# 181 Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Kind Hearts and Coronets is a British black comedy about a distant relative of a duke who is rejected by his family because his mother had run away with a lower-class opera singer. However he wants to inherit the title, and once he grows up he realizes that the only way he can achieve it is by murdering all the other heirs who are ahead of him in the line of succession. The Kind Hearts and Coronets title derives from Tennyson's poem Lady Clara Vere de Vere (1842): "Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood."

Lately I've realized that I've fallen in love with British films, especially comedies. This is one of the finest, most brilliant comedies I've seen in my life, and I never thought I'd say something like that about a movie made over sixty years ago. It also has the darkest humor, as we see a very likable and charming English gentleman having no problem with killing his whole family in order to regain what he believes is due to him. What makes this film special is that there's absolutely no slapstick humor, all the jokes are conveyed verbally, through dialogue or the main character's narration. Of course you could say the same thing about a few other films on IMDb's Top 250 list, but this was probably the only one that had me laughing out loud through most of it.

Alec Guinness played eight characters, and I didn't notice it, though one of the reasons is probably that I was paying attention to other things. Still that shows that he did a darn good job. To me the ending was sort of predictable, I don't mean it in a bad way, but I'm just saying I knew what was going to happen. But hey, this is not a thriller (at least that's not the main point), and for a comedy this movie has an incredibly twisted plot. So yes, this movie deserves to be on the list, as well as on the list of my personal favorites.

Interesting fact: An alternate ending was required for the US, where distributors balked at the film's ambiguous ending (The US Production Code at the time stipulated that crime could not be seen to pay). These extra ten seconds were not kept by Ealing but were unearthed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where they had been quietly filed away in a film storage facility.

Favorite quote: "It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms".