Original subtitles

With so little time remaining to complete my story,

it is difficult to choose where to begin it.

Perhaps I should begin at the beginning.

(BABY CRYING) I was a healthy baby...

...born of an English mother and Italian father...

(CHOKES)

who succumbed to a heart attack at the moment of first setting eyes on me.

In the circumstances, it will be understood

that I have but slight memory of him.

The little I know comes from what Mama told me.

(SOFT PIANO MUSIC)

Kind Hearts And Coronets is one of a kind,

a superb pitch-black comedy about gentile serial killing.

It was made at the great Ealing Studios,

but don't let that fool you.

Robert Hammer's bespoke fable has a style entirely its own.

There was the duke.

There was my employer, Lord Ascoyne D'Ascoyne.

There was Admiral Horatio D'Ascoyne.

There was General Lord Rufus D'Ascoyne.

(SNORING)

There was Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne.

Shh.

Would you say that Kind Hearts And Coronets is one of,

if not the greatest British comedy ever made?

I think in terms of modernity, in terms of laughs,

in terms of survivability, I would argue that it's if not the first,

then it's the top two of British comedies.

I think it stands up against

almost anything else that's been made since.

When researching for this programme, I looked at a lot of bloggers,

young, teenage, Gen Z bloggers,

who were coming to this film for the first time in the 2020s,

saying where has this film come from?

And not being able to believe it was made in the 1940s.

This is such a sharp, funny, contemporary film.

So I would say yes, essentially.

(SINGING OPERA)

This is the tale of Louis Mazzini,

long lost heir to the great D'Ascoyne dukedom,

played with exquisite poise by the criminally neglected Dennis Price.

The measure of his performance defines the entire film.

On one level, the plot is about revenge,

Louis' intricate plan to claim his inheritance

by removing the eight D'Ascoynes in his way,

all of whom happened to be played by Alec Guinness.

The Duke, the Reverend, the Banker,

the Admiral, the General, the Suffragette,

the amateur photographer, and the insufferable young snob

who plunges to his death off Maidenhead Weir.

But there is so much more to Kind Hearts And Coronets

than the graceful art of assassination.

This is a film about the rituals of society,

and how we are all deep down playing a part.

I think Kind Hearts And Coronets is one of the greatest British comedies.

You know, people sometimes talk after 70+ years of a film

being considered so popular, being liked so much,

that maybe, you know, it's over-rated.

That's just not true of this movie.

And I think anyone new that you show it to who hasn't seen it before,

is still struck by the modernity and the humour of it.

Kind Hearts And Coronets is not just

one of the greatest British comedies ever made,

it's one of the greatest comedies ever made.

It has just about everything in it that you need for...

...laughs, for something to think about,

for social comment,

and the way it's actually structured and put together, is perfect.

There isn't a false note in it.

And I think that that in terms of any film, is extremely rare.

There isn't a millimetre of celluloid wasted in it.

The casting is absolutely perfect, could be cast in heaven, almost.

The dialogue is exceptional,

and the way it looks, I think, is...

perfectly attuned to its themes.

While set in a pristine Edwardian Britain,

the film turns its cynical eye on the fading aristocracy

of 1949 when it was released.

Unusually, it is the middle class sizing up their so-called betters.

So what is it that audiences love in amorality?

What is it that draws us in to, as you say,

essentially a very bleak story,

but an enormously loveable one?

I think firstly, it's because it's incredibly funny.

If someone makes you laugh, you'll forgive a lot of things.

Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch to say if someone makes you laugh,

you'll allow them to get away with murder.

So it's very, very funny, but it has to be more than that.

There is the initial, there is the basic casting balance,

and the cruelty of the D'Ascoynes, which set up...

we don't ever have any sympathy for the D'Ascoynes.

They've not done anything decent.

So OK, we'll cut him some slack on that.

He's also incredibly clever with his murders. He does...

He takes his time. He does it properly.

