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