In <i>Kind Hearts and Coronets</i> (1949) Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) schemes and murders his way to a dukedom. Robert Hamer's pitch-black comedy of manners is legendary for having Alec Guinness play all of Louis's rivals and targets--among them the doddering Reverend Lord Henry D'Ascoyne and the formidably militant suffragette Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne. Perhaps the greatest Ealing comedy, <i>Kind Hearts and Coronets</i> is equally a brilliant satire of the English class system and a playful drama of doubles and confused identity.<br>Hamer was a heavy drinker whose career would soon go off the rails; Price was gay and troubled. Michael Newton looks into the turbulent personalities that formed the complex style of <i>Kind Hearts and Coronets, </i>with its dandies and blackmailers, aristocrats and assassins. And he unravels that style's fusion of cynicism, contempt, sparkling wit and philosophical curiosity. 'It is very funny,' Newton says, 'and, in a demonically subtle way, very wise. And for the bitter, the easy self-deprecators, the procrastinators, the snobs, the junkies of possibility, the flirts, the wits, the wastrels . . . it is perhaps the perfect movie.'