Kind Hearts and Coronets

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

Dennis Price plays Louis Mazzini, recounting his rise with impeccable politeness. Alec Guinness plays all eight members of the doomed D'Ascoyne family, from a blustering general to a suffragette and a doddering admiral, in a feat of impersonation that is still the first thing people mention. Joan Greenwood and Valerie Hobson are the two very different women in Louis's life. Hamer's direction is as poised as his hero's prose, and the starched Edwardian settings give the cruelty an air of perfect respectability.

It has long been counted among the finest British films ever made and is a permanent fixture of the BFI's national polls, yet it still feels startlingly modern in its amorality and its relish for language. Guinness's multiple roles became legend and helped make his name. What keeps the film fresh, though, is the screenplay's cool, epigrammatic perfection: comedy delivered with a straight face and a sharpened knife. Few comedies have been so elegant about something so thoroughly wicked, or so willing to let charm do the work of conscience.