peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2014 07 12 KindHeartsAndCoronets

Kind Hearts and Coronets

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The Gene Siskel Film Center is showing a series of old Alec Guinness movies this month. I missed the first couple but was glad to make it to this one. Their second theatre is tiny, and was completely packed out with grey hairs.

The cast here is uniformly excellent. Dennis Price in the lead has his finest outing, and Valerie Hobson is solid despite her character being callowly credulous. Guinness himself shines in particular as Lady Agatha, the shit-boring parson, the boorish general, and ... well, all the rest of the family. I particularly enjoyed Joan Greenwood in luminous feline mode; I'm looking forward to seeing what she and Guinness get up to in The Man in the White Suit at the end of the month. The plot is kind of like Hitchcock's Rope, and the tone is set right from the beginning with the hangman's concern that he act with proper respect for the hangee's title.