He doesn't just turn up and biff them over the head

with a bit of wood, you know, it's... these are classic

British country house murders.

And you know, we admire the art and the skill.

He's putting all the work into the job that he's doing.

So he's funny, he's skilful, he's good looking, he's charming.

He is on our side,

and we don't in any way sympathise with his enemy.

And so I think we fall for him very quickly.

I think it's easy for a few of those to slip

and this to become quite a difficult film,

there have been films about people working their way

through the deaths of a family, where you don't have any sympathy

for the leading character and the films are left very empty as a result.

So it has to have all those ingredients.

Everything has to be right. And we do love an amoral villain,

but not... not without qualification.

There is also a love triangle afoot.

Between murders, Louis is caught with contrasting female foils.

On one side are the foibles of Joan Greenwood's Sibella,

whose heartless social climbing

is only outdone by the volume of her hats.

On the other side, is Valerie Hobson's noble Edith,

stalwart widow of Henry D'Ascoyne,

who bears a striking resemblance to Louis' dead mother.

Mrs D'Ascoyne was beautiful, but what a prig she was.

I wondered how to ingratiate myself with her...

...and decided to attack on her own ground and with her own weapons.

On top of all this wonderful satire and all the sort of murders and everything,

there is also a love triangle going on.

I mean, it is a bit... This is a film of many layers.

The fascinating thing about this, again, it's all about contrasts.

Sibella is a sort of wild sort of romantic,

slightly mercenary, and very, very sexy creature.

Rejects the proposal of marriage by Louis,

because he's not rich enough and then marries one of his friends,

who has got a very rich father.

Edith, at the time that he's actually killing her husband,

he was struck by her dignity and poise.

She is a bit of a prig, she's anti-alcohol,

she is very, very reserved,

but she is extraordinarily sort of beautiful and dignified.

And I think that to go from one kind of woman to the other,

is a fascinating sort of see-saw process because, in a way,

that is also part of Mazzini's revenge.

Now let me have a look at the beautiful Mrs Holland.

No, I think I prefer Miss Howard. So do I.

Louis, it's very wrong of me to visit you here.

- Why? - A married woman calling on a bachelor?

A dangerous bachelor.

In his apartments. I, dangerous?

These things only become wrong if people know about them.

This is a very discreet apartment. That's why I chose it.

So that young women could call on you with safety.

So that one young woman could.

The innuendo, particularly, is interesting.

And this film is in 1949 and it's kind of amazing to me

how much it gets away with on the strength of

it doesn't really show you that much,

but verbally, if you're reading between the lines

and you're inferring what's being said,

particularly with the Joan Greenwood character, Sibella,

and there the kind of implications of adultery

between she and the Dennis Price character...

...it's kind of amazing it got away with that kind of implication.

And the film is very much about sexual repression,

and this kind of undertone

of British life where of all the aspirational things about class,

one of them was perhaps the acquisition of wealth

in order to achieve not just a prosperous marriage,

but the woman you wanted, or the sexual aims that you had.

And so there is a kind of seedy undertone to the film,

which does feel quite, you know, quietly sexual.

The film was released in 1949 and people have returned from the Second World War,

and you have had this generation of British men

who fought alongside the aristocracy,

the elite, and found them wanting. You know, in a way,

that election, the post-war election, was about the class

that took us into the war, and who led us badly.

My grandfather's friend once said when he joined up

at the beginning of the Second World War in 1939,

one of the questions was which school did you go to?

And that was basically how you became an officer, was based on your education.

So he, Dennis Price, in many ways, represents us.

He represents a group of people who cannot believe

that these idiots are in charge and would happily tear them down.

You know, we don't have any lingering respect

or noblesse oblige for these people,

you know, no-one has any sympathy for the rights

of the aristocracy when they're watching this film in 1949.

That idea, if it existed in Britain, has long gone.

Above all, it is a film about a radically unconventional tone,

one which is best described as demonically subtle,

and very, very British.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

I'm 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.

Perhaps I should begin at the beginning.

