Well, I spent much of the afternoon working on the Opal Magic socks, and I also finally got around to watching "Kind Hearts and Coronets."

It's an interesting movie, considerably more complex, plot-wise, than "The Ladykillers." It also comes across as much darker - in The Ladykillers, everything seems a bit cartoonish compared to Kind Hearts...despite the comic turn in Kind Hearts of Alec Guiness playing eight different characters.

I liked the fact that it was basically narrated in past tense by Louis Mazzini, who wished to be (and ultimately was) the heir to the dukedom, which could have passed through his mother's side of the family (and honestly, I do not know if that kind of provision actually existed in titled families - that the female as well as the male line could inherit - or if that was a contrived convenience for the movie).

Mazzini - he is the son of one of the D'Ascoyne daughers and an Italian opera singer she is smitten by and elopes with (and who conveniently dies of a heart attack moments after his son is born) - comes across very much as "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know" (as was famously said of Lord Byron). As he grows up, he hears little but how his mother was rejected by her family for "marrying beneath her." (And I suppose, Edwardian Britain being what it was, marrying an Italian at that.)

It's an interesting movie psychologically - you can almost hear the analysts nodding their heads gravely and discussing how Mazzini was warped from his youth by his mother's bitterness over her lot in life (although the D'Ascoyne family, for their part, are not exactly princes in how they treat him and his mother - refusing to recognize him as a D'Ascoyne relative, for example).

The disc I had has TWO endings on it - the original British ending, and a slightly-changed version for the American market (where the MPAA or whatever was in place at that time required certain things). It is a minor change in some senses, but it changes the whole tenor of the ending, I think.

I prefer the British ending; it is considerably more subtle. (Lydia - I don't know which ending - or both- was on the version you saw, but let us say that the American ending involved the finding of an important document of Mazzini's, the finding of which was merely implied in the British version).

I have to say it's a very satisfying movie - I mean, yes, it is a very black comedy, but the very end - what happens - is satisfying because there are three quite unexpected plot twists. And the final twist undoes the penultimate, so to speak, which, I don't know, gives an O.-Henry-but-better-than-O.-Henry quality to it.

I also loved the character of Sibella - I LOVE her voice. If I were a British bird, I'd want to speak with a voice like that. Never mind that she's as mad, bad, and dangerous as Mazzini. Never mind that she's precisely the sort of woman - manipulative, calculating, pouty, amoral - that I would absolutely detest were I to have to deal with her in real life - and yet somehow she is totally necessary to the movie and she absolutely sparkles in it.

Guinness is interesting as the 8 D'Ascoynes. Some are better developed than others - Lady Agatha (the one female among the bunch) is seen only briefly, which I guess is good, because she's the only one who rang false to me. It's very clearly a man in drag playing her - they should have got someone, I think, someone female, to tutor Guinness a bit in his gestures. I mean, yes, she's a suffragist and this is perhaps seen as a bit of an "unnatural woman" but his gestures were STILL too broad and masculine to work for me.

Still, it's startling to see what a good actor can do with the parts. There's clearly a "family resemblance" (the nose, and in some cases there are similarities between fathers and sons in speech patterns), but aside from that - his Colonel is different from his Duke. And his Rector is most different from all (and oddly enough - but this may be a mark of a young man trying to play one who is much older - I was vaguely reminded of Dick Van Dyke's turn in "Mary Poppins" as the aged bank president - there were some of the same gestures, some of the same facial expressions. Of course, perhaps Van Dyke had seen this movie and been consciously or unconsciously influenced by Guinness' portrayal of an 80-something rector).

Much of the humor in this movie comes from the dramatic irony at the end, but there are also some great lines.

Mazzini remarks of Sibella's intended, who is a horrible boor: "He exhibits the most extraordinary capacity for middle age that I've ever encountered in a young man of twenty-four." He also remarks that a young woman who has "shacked up" at a Maidenhead hotel with the young rake of the family (the first D'Ascoyne to meet his death) that even though he had to kill her, and he somewhat regretted that, he assumed that during the weekend she had already met "a fate worse than death." (Striking, that. Isn't that a conventional Edwardian nicety for "she gave up her "honor" cheaply and is now a "ruined woman""?)

One thing that is interesting about this movie is how a lot of the conventional "niceties" are sort of turned on their heads. And how there is a considerable amount of innuendo:

"Louis: Did you enjoy your honeymoon?
Sibella [matter-of-factly]: Not at all.
Louis [faintly surprised]: Not at all?
Sibella [definitely]: Not at all."

(This is after a scene - the day before the wedding - where Sibella asks Louis to kiss her, there's a fade-to-black, and in the next scene Louis makes some voice-over comment about having "got his revenge" on Lionel, Sibella's husband-to-be. It's not entirely clear if that "revenge" was business-related (Louis works for the bank that has a loan out to Lionel) or if it was a sort of, ahem, "I've trod THIS ground before him" sort of thing...if that's the case, well, again a lady's "honor" seems to be involved)

(She later remarks about being horrified when her husband touches her).

One thing though - even though this movie does feature "mad, bad, and dangerous" individuals, and has a fair amount of innuendo for a movie that trumpets at its very beginning that it has passed the British censorship board...there is still that sense of working-within-limits - that there are lines that can be toed but not crossed with dialog and suggestion. And I think - and maybe you disagree with me here - but I think that when movies were forced to do that, to go "thus far and no further," there was a greater level of creativity required.

I don't think this film could be remade in modern America (nor SHOULD it be. I remain firm in my belief that "good old movies" should simply be re-released as is, and not recast with Adam Sandler or Brad Pitt or Renee Zelweger or whoever the hot properties of the moments are). For one thing - the fact that we do not have anything akin to a peerage in the U.S. would be a serious impediment to making the movie work. Also, class MEANS something different in the U.S. than it does in Britain (and it probably means something different in modern Britain than it did in the Edwardian era when the movie was set).

I think someone wiser than I am about issues of class and ethnicity could work up an interesting essay on this movie and what it meant in post-war Britain and what would be comparable in 21st century America.