325 Kind Hearts and Coronets

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tojoed
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Re: 325 Kind Hearts and Coronets

#51 Post by tojoed » Wed Sep 14, 2011 4:53 pm

A nice piece on Dennis Price and the film in today's Grauniad.

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Mr Sausage
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Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#52 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Apr 01, 2019 6:45 am

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colinr0380
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Re: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#53 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Apr 01, 2019 7:22 am

Difficult to know where to begin on this one, other than I love the self-aggrandising memoirs by the jailed protagonist, with the wonderfully ironic pay off! And the film has the best background explosion gag outside of a Looney Tunes cartoon!

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Feego
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Re: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#54 Post by Feego » Mon Apr 01, 2019 9:24 am

The background explosion is indeed wonderful and perhaps my favorite moment in the film. A big part of the reason why it works is because Dennis Price and Valerie Hobson play the whole thing so straight. I've watched Kind Hearts and Coronets twice, and I can't say that I actually laughed at the film either time so much as just nodded and smiled at the gleeful nastiness of it. The film is so dry, so outwardly prim and proper, that it helps mask what is in fact the darkest of comedies. Guinness is of course excellent in his various roles, making such a distinct impression with each that you eventually forget they are all played by the same actor. But I do think Price really is the MVP here. He nails the sardonic protagonist, making him likeable to the audience without actually being likeable or charming. He's just so gung ho about his revenge and expertly delivers the Oscar Wilde-esqe quips ("I shot an arrow in the air. She fell to earth in Berkeley Square.").

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dustybooks
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Re: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#55 Post by dustybooks » Mon Apr 01, 2019 10:41 am

This is one of my favorite films of all time. Even as I grow older and (hopefully) less cynical than I was when I first encountered it, its sheer acerbic brutality is still right in line with my humor in a way that similar movies like Monsieur Verdoux and even The Ladykillers, both of which I do like, are not. It's also my favorite of the Ealing Studios titles, with The Lavender Hill Mob on its tail.
Feego wrote:
Mon Apr 01, 2019 9:24 am
I do think Price really is the MVP here. He nails the sardonic protagonist, making him likeable to the audience without actually being likeable or charming. He's just so gung ho about his revenge and expertly delivers the Oscar Wilde-esqe quips ("I shot an arrow in the air. She fell to earth in Berkeley Square.").
I think this is why this film comes off as so genuinely witty and lovably absurd despite the gruesome themes. If you look at something like Divorce Italian Style or Unfaithfully Yours, it requires much more work in those films to get "on board" with what the protagonist is doing because they are so off-putting as people, the former because he's a middle-aged pervert whose wife absolutely doesn't deserve such awful treatment, the latter because of the arrogance that Rex Harrison brings to so many of his roles. Kind Hearts is closer to Lubitsch in its buoyant tone, and its stroke of genius is applying Lubitsch's amoral attitudes about lust in his '30s comedies to something so dire as serial murder. Black comedy is so tricky, and what works for me may not work for you (or vice versa), but even as squeamish as I am about callous violence in movies, Price makes this work for me because he's so engaging and intimate with us -- we're brought along on a story fully told from his perspective, and instead of feeling cruel and nasty, it feels like he adjusts the moral universe we inhabit for the duration of the film enough that his actions seem almost comprehensible. Yet I never get the idea that the film expects us to look upon his actions as anything but terrible, only that Louis is embodying a secret part of ourselves that occasionally fantasizes about doing horrible things.

This is maybe also why I find the film curiously warm, but it's a warmth that comes from the filmmakers, not the characters. Louis is a bitter, vengeful asshole, but he's aware of it and so are we, and we encounter the whole of the narrative with our moral outlooks subtly reframed. Without being flippant about death, though, the movie requires a certain leap that not all audience members are going to be willing to make. For me, the resulting eccentricity of the film's comedy therefore is an affirmation: the people who thought this was funny were weirdos like me, who were out there even in 1949, and there's something I find reassuring about that.

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Slaphappy
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Re: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#56 Post by Slaphappy » Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:12 am

I saw this couple of years ago for the first time and loved it. It resonates with many of my old horror and crime favorites like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Theatre of Blood and Five Dolls for an August Moon and maybe even Hatchet for the Honeymoon and Get Carter. That shotgun execution scene is sooo cool and casual. Maybe the most satisfactory vigilante kill in history of cinema. That’s because there’s no sentimentality to it and it’s such a slow burn. Main character is almost like a Nabokovian outsider virtuoso with exception that he is miraculously holding it all together and almost gets away with everything.

Can someone point out similar murdering avenger stories from further back? Agatha Christie was an influence maybe?