(BABY CRYING) I was a healthy baby...

...born of an English mother and Italian father...

(CHOKES)

...who succumbed to a heart attack at the moment of first setting eyes on me.

The story originates in a strange book by the forgotten author, Roy Horniman.

Published in 1907, Israel Rank: The Autobiography Of A Criminal,

is a satire on the upper classes, in which murder is a comic device.

Post war sensitivities to anti-Semitism

persuaded Ealing Studios to change

the central character from half Jewish,

to a man of Italian ancestry.

So this novel, Israel Rank: The Autobiography Of A Criminal,

came out in 1907,

and it was not a super popular or a famous novel,

but it was reprinted around 1946.

And the story is sort of a lively, witty, sardonic

kind of almost epigrammatic tale of a serial murderer

who sees a devious way to the aristocracy

by killing off a bunch of distant family members,

part of the same aristocratic family.

And the film is very much loyal

to the basic story of the novel,

and takes on a similarly kind of sardonic, cocked eyebrow overtone.

If you read it, you will find that the actual structure and story

is almost identical to Kind Hearts And Coronets,

except that the film has been...

the script of the film has been refined

in a way that the novel isn't.

Fascinatingly,

Horniman was an enormous fan of Oscar Wilde,

and so all those kind of asterisms and epigrams

within the actual book,

sort of make perfect sense in terms of when you're writing a screenplay.

So let's talk a little bit about the background.

It is, in fact, based on a novel, isn't it?

But a novel that disappeared without a trace for a while.

Yes. It's based on a novel called

Israel Rank: The Autobiography Of A Criminal.

And Israel Rank is a character some people have argued

is loosely based on the politician Disraeli.

It was an Edwardian novel.

It's very funny, it's very much in the style of Oscar Wilde.

It in itself is ripping off an Oscar Wilde novel called

The Crimes of Lord Arthur Saville,

and which in itself is ripping off Crime and Punishment.

This is one of the beautiful things about Kind Hearts And Coronets,

is every time you think you've reached what's under the surface,

you find there's yet another layer.

So we keep going down and down and down with our references

just with this one novel.

How different Kind Hearts And Coronets is

from the house style of Ealing Studios.

There is none of the cheerful socialism

of Passport To Pimlico, or Whiskey Galore!,

released in the same glorious year of 1949.

The prim Edwardian setting is light years

from the studio's typical post-war realism.

Head of the studio, Michael Balcon, had serious misgivings

about a comedy of mass murder, but let himself be swayed

by his panel of in-house writers.

(OWL HOOTING)

It took a mere three minutes to substitute petrol

for the paraffin in the dark room lamp.

And I then repaired to a meadow and took a few hours' sleep

while awaiting the hour at which I could reasonably arrive at the house.

The day dragged by in an agony of suspense for me.

Henry took photograph after photograph...

...but seemed to have no urge whatever to follow it up with a visit to the dark room.

Bravo Edith!

I began to fear that he had suddenly taken the pledge.

Guided by Dennis Price's composed voice-over,

we follow Louis' determination

to avenge his mother's ignominious death.

Having been cast out of the D'Ascoyne family

for marrying an Italian opera singer,

she was eventually struck down by a Croydon tram.

Louis sets about climbing the social ladder

by bumping off the conceited D'Ascoynes on the rungs above.

These twits are so arrogantly certain of their station,

they never see it coming.

The title Kind Hearts And Coronets comes from a line in a poem

by Lord Alfred Tennyson, called Lady Clara Vere De Vere,

and it is about a duchess who is so cruel to a potential...

lower-class lover that he ends up taking his own life.

And so it is very much almost a moralistic poem

about the vagaries of class, inter-class love,

and the kind of cruelty that we wreak upon each other

in the name of maintaining sort of order within the classes.

But I have often felt that the attitude of my husband's family

has failed to move with the times.

That they think too much of the rights of nobility

and too little of its duties.

