Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2568 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-11-13
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 102 minutes

Synopsis
An Ealing Studio classic, KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS is a deft and dark Edwardian comedy with Alec Guinness in superb form as he plays eight different members of the D'Ascoyne clan. In order to inherit the entire D'Ascoyne fortune, the suave, dashing black sheep of the wealthy family, Louis (Dennis Price) must murder all the other heirs. Watch as the brilliant Guinness disappears into his various eccentric roles.

Customer Reviews

my favourite film
"Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood." - from the 1842 poem "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" by Alfred Lord Tennyson

This is one of the great Ealing comedies. A truly great family film, which is both funny and profound.

Released in 1950 and staring the late, great and extremely underrated Dennis Price as Louis Mazzini and Alec Guinness as all 8 members of the D'Ascoyne family.

His quest was to extract revenge for the treatment of his mother by the D'Ascoyne family. His mother, a member of the D'Ascoyne family, had married for love not for status or money and was therefore disowned. After her death she was refused burial in the family crypt and this was the tipping point for Louis. He decides that the only way to get revenge is to become the Duke. Unfortunately for Louis there are 8 other D'Ascoynes in the way, he must dispose of them all before he can become Duke.

This is my favourite film, it is the one that I come back to time after time, because of this I highly recommend this film.

Oh, and my favourite line is: "It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms." It tells you so much about the tone of the film. Enjoy.

Glorious entertainment
You can't fault this hilarious film. It plays on the fact that most human beings toy with the idea of murder at some point in their lives, especially when they have been wronged. The fact that so few of us talk about it is what makes the movie so hilarious. The Gascoine D'Ascoines (or however it's spelled) have left an illegitimate child out of the inheritance and so he takes revenge, killing them one by one. As he does so he becomes well-liked and moves up in society. Indeed, the way the story plays out reminds me of Tony Blair's murderous career.

This film has a better ending than Blair's round of highly paid speaking engagements, however, and as soon as it ends I just want to play it again. Super cool stuff from Ealing.

a lovely film - uniquely intelligent
This is one of the classic Ealing comedies which lingers long in the memory and leaves a very happy aftertaste. It is unique because of Alec Guinness's tour de force in personifying all the D'Ascoignes, but it has many other virtues too - the suave and solid work of Dennis Price and of Valerie Hobson, beautiful and remote with just a hint of earthy lustfulness, and Joan Greenwood, much more worldly and playful and every bit as characterful. The screenplay is full of intelligence - I have always enjoyed the superannuated parson's description of his frescoes as having 'all of the vigour of Chaucer with none of his concomitant crudity' - and the plot is neat and clever, with the irony of Price's downfall resulting from the one death he was not responsible for and then, when all seems well after all, the strong hint that it may not be.
I've seen the film a number of times and it always gives delight. It is one film which fully justifies the epithet 'well-liked', and that is just what it deserves to be.