Cast:
Dennis Price, Alec Guinness and Valerie Hobson
Perhaps the most perfect of all the Golden-Age Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets famously featured Alec Guinness in eight different roles as the unsuspecting members of the aristocratic D’Ascoyne family – bumped off one by one by the scheming, outcast cousin of the family: Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price).
The film featured stunning and inventive cinematography by Douglas Slocombe, and a groundbreaking first-person narrative that, legend has it, inspired Scorsese to make use of the same device in Goodfellas. 2011 is also the centenary of the birth of Kind Hearts’ director Robert Hamer.
Opens at the BFI Southbank and nationwide on 19 August 2011.