The very honesty of your behaviour would appear to me

to prove them wrong.

Was Lord Tennyson far from the mark when he wrote

"kind hearts are more than coronets and simple faith the Norman blood"?

I hope you will stay to lunch.

In that case, I should be delighted and honoured.

I am personation of a man of sterling character

with such a resounding success that Mrs D'Ascoyne invited me to spend

the following Saturday to Monday with them.

So in many respects, this was a highly unlikely film

for Ealing Studios to be making.

Yes. Ealing Studios, at this point at the end of the Second World War,

were making a very particular kind of comedy

and that comedy was a community usually...

isolated in some cases for various reasons, or socially distinct,

gathered together to overcome outdated or outmoded bureaucracy.

It's the idea of the bacchanal where good sense prevails,

that people pulling together bring around the right, decent thing

with some larks along the way and thumb their noses at authority.

In this case, there is an authority figure

and there is an individual who is excluded from that,

but there's no community in this, there is no community at all.

It is an entirely transgressive film.

No-one in this film has any moral compass

that you would want to set your own by.

It absolutely does not have any of the kind of...

well, the decent British spirit will win through in the end.

If it wasn't for the fact that it's so funny

and so charmingly put together,

it's actually an incredibly bleak story.

The choice of Robert Hammer to direct was crucial.

The Cambridge-educated former economist had worked his way up

to the rank of director via the editing room.

In 1948, he was riding high at Ealing

but liked to play the discontented artist,

drawn to the drink which would curtain a great talent.

There is an element of self portrait in cynical Louis.

Hammer took a meticulously matter of fact approach to script,

editing, and performance.

Indeed, his approach to the film

was as ingenious as Louis' approach to murder.

These people whom I had studied until I knew their names

and histories as well as I knew my own,

the more they became monsters of arrogance and cruelty,

whose only function in the world was to deprive me of my birthright.

I had seen Chalfont only as Mama had painted it.

To pass in through that magnificent gateway

on visitors' day at a cost of sixpence

was a humiliating experience, but I forced myself to undergo it.

I wanted a closer view of the target at which I had determined to aim.

One of the reasons that it appealed to Robert Hammer, the director,

was precisely because of the language.

He loved the English language, he loved the idea of this sort of

slightly decadent articulacy.

And he could see, certainly in the actual story,

the possibility of a really fine film.

It did take quite a lot of persuasion of Michael Balcon,

who was the head of Ealing Studios,

to actually agree to the film being made

because it is, after all, a black comedy

about a man who murders six or, in fact, seven people.

And that was just a little bit too much for him.

So a young playwright and budding screenwriter,

who knew Michael Balcon, called Michael Pertwee,

actually found this book on a bookshelf in a shop,

that had recently been reprinted,

and he liked it and he showed it to Michael Balcon,

who was the head honcho at Ealing Studios,

and who, you know, the entire creative process of anything

that was coming out at that time, in that heyday, was down to him.

He decided to let Pertwee sort of workshop a screenplay

and adaptation with director Robert Hammer.

Unfortunately, Robert Hammer and Pertwee did not get along at all.

Pertwee later said that Hammer started to twitch the moment

they were in the room together, they just had a clash of personalities.

And eventually Pertwee would leave the project,

which is unfortunate given that he had discovered the source material,

and didn't end up getting any credit on the screenplay.

But this did mean that it brought in room for John Dighton,

and between him and Robert Hammer,

they then hashed out this remarkable screenplay,

and this remarkable adaptation, which has quite a few changes from the novel,

that became Kind Hearts And Coronets.

Inspired by Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux,

the point is not to shock,

but to escape the moral conventions of story-telling.

Hammer's weapon of choice is language.

The film bubbles with innuendo, both murderous and sexual.

It is all irony,

framed from the prison where the anti-hero awaits execution

for the one murder he did not commit.

A brief history of the events leading thereto,

written on the eve of his execution,

by Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini, Tenth Due of Chalfont...

