Kind Hearts and Coronets

Here's another one of lacka's!

A brilliant, stylish, much-underrated (in the sense that not enough people get to see it these days) black comedy. As the murderous Louis Mazzini, merrily shortening the gap between him and the dukedom of Chalfont, Dennis Price has his finest hour; and Alec Guinness had a rare old time playing eight members of the D'Ascoyne family (nine if you include the painting of an 'ancestor'). It mystified me the first time I saw it, because I was too young to understand how murder and humour could go together.

It wasn't until I got online that I 'got' the title, which is a (mis)quote of Tennyson: 'Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.'

Favourite lines: (Louis Mazzini, having just brought down the balloon of [Alec Guinness playing] the suffragette Lady Agatha D'ascoyne): "I shot an arrow in the air; she fell to earth in Berkeley Square."

and,

(Louis Mazzini) "The Reverend Lord Henry [Alec Guinness again] was not one of those new-fangled parsons who carry the principles of their vocation uncomfortably into private life."

-though there's plenty more in the script!

And if I remember rightly, a very young Arthur Lowe makes a brief appearance in the brilliantly ambiguous coda as a journalist(?) asking Mazzini about publishing his 'memoirs.' Chock full of little gems, this film.