blue blood

Louis Mazzini is an impoverished, disgraced draper's assistant, his father a dead Italian singer, his mother the outcast of the aristocratic d'Ascoyne family. When the d'Ascoynes refuse to allow his mother's burial in their family vault, Louis methodically kills all eight of the d'Ascoynes between him and the dukedom of Chalfont - to avenge his mother's memory, for the title, the castle, for profit, and for satisfaction.

Every murder is different, and fitted to the personality of the victim. . . . most of the film is given over to the pleasure of narrated premeditation, because Louis is casual, cool, amusing, cruel, and lets us in on his thinking as he X's them off the family tree in strict sequence. Think of Louis as Oscar Wilde with a score to settle. There's a strong family resemblance among the eight, if only because every one of them is Alec Guinness.

But can we back up a minute? Kind Hearts is an Ealing comedy. Between 1946 and 1955, the small Ealing Studios produced maybe a couple dozen black and white prototypically British comedies: Passport to Pimlico, Whiskey Galore, The Man in the White Suit, Last Holiday, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Ladykillers, The Titfield Thunderbolt - those are the best-known, and most of the best feature Guinness in a leading role. The Ealing comedies are amusing rather than hilarious, more about irony than sight gags, and more comfortable than downright funny.

And no sex. Don't come around here looking for sex. Except for Joan Greenwood's languid pronunciation of 'Louie', which carries a surprising erotic charge.

So this is a very social murder comedy, very rooted in postwar England. What counts as appalling social transgression there, amounts to fine breeding here at the end of the century, so some of these jokes misfire and Louis as a serial killer is small potatoes compared, to, oh, name your favorite serial killer. To the casting, the genius here was in the idea of the casting, not necessarily Alec's execution. Sorry for the pun. (And it saved Ealing a good deal of money, too, a trick picked up by the evil-twin-happy tv producers like Gene Roddenberry, but I'm way off topic.) Guinness's work here is fascinating and happy to see, but not completely satisfying, maybe because we rarely get the camera close enough to see him at work.

And Guinness doesn't do eight. He does a full-blown job on four or five. I wished for more a few more minutes of Lady Agatha, the suffragette balloonist, but oh well.

And, you know, all the d'Ascoynes, except possibly for Henry the amateur photographer, are a dull, stiff, lordly bunch. The fact that they're all Guinness, they're visual jokes instead of characters, blunts the idea that Louis is killing people, and makes you believe that Louis is taking social revenge on an entire class that richly deserves some sort of unpleasant wake-up call. That's was the brilliant idea, that the stunt casting supports the dramatic logic of the film, and gives a funny justification to Louis's homicidal crusade.

With class equations so much more powerful in the UK, and here after fifty years, you can pretty much think of Kind Hearts and Coronets as a foreign movie in English. The question is whether you should hunt this movie down, since you're not likely to stumble across it. The answer is, well, probably not. It's a novelty, an oddity. Charming, witty, elegant, yes. Quaint, dated, mannered, articulate, literate, yes. Paced well for today's audience, no. Unless you're really paying attention.

In my mind, ripe for remake. Move it to Detroit, make the d'Ascoynes into a Gross Pointe family patterned after the Fords, cast Johnny Depp as all the d'Ascoynes and maybe Jet Li as the black sheep of the family. And Halle Berry as Sibella.