...who ventures to hope that it may prove not uninteresting

to those who remain to read it.

I decided to proceed methodically

with the elimination of the remaining minor obstacles.

Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne was a pioneer

in the campaign for women's suffrage...

...with the inconvenient consequence that her public appearances

were invariably made under the watchful eyes of the Metropolitan Police.

When she was not making public appearances,

she was in prison and still more inaccessible.

In fact, before I could learn of a favourable opportunity,

I had to join the movement myself.

The precise ironic tone would be impossible

without a pitch-perfect performance from Dennis Price.

As with Hammer, there was an element of self portrait.

Price was the son of a Brigadier General, and mentored by Noel Coward,

whose loquacious disdain is a clear inspiration for Louis.

Price is the source of the film's composure,

the idea that it must keep a straight face throughout,

a comedy that never admits to a single joke,

giving a whole new meaning to the term dead pan.

So let's talk a bit about Dennis Price.

I mean, he is just extraordinary in the film,

and it's not just a performance.

In a sense, he is the entire tone of voice of the comedy,

it's a voice-over as well as acting in the scenes.

But as you are saying,

it's a sensibility he kind of extends to the piece.

Yes, Dennis Price has...

I mean, for a start, his performance has this very complex

set of shades and tones as he goes through the film.

But his voice-over is consistent.

His voice-over is the voice-over of the man

who is writing his memoirs the night before he dies.

And he is very, very witty, very, very dry, very...

...skilful in his language and his tone, very condescending,

absolutely hilarious with his wry asides.

There is one point where the very first murder he commits is,

he sends one of the D'Ascoynes over a weir,

with a girl he's having an affair with,

and he says afterwards, "I had to give myself a moment's thought about the girl, but then I reasoned, well,

at the weekend she had already suffered a fate worse than death."

There is no question about it that Dennis Price, this is his...

the performance of his career.

I am always amazed that for someone who was,

you know, on the up and up, he was a good character actor,

he was always playing cads and things.

In fact, the same year he played Byron in Bad Lord Byron,

which was an utter flop.

This, of course, is the sort of major stepping stone for him,

and he should, as a result of his performance

in Kind Hearts And Coronets,

have become a major leading man in British cinema.

It didn't do that for him, and I have always wondered why.

However, what he does in this film is absolutely incredible

because not only is he...

destined to sort of try and...

work out a series of murders that will go undetected,

he must do that in a way that is, of course, funny

at the same time he is giving this voice-over.

He is actually delivering his memoirs to us, the audience.

So he is the link to everything.

He is sort of the story-teller,

he is the confessional,

and at the same time, he does this in the spirit

of wonderful irony with this sort of slightly sardonic note.

You look more lovely today than I have ever seen you.

You're a lucky man, Lionel, take my word for it.

I couldn't help feeling that even Sibella's capacity for lying

was going to be taxed to the utmost.

The two female leads are beautifully opposite.

With impeccable timing, and that husky, teasing, seductive voice,

Joan Greenwood was a comedy great.

Sibella plays the pouting child,

but is as intent on social betterment as Louis.

The unrufflable Edith suggests a rare point of decency

amid the black comedy,

but in the hands of the magnificent Valerie Hobson,

she's as warm as a statue,

fixed to her own relentless code of conduct.

So Joan Greenwood as Sibella is this middle-class woman

who's been raised with Louis Mazzini,

and they clearly have a lot of chemistry and they've had an affair,

but she wants to marry someone who is wealthy.

She comes from a middle-class background and she's very aspirational.

She doesn't really believe that he is going to achieve dukedom in any way.

And so their relationship remains coloured

by the fact that they both actually are quite devious people,

and both have their own aims and their own goals,

which don't really involve marrying each other,

or legitimising their relationship in any real way.

It doesn't mean that they aren't incredibly attracted to each other at times,

which creates a really great kind of tension

and chemistry between them.

Valerie Hobson was a very beautiful actress

who had a really incredible sort of run of roles in the '40s,

including as Estella, the adult Estella, in Great Expectations.

