Kind Hearts and Coronets

The crown jewel of Ealing Studios' great comic run, Kind Hearts and Coronets was directed by Robert Hamer in 1949 from a screenplay of exquisite, murderous wit. Where most Ealing comedies were warm and communal, this one is glacial: a black comedy narrated in the mellifluous, entirely unrepentant tones of a born social climber, adapted loosely from a long-forgotten Edwardian novel.

Dennis Price plays Louis Mazzini, recounting his rise with impeccable politeness; Alec Guinness performs the celebrated tour de force of playing all eight members of the doomed D'Ascoyne family, from a blustering general to a suffragette and a doddering admiral. Joan Greenwood and Valerie Hobson are the two very different women in Louis's life, and Hamer's direction is as poised as his hero's prose, the starched Edwardian settings lending the cruelty an air of perfect respectability.

Long regarded as one of the finest British films ever made and a permanent fixture of the BFI's national polls, it remains startlingly modern in its amorality and its sheer relish for language. Guinness's multiple roles became the stuff of legend and helped make his name, but it is the screenplay's cool, epigrammatic perfection — comedy delivered with a straight face and a sharpened knife — that keeps the film evergreen. Few comedies have ever been quite so elegant about something so thoroughly wicked, or so willing to let charm do the work of conscience.