Robert Tanitch reviews Kind Hearts and Coronets (StudioCanal)
Robert Hamer directed this famous and hugely successful Ealing Studios comedy with great style in 1949. It is one of the great high comedies of manners, an elegant and sophisticated satire on the class system in Edwardian England.
A cold and callous story is told with dry irony and studied cynicism. The witty and literate screenplay by Hamer and John Dighton sounds like it is by Oscar Wilde and the actors perform it as they would perform Wilde.
The admiral who goes down with his sinking ship and the suffragette who is killed whilst travelling in an hot air balloon are cardboard cut-outs. The boring general (a parody of C. Aubrey Smith in The Four Feathers) and the arrogant, young man who disappears over a weir whilst he is making love in a punt are quick sketches.
The most rewarding roles are the kindly old banker who dies of a stroke, the likeable newly-wed photographer who gets blown up in his dark room; the deaf old parson who is poisoned; and the brutal duke who is caught in one of his own mantraps and murdered in cold blood – a scene of unexpected viciousness.
Guinness got all the notices. But it was Dennis Price, excellent in his best role ever, who carried the whole film, and he was, most unfairly, not given the credit he deserved. His restrained, coolly mocking voice-over is perfect.
Price plays the sang-froid serial killer with such wit and elegance that you wonder why he never acted in Wilde’s plays. The scenes he shares with clever Joan Greenwood (as a ruthless, sneering, seductive predator) are particularly sharp and vindictive.
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