The dark heart of a British comedy classic
Matthew Sweet reveals that ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ had its roots in sadism and anti-semitism
In the original novel, Rank considers killing the baby by suffocating him with a cat
Few film genres are so richly realised that you feel it might almost be possible to live inside them. Ealing comedy is one. We know the locals and we know their values. The street kids of Hue and Cry
(1947), who round up an organised crime gang and deliver it to the coppers. The polite burglars in The
Lavender Hill Mob (1951), who compare their crime news clippings like actors sharing old reviews. The citizens of
Passport to Pimlico (1949), who secede from the UK but return when their neighbourhood becomes a paradise for spivs. This was the world mapped out by Ealing’s boss, Michael Balcon, the faintly headmasterly son of Jewish immigrants to Birmingham, who did more than any other filmmaker to articulate the 1945 consensus.
So what about Kind Hearts and
Coronets? Seventy years ago this month, Ealing despatched one of its greatest pictures into British cinemas. It was not a quiet affirmation of mid-century communitarian values. It did not feature the reassuring presence of Stanley Holloway or Margaret Rutherford. It was a Wildean farce about an adulterous serial killer, adapted from a gleefully nasty Edwardian novel by a director who sometimes drank so much he hallucinated being followed home by malicious lobsters. It starred Dennis Price as Louis Mazzini, the child of an aristocrat excommunicated from her family after eloping with an Italian opera singer. It described Louis’ cold-blooded extermination of all members of the D’ascoyne clan between him and a dukedom – all of whom are played by Alec Guinness in a variety of frocks, epaulettes and dog collars. One by one, the D’ascoynes are drowned, poisoned, exploded and smashed before the killer herds his final victim into a man-trap and shoots him in the head with a hunting rifle.
We’d expect to see the film on an afternoon Bank Holiday TV schedule. Familiarity has blunted our sensitivity to its violence. Unfamiliarity with its source material ensures that few viewers know about the even-morehorrible possibilities that didn’t make it to the finished film. Kind Hearts is so uneasy about its source that it doesn’t
dare credit it on screen. “Based on a novel by Roy Horniman” is as far as it goes. Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907) is an obscure novel brought to Ealing’s attention by the playwright Michael Pertwee who found a copy in the library of a golf club. The setting is appropriate. British golf clubs at the time were notoriously anti-semitic. Its protagonist is not Italian but Jewish and never lets us forget it, particularly when telling us about his murderous impulses.
Until his final execution of the Duke of Chalfont, the killer in the film favours elegant, arm’s-length techniques – a booby-trapped jar of caviar, a punt propelled down a weir, a hot-air balloon shot down above Berkeley Square. (The widespread casting of Alec Guinness also makes us feel that these crimes only really have one victim.) The murderer in the book is not so well-mannered. One of the D’ascoynes in his way is an infant. In order to get into the young Lord’s presence, Rank seduces the nanny. He considers killing the baby with a catapult. He ponders whether it would be possible to suffocate him with a cat, and concocts a plan to train the animal using a doll filled with hot water. Rejecting these plans as too elaborate, Rank decides on a scarlet feverinfected handkerchief secreted in the baby’s cot. Impossible to imagine such a sequence making it into the movie.
However, a draft of the script completed three months before filming shows that the director, Robert Hamer, and his co-screenwriter, John Dighton, had all kinds of horrid ideas of their own. It survives in the archive of the British Film Institute but, oddly, seems to have escaped the notice of scholarship. Ordering it up, I expected to encounter some minor differences. There were many. The Dukedom is Romney, not Chalfont. The unidentified mistress of the D’ascoyne who drowns on the weir is named as Clothilde Duval. In the film, General Lord Rufus D’ascoyne is blown up in the middle of a Boer War anecdote. In the script, Louis informs us: “General Lord Rufus had just returned from suppressing a rebellion in Ireland. It was convenient that he had done so with some bloodthirstiness for this made me confident his demise would be blamed on the Sinn Feiners.”
Other changes, though, were more substantial. This version contains one sequence that would be rewritten out of recognition, and an entire abandoned act. In the finished film, Louis kills the nicest of the D’ascoynes with a chemical trick. Young Henry is an amateur photographer and boozer, married to a total abstainer. Louis swaps the paraffin in his darkroom lamp for petrol. When Henry disappears for a snifter, he goes up in smoke. In the script, he is not so nice. He is having an affair with the fiancée of the village blacksmith. Louis follows him to his place of assignation and caves in his skull with a hammer. “It is proposed,” says the script, “to shoot this with the blow being delivered offscreen.”
The real surprise, though, is the original finale of Louis’ murder spree – a sequence somewhere between The Importance of Being Earnest and I Spit on Your Grave. Louis is interrupted before he can finish off the Duke and has to return to his lakeside castle, where a tea party is in progress. The Duke goes to another room to phone the police. Louis raises his gun to shoot but can’t remove the safety catch. Instead, he slams the Duke out of the window into the water below. Then the really nasty stuff happens. A bevy of swans in the lake are trained to cadge food by tugging a bell-pull below the drawing-room window. As Louis makes polite conversation, the bell begins to ring. The ladies, of course, believe that the swans are responsible. Louis knows that this is the last act of the dying Duke and does extravagant work keeping everybody away from the window – including taking part in a discussion about whether foie gras is fatal to swans. The sequence concludes with the Duke’s final breaths bubbling through the water, as bread bobs on the surface.
The US censor, Joseph Breen, said of this draft: “This is such a peculiar story that we will not be able to give a proper opinion on it until we see the finished picture.” Balcon took the hint. A rewrite removed the hammer, the swans and the sadism. But the satisfactions of the plot remained – the removal of a whole echelon of the undeserving rich.
“By and large,” said Balcon, in a 1974 interview, “we were a group of liberal-minded, like-minded people. We voted Labour for the first time after the war; this was our mild revolution.” Kind Hearts and Coronets may look like the odd one out among the Ealing comedies. But it’s set in the past, and Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob are set in the post-war present. A present untroubled by D’ascoynes.