Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is one of the best known but least typical films to be released by Britain's Ealing Studios, the 1949 Black comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets."

It was directed by Robert Hamer from a screenplay he wrote with John Dayton, based on a 1907 satirical novel by Roy Horniman.

"Kind Hearts and Coronets" stars, Dennis Price Joan Greenwood, Valerie Hobson, and Alec Guinness who appears in eight separate roles as different members of a noble family.

The movie is presented in flashback with voiceover narration by Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini, 10th Duke of Chalfont who is in prison awaiting execution for murder.

Louis works to complete a memoir detailing the series of events that have led to his plight.

His mother, a member of the noble D'Ascoyne family was disowned when she eloped with Louis' father, an Italian tenor named Mazzini.

The couple was poor but happy.

But when Mazzini died, he left his widow and Louis without resources, requiring them to take in lodgers to make a living.

Louis only childhood friends were the children of a local doctor, a girl, Sibella, and her brother.

Louis' mother, brought him up on stories about the family of whose dukedom had the unique feature of descending through both the male and the female line.

This means Louis himself could conceivably inherit the title although there were at least eight people, uncles, and aunt, and cousins ahead of him at the line of succession.

When Louis was old enough to leave school, his mother wrote to a D'ascoyne relative, Lord Ascoyne, asking him to give her son a place at his private bank, but he refused.

Louis instead went to work as an assistant in a draper shop selling fabrics.

When his mother died, her final wish was to be buried in the D'ascoyne family vault at Chalfont, the ducal manor, but the duke refused to allow it.

Louis proposed to Sibella now grown into a beautiful woman but she mocked him and told him she was engaged to Lionel, a wealthy friend of her brothers.

All his hopes dashed.

Louis got into an argument the only son of Lord Ascoyne D'Ascoyne, the banker.

at the draper shop with a customer, Louis found himself dismissed from his job.

It was at this point that Louis resolved to take his revenge on the entire D'Ascoyne family for the way they had treated him and his mother doing so in the only way open to him.

He plans to murder each of the eight relatives standing between him and the ducal coronet and become Duke of Chalfont himself.

In comparison to the other Ealing comedies released at much the same time in 1949, the classic, "Passage to Pimlico" and "Whiskey Galore," "Kind Hearts and Coronets" was decidedly odd.

The project was first suggested by screenwriter Michael Pertwee, who thought there was a movie comedy to be found in Roy Horniman's 1907 novel, "Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal" despite its dark subject matter.

Studio Head, Michael Balcom was initially opposed to the ideas saying, "I'm not going to make a comedy about eight murders."

But in time he was persuaded the idea had possibilities.

He chose Robert Hamer to direct telling him, "You were trying to sell that most unsalable commodity to the British.

Irony, good luck to you."

But Hamer was not concerned, he relished the opportunities it presented.

Firstly, he later said, "That of making a film not noticeably similar to any previously made in the English language."

Secondly, "That abusing this English language in a more varied and to me more interesting way than I had previously had the chance of doing in a film."

Thirdly, "That of making a picture which paid no regard whatever to establish, although not practiced, moral convention."

The title of the movie comes from a couplet in a poem by Alfred Tennyson "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," written in 1832.

The poem is a rebuke to Lady Clara, after she rejected a low born young man who was in love with her.

Brokenhearted, he committed suicide.

The couplet in question reads, "Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman Blood."

But our movie is about a different, rather more aggressive reaction to cruelty in a noble family.

One of the most arresting features of "Kind Hearts and Coronets", especially in view of his later fame in Ealing Studio comedies and other more prestigious motion pictures, is Alec Guinness's convincing performance as eight different members of the D'Ascoyne family.

The eight are Ethelred, Duke of Chalfont, the Reverend Lord Henry, General Lord Rufuss, Admiral Lord Horatio, Lady Agatha, the suffragette, Lord Ascoyne, the banker, Young Ascoyne, the banker's son, and Young Henry, the photographer.

Guinness was also the model for artistic representations of earlier D'Ascoynes.

Ross Mckibbin, who studies the social, political, and cultural history of modern Britain, sees Guinness's appearance as so many of the D'Ascoynes as inherently absurd and key to the movie's sustained satire of the British upper classes.

Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote in his review of the movie that Guinness acted "with such devastating wit and variety that he naturally dominates the film."

Originally, Guinness was asked to portray only four members of the doomed D'Ascoyne family.

He later recalled, "I read the screenplay on a beach in France, collapsed with laughter on the first page, and didn't even bother to get to the end of the script.

I went straight back to the hotel and sent a telegram saying, 'why four parts?

Why not eight?'"

Playing so many roles did present some challenges, however.

"Quick transformation from one character to another has a disturbing effect," Guinness said in an interview in 1952.

"I had to ask myself from time to time, 'which one am I now?

I had fearful visions of looking like one of the characters and thinking and speaking like one of the others.

It would've been quite disastrous to have faced the cameras in the makeup of the suffragette and spoken like the admiral.'"

"Kind Hearts and Coronets" is one of those motion pictures that substantially improves upon its source material.

According to British film historian Philip Kent, it retains most of the characters and the plot of the novel "Israel Rank", while substantially improving the plot and its comic irony.

The cleverness and the method of the murders is more buried and ingenious.

In the novel, Rank is arrested after botching the murder of his final victim, but in the movie, Louis is ironically arrested and convicted for a murder he didn't commit, a murder that was, in fact, a suicide.

Rank is saved when one of his mistresses confesses to the murder in a note she leaves after killing herself out of love for him.

Louis is similarly saved by a suicide note, but one the conniving Sibella agrees to give the police only after blackmailing Louis into leaving his wife for her.

The smoldering scenes between Louis and Sibella also introduced an unexpected sensuality into the movie that alarmed studio head Michael Balcon.

He demanded they be toned down.

Director Robert Hamer refused and won, but only directed one more film for Ealing.

The use of Louis's voice-over narration throughout the film establishes and maintains a cool detachment reminiscent of the work of Oscar Wilde.

Mark Duguid, writing for the British Film Institute's Screenonline, notes, "far from undermining the visual storytelling, the conceit shows us the world as Louis sees it, with detached self-justification, allowing us to share the joy of each successive murder while not blinding us to Louis's own callousness."

An example is Louis' remark after sending the boat containing Young Ascoyne and his female companion over a weir.

"I was 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."

"Kind Hearts and Coronets" was received warmly by British critics on its release in 1949 and its reputation has only grown since then.

In 1964, the weekly magazine The Spectator called it "the most confident comedy to ever come out of a British studio".

Actor and writer Peter Ustinov praised it as "a film of exquisite construction and literary quality".

Director Robert Hamer apparently had mixed feelings about the film's, and his own, reputation.

"It's flattering to make a picture that becomes a classic within 10 years," he truthfully noted.

"It's not so flattering, however, when people get the impression it's the only picture you've ever made."

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.