis is Lionel Holland (John Penrose), an only marginally 'social better' with whom Louis grew up, who had slighted him as ‘a penniless boy from Clapham’. 

Dennis Price and Joan Greenwood in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Part of Louis’s motivation is to impress the voluptuous but unobtainable Sibella (Joan Greenwood) with whom he also grew up, destined to marry Lionel. And then in the course of his campaign Louis becomes acquainted with young Henry D’Ascoyne’s devoted but sexually 'disappointed' wife Edith (Valerie Hobson), a high-minded widow who looks like a John Singer Sargent portrait subject. Louis, to whom sexually frustrated beautiful married women are candy, sees the perfect dessert for his main course in marrying Edith, adding, ‘While I never admired Edith as much as when I was with Sibella, I never longed for Sibella as much as when I was with Edith.’

Dennis Price and Valerie Hobson in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

In step with the story’s high irony, the House of Lords convicts Louis, Lord Chalfont of a murder he did not commit. However, this is neither the end nor the final irony: the story concludes as it opened, with the mémoires (there is an alternate crime-does-not-pay ending spelled out for US audiences).

The film takes its unusual title from the poem Lady Clara Vere de Vere by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In it, the poet, speaking of the proud aristocratic woman of the title, says: ‘Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.’ Edith quotes the line after Louis tells her his story when they first meet.

The Criterion Collection release of this film includes a 70-minute 1977 BBC television interview with Guinness by host Michael Parkinson.
 
Kind Hearts and Coronets 1949 U.K. (106 minutes) Ealing Studios. Directed by Robert Hamer; screenplay by Hamer and John Dighton, uncredited script revisions by Nancy Mitford, from Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of Criminal; cinematography by Douglas Slocombe; edited by Peter Tanner.