Everyone wants to believe that there’s something that sets them apart from all the other assistant shop-keepers and undergarment salesmen in the world, and Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) has something. He’s twelfth in line to a dukedom… This is the premise of Kind Hearts and Coronets, a movie most famous for having Alec Guinness in eight roles (as the rest of the family), but as much as I respect Sir Alec, it is so much more than that.

Louis’s mother, herself perhaps a cousin of the current duke, ran away with a poor singer, who died when their son was born, leaving her in poverty. The family disowned her for her foolish match, refused to recognize her son, and when she died they would not allow her body to be buried at the family church. All of this, and his constant poverty, drive Louis to take revenge, and by murdering his family members, bringing himself closer to being at last a duke, with all the lands and entitlements that are attendant on it.

The film opens with Louis, already a duke, in prison preparing to be hanged in the morning. He’s going over his memoir, outlining the poor treatment of his mother, and fate’s ill-use of him, and the woman he was in love with, who would not marry him because her other suitor was going to be wealthy, and she required wealth, and each misfortune adds together, and compels him to start his jaunt down the path towards premeditated homicide. Dennis Price gives a pitch-perfect performance. He’s just enough handsome, just enough strange looking, just enough clever, just enough calm about it to make it amusing… after all it is a black comedy. And he’s balanced out by the woman he adores, Sibella Holland, played by Joan Greenwood, a silly little blonde who grows less silly as her ill-considered marriage begins to fall apart. She, too, begins to find she’s made of harder stuff, and begins to scheme at cross purposes to Mazzini.

As for Alec Guinness, this is in no way his movie, not the way Dr. Strangelove… belongs to the great Peter Sellers. Although he appears as eight characters, most of them are brief appearances, and most of them are more caricatures than people (which, considering this is a comedy, is probably for the best.) But then I would point out that his Lady Agatha d’Ascoyne is an amazing creature! Anticipating Monty Python by about two decades, she’s smashing up shop windows with inspiring nonchalance. Also notable, the ill-fated Admiral d’Ascoyne, but maybe it’s his fate that’s the more remarkable. I suppose, my point is, he doesn’t have enough time to leave a proper mark with these characters, and I for one am content with that, considering the vehicle.

What I found completely delightful about this film, however, was the costuming. So much is communicated in, especially, the dresses worn by the two women in Mazzini’s life. Sibella’s wardrobe gets progressively flashier and in worse and worse taste. The other woman, the aristocratic, principled Edith who Mazzini begins to prefer to the grasping, greedy love of his youth, shows her own silliness in her dresses which are too much to the occasion. When she and Mazzini spend the afternoon doing some archery, her dress is decorated with arrows.

For a film with a number of deaths, it is a cheerful, thoughtful piece, with a wonderful eye for detail and a great script. I must confess that often black comedy gets too dark for me, but this is just the right tone for it.