But what in that film is sort of an icy suspicious attitude

towards men, here is slightly softened.

She's quite warm in this film, and she's a lot more trusting,

certainly, of men, which is not necessarily to her benefit

because the man that she's trusting is Louis Mazzini,

and in fact, she is the widow of one of his victims.

So the fact that he then is pursuing her as his possible,

you know, bride to be, is incredibly dark,

and she is probably, I guess you might argue, the only...

likeable character in the film,

like, truly likeable in the sense of being like a decent person.

It doesn't mean you don't enjoy what's happening with the other characters,

but she is, you know, she means well.

The filmmaker's most delicious concept

was to cast the great Alec Guinness,

only in his 30s, as the D'Ascoynes.

He was holidaying in the south of France when the script came through,

and had only one request -

rather than play the four parts as suggested, why not six?

He ended up embodying eight doomed D'Ascoynes with complete conviction.

From the bumbling relic, Lord Reverend Henry,

who swigs poisoned port,

to the suffragette, Lady Agatha, shot down in a hot air balloon.

In another ironic ploy,

it is essential that we still identify each one as Guinness.

At that moment, the concealed enemy emerged from behind the kopje.

I held our guns' fire until we could see the whites of their eyes,

then I gave the order - fire!

Boom, boom, boom...

Now let's talk about Alec Guinness,

and, you know, what he gave to the film

in playing eight different parts.

You can count ten if you count portraits and sort of sculptures,

but it's eight performances.

Why do that?

How well was it done,

and what does it kind of have to say within the film?

When we look at the decision, it becomes critical to the film.

And I think it moves the film into the work of genius that it is,

not because, not just, not just because Alec Guinness is superb

in all of those parts. Not just because he has the talent

to, with a simple nuance and simple body language,

convey an entirely different person from the same bloodline.

It's a bravura performance.

But also because having him play all of those parts,

it opens up a series of things that the film can do.

For a start, as an unreliable narrator,

Louis sees the D'Ascoynes as his enemy

and he blends them all together as the obstacles to his success.

So the idea that, for him, they all have exactly the same face

becomes a psychological trick, in a way.

He doesn't see their humanity, he just sees they are all like Alec Guinness,

they all look the same, they all are the same,

get them out of the way, get them out of the way.

It's also a reference, perhaps, on the idea that the aristocracy are inbred

and so they all grow to look alike, the fact that all these faces are the same,

is also an incredibly convenient piece of filmmaking shorthand.

We actually need to spend no time learning about the characters

that we are presented with.

In particular, there's a rapid sequence of deaths,

where the suffragette, Agatha,

the Admiral Horatio, and the bumptious colonel

who insists on telling his war stories,

are all killed very, very quickly.

A bomb, an arrow in her... her balloon...

"I shot an arrow in the air, she fell to Earth in Berkeley Square,

and the Admiral going down with his ship.

We don't need to learn anything.

All we need to do is watch them die because we know all about them

because they are Alec Guinness. So it's very swift,

very economical, very funny.

Roger Ebert once said about Alec Guinness that the reason

that he was so convincing in the eight different roles

of the D'Ascoyne family, was that he was such an Everyman.

He was the kind of actor who even when he was very famous,

wasn't really recognised on the street in the same way

that other actors of his ilk, you know, Laurence Olivier, might be.

And so that quality kind of allowed him

to strangely disappear into these roles.

Kind Hearts And Coronets is about the essence of acting.

Each character is playing a part,

one set by social class or their own wicked aspirations.

Manners are a disguise.

Hammer went in search of what he called strange human patterns.

Louis' cool, ethical code judges people

not as good or bad, but as interesting or dull.

The wonderfully superficial Edwardian setting was created

through a mix of sound stages and locations that reflect character.

In contrast to the grand D'Ascoyne seat captured at Leeds Castle

in Kent and the surrounding villages,

Louis struggles to escape the growing phenomenon of the suburbs

with their gauche professionals.

