Post on 24-Feb-2016
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FM2: British and American Film
Kind Hearts and Coronets• Briefly summarise the plot of the film
• What are the main themes?
• How does it link to the social context of the time?
• In what ways can it be seen as ‘ quintessentially
British’?
Kind Hearts and Coronets is different from the usual Ealing Comedies: the film treats the values of English culture in an angrier,
more elegant, more cynical and less cautious way; it mercilessly exposes forms of behaviour, rituals and class differences
without, however, reconstituting them in the end, as other Ealing films do
Light-heartedmore humanecynicalbehaviourhumorousclass
Light-heartedhumanecynical
angrierelegant
cautious
rituals
comedicBut HOW does it do this?
Where does Kind Hearts start?• It begins twice, if not, three times:
tastefully stylised credits
family photographs sentimentally framed in the Edwardian manner
suggests a film of quiet nostalgia?
yearningly old-fashioned music – aria from Don Giovani
Where does Kind Hearts start?• Then the film proper starts:
ending of the Duke’s life and Elliot’s last execution (all about endings?)
Mr Elliot’s mournful enthusiasm
establishes the black humour
feeling of social insecurity ‘how does one address a Duke?’
Where does Kind Hearts start?• Then the memoir self-consciously makes a new start:
Louis narrative now slips back before his birth and starts over again with his parents’ first meeting
That beginning is Louis’ birth – and another
ending
With so little time remaining to
complete my story, it is difficult to choose
where to begin. Perhaps I should
begin at the beginning
Where does Kind Hearts start?• All this is very strange and very self-conscious
•Why would Hamer and Dighton choose to open their film this way, with these hesitancies and false starts?
•Why?
Where does Kind Hearts start?• It really begins with a book, Israel Rank by Roy Horniman
• Horniman: homosexual, socially adrift, Greek aristocracy + navy• Double pun on ‘Rank’• Jewish taint – ‘Israel’• Anti-Semitic?• How interpreted as not anti-Semitic?• Complications for Ealing?
Importance of names:•Why is the hero called Louis Mazzini?
•What are the significance of some of the other names?
• Sibella, Ethlered, Edith etc
Key scene – Louis’ mother’s death:• Louis, having killed his father just by
being born, now loses his mother in a tragic tram accident near Clapham Junction. We see Louis kneeling at her bedside, fading she requests a burial at Chalfont’s family vault. She dies, dropping in that instant from her frail hand the heart-shaped photograph of her dead husband. Louis weeps uncontrollably.
• A drearily sentimental deathbed scene?
• Louis posture – faintly ridiculous
• photograph drops clunkingly
• air of theatrical awkwardness - tableau
• off-key effect is undoubtedly comic
• Why is a tram accident near Clapham Junction funny?
• We are not seeing life, or even the representation – but the parody of
the representation
Balcon told Hamer: You are trying to sell that most unsaleable
commodity to the British – irony. Good luck to you
Written Consolidation:• Think back to the quotation at the start of the lesson:
•Write a paragraph, to hand in at the end of the lesson your ideas about how/why Kind Hearts does this
Kind Hearts and Coronets…treats the values of English culture in an angrier, more
elegant, more cynical and less cautious way; it mercilessly exposes forms of behaviour,
rituals and class differences