Great Britain

'My Goodness, Eight Guinnesses,' chorused the critics in 1949. For Alec Guinness certainly turned in what is still one of his greatest virtuoso performances, playing all eight relatives who stand in the way of a cynical bounder (Dennis Price) and a ducal coronet. He assumes not only a different appearance in every role, but a different voice and mannerism, so the Guinness personality sinks without trace (well, almost) into the richly eccentric concoction. A middle aged admiral, a balding general, a duke, a banker, a henpecked husband, a bumbling man-about-town, a rambling and creaking country parson and even a militant suffragette; you expect Guinness' skill to stretch out the line to the crack of doom. But whereas most of the other Ealing comedies, like Passport to Pimlico or Whisky Galore, are amiable, whimsical, essentially good natured pieces of fun, Kind Hearts and Coronets is, well fairly heartless. It is almost more French than English. You could imagine Sacha Guitry or René Clair inspiring its air of unrepentant cynicism as Price polishes off each member of the family with a disdainful attitude towards moral convention and a light quip on his ups which recalls, in its lack of feeling, at least, the more brutal jokes with which James Bond was later to despatch villains in somewhat the same exotic fashion. Of course the very eccentricity of the means used to obtain the ends - sending lovers over the weir in a punt, or puncturing the suffragette's aerial balloon with bow and arrow - redeems the callousness of the vendetta and doesn't impair the film's essentially well-bred mood. Valerie Hobson and Joan Greenwood, as the widow Price marries and the mistress he unwisely keeps, provide the most elegantly imaginable nemesis for this smooth mass-murderer who might almost be a cross-Channel cousin of Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux. Kind Hearts and Coronets had no successors in the Ealing school of comedy - and perhaps for this reason, too, it is an experience which people with fine palates tend to rate very highly. ALEXANDER WALKER