Kind Hearts and Coronets

Pros: Sir Alec Guinness' tour de force performance, Dennis Price's homicidal gentleman performance, Hamer's elegant direction
Cons: Dennis Price's performance as Louis Mazzini's father, not enough of Sir Alec Guinness!

Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.

- Lord Tennyson

Revenge is a dish the people of taste prefer to eat cold.

- Italian Proverb

Nobody commits murder just...

Pros: Great lead performance by Dennis Price; eight great supporting performances by Alec Guinness
Cons: For me, the humor was excessively repetitive and not especially effective

This film offers another dose of Ealing comedy, a bit darker than other Ealing offerings, as well as eight – count em! – eight doses of the great Alec Guinness. Historical Background: In the late forties and early fifties, Ealing ...

Pros: Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness and Dennis Price
Cons: THICK British accents sometimes muddle dialogue

Before there was Eddie Murphy, there was Alec Guinness. Before the Klumps, the d’Ascoynes.

Decades before Murphy made his mark playing a simultaneous multitude of characters in the Nutty Professor movies (and flicks like Life...

Pros: A stylish black comedy full of great characters and nostalgia.
Cons: May be too dated for some.

I was born three years after this film was released in 1949. As a child in the fifties and sixties I remember it was always years before films were shown on TV. After all not everyone had access to a television set. We acquired our first set in 1959 when ...

Pros: Brilliant performances from Sir Guinness, very suspenseful story, a winner all around
Cons: None

Recently, the world lost a most brilliant actor. Unfortunately, most Americans remember him solely for his portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars series, a role he ultimately came to despise. I put together this write off in the hopes of showing...

Pros: Alec Guinness murdered eight times
Cons: talky, slow

Louis Mazzini is an impoverished, disgraced draper's assistant, his father a dead Italian singer, his mother the outcast of the aristocratic d'Ascoyne family. When the d'Ascoynes refuse to allow his mother's burial in their family vault, Louis...

Pros: Alec Guinness's tour de force.
Cons: Dennis Price is a little too mannered.

I've heard that Hollywood are planning to remake this with Eddie Murphy, but I have a feeling that it was a joke. If it isn't, I wouldn't like to see the results: a gentle British comedy released in 1949 won't respond well to an American re-making in...

Pros: Ted Turner hasn't colorized it yet
Cons: Alec Guinness dies -- eight times

Patty Duke has nothing on Alec Guinness, who played EIGHT distinct and prominent roles in this 1949 film.

In short, this is a farce which revolves around English nobility, a daughter cut off for marrying beneath her, and a young man who...

Pros: perfect cynicism; perfect sustained tone; Joan Greenwood
Cons: too smart for Bubba; no car-chase

Things I value about this movie:

(a) it seems to me to be perfectly-formed. The plot is ridiculously complicated, and the first act (up to the first murder)is necessary to set all the wheels in motion - AND to set up black-comic the tone....

Pros: Dennis Price, Alec Guinness
Cons: None

This is the best British comedy--ever! It is my all-time favorite movie. This is a very dark comedy that will actually make you sympathize with a murderer. Dennis Price plays a man who should be a Duke (it's in his lineage) but the D'ascoygnes just won't...