It is a very good film about an evolving British society.

The film to a certain extent, not only shows the class structures

in place in Britain at that time,

but also I think, the new, the rise of the merchant class.

And so there were people who aspired

if not to the aristocracy,

then certainly they had a sense that they wanted to better themselves.

This was a kind of a new idea.

This was the sort of way out of serfdom,

or if you want to call it that, and it was increasingly happening.

Of course, the nobles resented that.

They wanted to be in control all the time.

They wanted to keep the old guard,

they were incredibly conservative (small c) in their ways.

And so what it does is it reflects a certain change in social attitude,

which has, you know, continued right up until through the war,

and especially after the war.

And this film, of course, came out in 1949,

very interestingly, when the House of Lords,

which is where Mazzini is actually on trial,

because if you are a duke or a peer,

you can opt to be tried in the House of Lords,

as opposed to central criminal court, like the Old Bailey.

That privilege was abolished in the same year, 1949.

Now there is no connection between the film and that,

but I think that it's a fantastically interesting

coincidence that that should have occurred.

What works so beautifully is the marriage of plot and style.

The film consciously leans into artifice and theatricality.

Every scene is staged for effect.

The image undermines what is being said.

The director is always one step ahead of you,

even the title is ironic.

Kind Hearts And Coronets was taken from the Tennyson poem,

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

the message being that true nobility lies not in social status,

but in human goodness, which is in short supply in these circles.

May I say that I think you have behaved despicably.

Has it ever occurred to you, Sibella, that we serve each other right, you and I?

But the night has gone by and nothing has happened.

It is now but a few minutes to eight,

and I realise that Sibella came yesterday merely to tantalise,

to raise my hopes in order to dash them again.

How unlike me not to have guessed.

But after all, how very like Sibella.

A written memoir in visual form,

Kind Hearts And Coronets is the most literary of British comedies.

Here are the satirical barbs of Oscar Wilde,

Evelyn Waugh, and even Jane Austen.

The shooting script had no word on how a scene was to be filmed or cut.

All of that was devised as Hammer rehearsed with his actors.

But it was still dazzlingly complex.

The story is a Russian doll of flashbacks within flashbacks.

Even the costumes have a narrative.

From the growing finery of Louis' dandyish suits

to Sibella's increasingly formidable millinery,

an expression of her own desire to get ahead.

And there's something strikingly modern about the literariness.

I mean, you've talked about Oscar Wilde and all the kind of references.

But that was an unusual game for a film to be playing.

It's very normal in modern times for someone to openly admit

that it's calling all these different things.

But that's going on here. You can think of Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh...

- Samuel Johnson. - Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen to an extent,

and obviously Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.

And the title which is... And of course the title, yes.

So it's got this incredibly quality of self awareness,

and sophistication, which in itself is almost like an ironic game.

Ironic game, but it doesn't talk down to its audience.

At no point does it seek to explain that.

You come along with the joke.

So the references are this is a smart, funny film,

with literary references and you'll get them.

No-one has to step aside and point out this is what we're talking to.

We're not talking about Samuel Johnson here,

we're talking about a poem by Tennyson.

It's just assumed. You know, there's no pandering.

So the whole thing is artfully constructed in much the way

that a Jane Austen novel would, these set pieces

and this kind of comedy of manners.

It's got the wordplay of Wilde. You know, it's got...

There's even something like Conan Doyle's murder mystery in it.

There's references to so many different parts of British literature,

and, really, Hammer was saying this.

He wanted to include the language that he loves

as much as he could throughout every part of the film.

Kind Hearts And Coronets is a dazzling accomplishment.

Even if the American Production Code required an additional scene

to be inserted into the ambiguous ending.

Michael Balcon who had been so disapproving at first,

considered it his favourite Ealing production.

But it is so much more than another Ealing Comedy.

It is a masterpiece that encourages endless readings.

