Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
When his mother eloped with an Italian opera singer, Louis Mazzini was cut off from her aristocratic family. After the family refuses to let her be buried in the family mausoleum, Louis avenges his mother's death by attempting to murder every family member who stands between himself and the family fortune. But when he finds himself torn between his longtime love and the widow of one of his victims, his plans go awry.
Kind Hearts and Coronets is one of the crown jewels of Ealing Studios and British cinema. The plot is wickedly inventive — a serial-murder comedy executed with such wit and precision that it remains virtually unmatched in the genre. Alec Guinness's tour-de-force performance playing all eight D'Ascoyne victims is genuinely extraordinary acting, earning its 4 with ease. Novelty is high: the film's tone — ice-cold irony, literary narration, aristocratic absurdism — is entirely its own and has never been truly replicated. Cinematography is competent and atmospheric but unremarkable by the standards of great noir or period cinema of the era, earning a solid 3. The ending, while cleverly ambiguous with the forgotten memoirs, is somewhat abrupt and relies on a contrivance that slightly undercuts the otherwise immaculate structure — above average but not exceptional.