Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune … Valerie Hobson and Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets. Photograph: Cinetext/Allstar
This week, I spoke at the Film Nite discussion clump in London on the 60th anniversary of Robert Hamer’s Ealing first-rate work Kind Hearts and Coronets. It was a chance to revisit that long-cultivated chestnut: is it true that you can only make great films from terrible books, and that conversely, great books always dispose turned into dreadful films?
- Kind Hearts and Coronets
- Production year: 1949
- Country: UK
- Cert (UK): U
- Runtime: 106 mins
- Directors: Robert Hamer
- Cast: Alec Guinness, Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood
- More adhering this film
Kind Hearts and Coronets is the elegant black comedy about a suburban draper’s assistant, Louis Mazzini, played by Dennis Price, who through a quirk of fate is distantly in line to a dukedom and sets on the outside to murder each single nobleman and noblewoman in our teeth of him in the succession so that he can get his hands on the ermine. All the members of this complacent family are famously played by Alec Guinness in various guises, and this multi-performance is superbly detailed and differentiated: not a pantomime dressing-up apply, but an inspired tour de force, as if eight different excellent actors from the like family had somehow been brought to the conceal.
It is based on a very entertaining book: a 1907 recent called Israel Rank, by the Edwardian actor-manager and author Roy Horniman – a work which since 1949 has attained a kind of homage charm by virtue of being, until very recently, obscure and almost impossible to find.
The Daily Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer, with enormous energy and resourcefulness, tracked on the ground a copy, wrote concerning the volume’s importance, and it is Mr Heffer who has the distinction of having single-handedly retrieved this novel from oblivion. It is witty, tremendously written and a real page-turner, and is now republished as a print-on-demand moreover from Faber Finds, with an introductory essay online by dint of. dint of. Heffer.
However, the weird samizdat aura stagnant surrounds the novel by virtue of the strange copy-editing slips that speckle almost every single page of this new edition.
There is a very specific reason why Israel Rank has been shrouded in reticence and unspoken embarrassment. In the movie, Dennis Price’s social-climbing serial killer was supposed to be half-Italian: in the book he is a Jew, whose first name speaks for itself and whose second name hints punningly at social hierarchy but also, unquestionably, at a bad smell.
The adaptation’s modify – which of track arguably offends Italians – could be read as a tacit access that one of our greatest films is taken from a dubious source, and that there is something questionable about the idea of a Jew (in fact his father is a Jew, his mother a Christian) insinuating himself into the intimate friendship of the English nobility, and then murdering them, his cunningly concealed ambition feeding parasitically off the dead bodies of these aristocrats. The most deliriously inspired homicide – which is not used in the movie – is Israel’s massacre of a baby boy by wiping the infant’sitting face with a handkerchief impregnated with the spores of scarlet fever. That comes really very close to the ancient blood libel.
So is Israel Rank the most obviously antisemitic novel of modern times? Simon Heffer argues forcefully that it in performance satirises antisemitism, daringly conjuring up the antisemite’s greatest in number paranoid fantasies, though in doing so “skirts dangerous territory, and possibly even wades into it”. This I think is true, and I think Horniman is also, specifically, satirising English attitudes to the career of Benjamin Disraeli: his wicked antihero at one stage relaxes through a make a transcript of of Disraeli’s novel Vivian Gray. In its dreary suburban setting, it is also a premonition of the work of Patrick Hamilton.
No lover of the film will want to remain in ignorance of this book; reading it, while imagining Dennis Price’s musical voice in your head, is like having access to a delicious deleted scene. But it also has the ill-fated effect of smudging what I be possible to only describe as the film’s innocence, if a film about an unrepentant serial killer be able to subsist described in this room for passing. The original is, arguably, chancy and provocative in a way that the film isn’t. Offensiveness has a certain worrying potency.
Set in countervail to this is the fact that the changes made by Hamer and dramatist John Dighton immeasurably improve the book. The murders onscreen have a cantering gaiety and narrative momentum which Horniman lacks. The book has an ponderous third love-interest as far as concerns the protagonist, a woman whose abject love for him creates the plot twist which saves Rank from the gallows. But Hamer and Dighton hold to just two women in Louis’s life – Sibella and Edith – creating a simpler dilemma which is alienated more satisfying. Finally, Hamer and Dighton come up with a completely primary final act, devising an irony by which Louis is arrested for the one murder he never commits: this is a masterpiece of suspense, much better than Israel Rank’s final anticlimactic and implausible sloppiness.
Most importantly, removing the “Jewish” piece of the book makes it a universal story. Kind Hearts and Coronets is a brilliant satirical parable for career ambition: anyone who has ever yearned enviously for a certain piece of work or position – and tormented himself by those people ahead of them in the pecking order – will recognise and perhaps secretly wonder at Louis for his criminal daring. Israel Rank was a minor standard work for its life; Kind Hearts and Coronets is a still major classic right now.
