#robert hamer

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It Always Rains on Sunday (Robert Hamer, 1947)

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PINK STRING AND SEALING WAX (1945) | dir. Robert Hamer

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How to Make a Killing

2026

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"Kind Hearts and Coronets" (Robert Hamer, 1949)

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Robert Hamer - Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

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kind hearts and coronets (1949) dir. robert hamer

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 Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

Dennis Price and Joan Greenwood in Kind Hearts and Coronets 

Cast: Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness, Audrey Fildes, Miles Malleson, Clive Morton, John Penrose, Hugh Griffith. Screenplay: Robert Hamer, John Dighton, based on a novel by Roy Horniman. Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe. Art direction: William Kellner. Film editing: Peter Tanner. Costume design: Anthony Mendleson. Music: Ernest Irving.

Kind Hearts and Coronets is best known for Alec Guinness’s tour de force as the entire D'Ascoyne family, but that’s hardly the greatest of pleasures the film affords. Dennis Price’s performance as the suavely lethal Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini is as much a demonstration of how to act sophisticated comedy as one could wish, and who can resist Joan Greenwood as Sibella, especially in hats that seem to contain an entire florist’s shop? It evokes her definitive Gwendolen Fairfax in Anthony Asquith’s 1952 filming of The Importance of Being Earnest. In fact, Oscar Wilde’s play is the essential background reference for Robert Hamer’s screenplay – it apparently also influenced the novel on which the film is based – and you hear Wilde’s voice in such lines as Mazzini’s “It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.” Hamer’s staging provides the necessary distancing from Mazzini’s murders, as in the scene in which he offs Young Henry D'Ascoyne (Guinness): While Mazzini is taking tea with Edith (Valerie Hobson) in the garden we hear a whump that neither character acknowledges as Henry’s darkroom explodes with him in it. Then smoke begins to arise beyond the garden wall, and Mazzini comments that someone must be burning leaves. Not this time of year, Edith replies, and Mazzini rushes off to “investigate” what he knows has happened. Kind Hearts and Coronets seems to me the best of all the classic British comedies of the late 1940s and the 1950s.