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Florinaldo
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Re: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#57 Post by Florinaldo » Wed Apr 03, 2019 4:08 pm

Slaphappy wrote:
Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:12 am
I saw this couple of years ago for the first time and loved it. It resonates with many of my old horror and crime favorites like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Theatre of Blood and Five Dolls for an August Moon and maybe even Hatchet for the Honeymoon and Get Carter.
You mention Theater of Blood. It is amusing that in a reversal of roles, Dennis Price plays in that movie one of the several theater critics murdered by the Vincent Price character for denying him an acting award, much like he was the serial executioner of all those d'Ascoynes. As I recall he is the one whose body is dragged by a galloping horse. The murders, replicating with modifications famous scenes in Shakespeare, are more grotesque and extreme than in the 1949 movie, but the whole thing works because is also played straight by just about everyone (except Robert Morley perhaps), despite the almost baroque character of the murders.

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Roscoe
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Re: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#58 Post by Roscoe » Wed Apr 03, 2019 4:16 pm

I always find myself very taken with Joan Greenwood's Sybella -- the way she purrs out the name "Louis" always delights.

Anyone ever read the novel the film is based (very loosely) upon? Well worth a look. Some significant changes, mainly in tone.

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Slaphappy
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Re: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#59 Post by Slaphappy » Thu Apr 04, 2019 4:40 am

Florinaldo wrote:
Wed Apr 03, 2019 4:08 pm
Slaphappy wrote:
Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:12 am
I saw this couple of years ago for the first time and loved it. It resonates with many of my old horror and crime favorites like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Theatre of Blood and Five Dolls for an August Moon and maybe even Hatchet for the Honeymoon and Get Carter.
You mention Theater of Blood. It is amusing that in a reversal of roles, Dennis Price plays in that movie one of the several theater critics murdered by the Vincent Price character for denying him an acting award, much like he was the serial executioner of all those d'Ascoynes. As I recall he is the one whose body is dragged by a galloping horse. The murders, replicating with modifications famous scenes in Shakespeare, are more grotesque and extreme than in the 1949 movie, but the whole thing works because is also played straight by just about everyone (except Robert Morley perhaps), despite the almost baroque character of the murders.
Yeah, I like the combination of grimimess and highbrow. Dennis Price died 1973 when Theatre of Blood came out btw. I hope he had great time that year in Spain with Jess Franco, Howard Vernon and the rest of the crew shooting Erotic Rites of Frankenstein and Lovers of the Devil’s Island.

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colinr0380
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Re: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#60 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Apr 13, 2019 10:35 am

Dennis Price was in a couple of earlier Jess Franco films too. I have a feeling that he (and Christopher Lee and Maria Rohm!) was brought into that orbit by his role in 1965's Ten Little Indians, which was produced by Harry Alan Towers, who was working with Franco at the time. His first Franco role was in 1969's Venus In Furs, produced by Harry Alan Towers, and then he went on to arguably Franco's best film (at least best known by name) Vampyros Lesbos in 1970. And then he played a variation on Doctor Frankenstein in Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein between that and those last two titles.

Jonathan S
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Re: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

#61 Post by Jonathan S » Sat Apr 13, 2019 1:21 pm

Roscoe wrote:
Fri Jan 02, 1970 3:10 pm
Anyone ever read the novel the film is based (very loosely) upon? Well worth a look. Some significant changes, mainly in tone.
Not yet, but I gather that 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal was a contemporary social satire, particularly on Edwardian anti-Semitism, and of course it's easy to understand why that wouldn't have been possible in 1949. Changing the protagonist to an Anglo-Italian works very well, in stereotypical terms, because Mazzini has a “hot Latin" temperament that fuels his desire for revenge, but it’s masked by an English stiff upper-lip - as in the maxim "revenge is a dish best served cold". It also facilitates the introduction of "Il mio tesoro", Ottavio's vengeance aria from Don Giovanni, first heard orchestrally over the opening credits.

Hamer had only made dramas for Ealing up to this point, and I think that's partly why it has a darker, more serious tone than the other Ealing comedies. In some ways, it's got more in common with 1940s film noir, such as the Double Indemnity-like flashback structure with narration by the criminal protagonist. Yet it also fits the "David and Goliath" pattern of most Ealing comedies (small communities v. government officials, little old lady v. bank robbers, etc.) which, together with the first-person voiceover, invites empathy with the underdog.

The part of the narration I always find most shocking is the gleefully insouciant reference to diphtheria, a disease mainly associated with children, which reportedly caused 50,000 European deaths in 1943 alone, just six years before the film was released. But perhaps this is Swiftian bad taste with a purpose, part of the film's underlying commentary (like Monsieur Verdoux's) on the recent large-scale destruction of human life.

Kind Hearts looks backward to Edwardian times and to World War Two but, with hindsight, it also seems to look forward to the Angry Young Men of a decade later, the working-class heroes who like Mazzini rebelled against the ruling class. The upper-class twits played by Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts are very funny, but not all of them are portrayed as affectionately or innocuously as such characters usually had been in pre-WW2 British cinema - which of course reflects the class shakeup of the war and the post-war Labour government. Debonair Dennis Price goes even further in challenging the ruling class than his Angry successors. Sometimes his revenge seems to be conducted more in sorrow than anger… but always with great finesse!

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