The reason that Kind Hearts And Coronets is actually unique

as a work of art, and is a work of art,

is because of all the elements that coalesced

at the time that it was made.

I don't think there is any other film that exists that has...

...delivered so perfectly

and so perfectly poised,

a story that could have been a thriller,

or it could have been a satire,

or it could have been a sort of dark romance.

But this is all three.

This is all three welded seamlessly together.

We used to get a lot of this stuff in the Crimea.

One thing the Ruskies do really well.

Not an atom of him was left.

I think there are two reasons, really,

why the film doesn't feel in bad taste.

One is just the sense of humour.

It's always kind of winking and nodding.

It's always got its tongue in cheek, and the deaths are,

they're violent, but they're quite cartoonish.

The characters feel, you know, the aristocratic characters

do not feel particularly sympathetic.

They are all quite annoying and mannered.

Of course, Guinness is doing an incredible job

of breeding life into them.

The one likeable character,

the one who initially hires Louis Mazzini

and who Mazzini later expresses regret about possibly having to kill,

and he feels lucky that he doesn't have to kill him

because he drops dead of shock,

There is this sense that

you're not completely on the side of Mazzini, either.

This is someone who, you know, he might be likeable

and he might be a cad, but he is someone who is capable

of real cold callous calculation

and that he doesn't even bat an eyelid at the idea

that he is more than happy to treat people as collateral damage.

You can find the film's influence within the Ealing stable.

The Ladykillers, satisfyingly inverts the idea

with a prim old lady killing off a gang of crooks,

led by a heavily disguised Alec Guinness.

That film featured Peter Sellers,

who paid homage to Kind Hearts And Coronets,

with his multiple roles in Dr Strangelove,

a habit he continued throughout his career.

Such buoyant cynicism and precision filmmaking

inspired everyone from Martin Scorsese to the Coen Brothers.

Kind Hearts And Coronets creates the idea of the great movie voice-over,

the voice-over that dictates the tone,

and Scorsese watched it avidly for Goodfellas.

He wanted to understand how that tone of voice can shape an entire film.

So you know, this prim British film

has influenced extraordinarily large amounts of things.

When you look at Peter Sellers, who borrowed the idea

of the multiple parts that he does in Doctor Strangelove

and on into his career, he took it from Kind Hearts And Coronets.

I mean, I love the Goodfellas reference

because I think of Louis Mazzini,

the half Italian operator killing his way to the top

and compare it with Goodfellas,

and you think, well, how different actually are those-

Well, Henry Hill... He's half Italian as well.

Absolutely. There's so many similarities.

I love the fact that Scorsese was inspired by Kind Hearts And Coronets

to create Henry Hill and his voice-over.

Obviously, very different ending.

No ambiguity in Henry Hill's ending.

But there's so many people who've referenced it.

If you go through the list of TV series or films

that have quoted from it or alluded to it,

or have remade certain aspects of it

or done certain styles of it,

I mean the idea of just working your way

through a series of murders to get what you want,

it is the template of this kind of killing.

And no-one, I would say, has quite equalled it.

I think of all the people who have echoed it,

who have homaged it, who have noted it,

who have tried to toy with it and, you know,

maybe even tried to, "Oh, we'll make this a little bit funnier,

we'll do it in a more contemporary style."

No-one has come close to this unique piece of filmmaking,

this piece of filmmaking where you have this director

who is, as it turns out, at the peak of his career,

the last great thing he's going to make,

and possibly without doubt, the greatest piece of work he was going to make.

To some degree, Dennis Price never quite achieved this level.

I mean, so many people working on this film were delivering

their best ever performance, or their best ever contribution,

or creating something new.

What makes Kind Hearts And Coronets

perhaps the greatest of all British comedies

is that it has greater purpose than simply sardonic daring.

Robert Hammer's film holds up a non-flattering mirror

to Britishness and human nature as a whole.

But in its ultimate irony, it is a celebration

of the endless peculiarity,

originality, and joy of being alive.

(PEOPLE CHEERING)

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