“It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.” It’s startling how much we relish the nonchalance of Louis Mazzini in murdering the members of the D’Ascoyne family in Kind Hearts and Coronets. A manner only Dennis Price could possibly get away with, his delivery effervescent, like a fine Champagne. That’s a drink that, like revenge, people of taste prefer served cold. Vengeance is the primary motivation of Mazzini, who seeks to reclaim the fortune closed off to him after his mother was disinherited by her aristocratic family by murdering his relatives.
It was adapted, rather loosely, from Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal. The greatest contribution the book makes to the screenplay, by John Dighton and the film’s director Robert Hamer, is its Wildean wit and its protagonist’s delicious amorality. For its comedy is the deepest, richest, filthiest black, made all the more breathtaking by the film’s apparent insouciance towards the brutality it depicts. It is profoundly British.
It’s a little surprising, then, that a remake should come out of Hollywood. How to Make a Killing is the second feature written and directed by John Patton Ford following Emily the Criminal (2022), both of which depict absurdly extreme measures taken by people down on their luck in contemporary America. In Ford’s debut, Aubrey Plaza plays a young woman burdened with crippling student debt and unable to enter the job market due to a criminal record, causing her to embark on a lawless life. Now, Glen Powell takes on the Mazzini mantle by portraying Becket, who has been disinherited by the affluent Redfellows. He decides to murder them systematically to retrieve his fortune. Powell cuts a different figure to Price: he has a Cheshire Cat grin and sandy locks, his charm relying on looks over the silver of his tongue.
More strikingly, How to Make a Killing lacks the humour of Kind Hearts and Coronets – the Redfellows are played by a roster of character actors including Bill Camp and Ed Harris rather than daring to emulate the original, in which an octet of D’Ascoyne family members are each played by the same actor: Alec Guinness. Ford seems more inspired by the original film’s treatment of class warfare, which is both ludicrous and yet macabrely desirable, tapping into the eat-the-rich zeitgeist of recent films such as The Menu and the Palme d’Or-winning Triangle of Sadness (both 2022).
Despite its Edwardian setting, Kind Hearts and Coronets is a staunchly postwar picture in outlook. Just as Ford capitalises on 21st-century contempt for the 1 per cent, the austerity of the Second World War and its aftermath in Britain aroused a loathing for the landed gentry. The film was released in 1949 at the zenith of the Michael Balcon era of Ealing Studios: Passport to Pimlico and Whisky Galore! also arrived in cinemas that year. While those two classic Ealing comedies champion community action and national spirit in the face of rationing, Hamer’s masterpiece is decidedly singular – one man’s bloody battle against the bastions of the old guard. Its comedic brutality has precedents in Hollywood, in the murderous aunts of Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and Charlie Chaplin’s bigamist wife-killer in Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
Hamer had not even been a comedy director in his earlier work at Ealing. His first directorial credit was for a sequence in the anthology horror film Dead of Night (1945), in which a recently married man gifts an antique mirror to his wife with haunting consequences. His debut feature was the Brighton-set Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), a period piece about a woman who murders her abusive husband. It stars Googie Withers, who returned for Hamer’s gritty realist drama It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). Any association of cosiness with Ealing, created by the legacy of its lighter comedies, is dispelled upon watching Hamer’s early efforts. Next to Basil Dearden and Alexander Mackendrick he was the studio’s greatest talent, yet one that tragically faded in the wake of his alcoholism and early death.
Much of Kind Hearts and Coronets is inspired by Hamer’s fleeting relationships with women as he contended with his closeted sexuality. The film’s queerness exudes from Price, which was later more explicitly expressed when he played roles such as Oscar Wilde’s lover Robbie Ross and in Dearden’s groundbreaking neo-noir Victim (1961), reputed to be the first time “homosexuality” was named in a British film. Mazzini’s character represents a societal fear of the queer figure as a barrier to a reproductive future: that is, in his pursuit of the D’Ascoyne dukedom, he terminates an entire family line. Although there is a romance with silky seductress Sibella, played by Joan Greenwood, and teetotal prig Edith, played by Valerie Hobson, Mazzini’s affairs are ultimately illicit and unconsummated. The women – including Guinness’s cross-dressing role as the suffragette Lady Agatha – are rendered camp. Costume designer Anthony Mendleson provokes mockery with the film’s astonishing hats. By the end, Sibella’s head ornamentation, a basket of fruit and flowers, seems to have added to itself several miniature birds and butterflies. Edith mostly appears with dainty flowers or her hair tied up, though during the scene in which her husband, Henry D’Ascoyne, is killed and Mazzini begins to desire her, she appears in an archery-themed outfit.
There is some regret on Mazzini’s part in murdering the young man, having bonded over an interest in photography – Henry admires his “Thornton-Pickard”, boasts about his “rapid rectilinear”, and asks him to his house to see his “Sanger Shepherd”. A slew of double entendres worthy of a Carry On. An arrow pierces Edith’s hat, that of death springing from Mazzini’s bow only to return as an arrow of love for Edith, “correcting” his sexuality.
The young Henry is a closet drinker, concealing alcohol in his darkroom, away from his wife, to which he invites Mazzini. A penchant for a tipple also sees the demise of the other Henry D’Ascoyne, the Lord Reverend – “The D’Ascoynes certainly appear to have accorded with the tradition of the landed gentry, and sent the fool of the family into the Church.” Pretending to be the bishop of Matabeleland, Mazzini poisons the priest’s port, a secret he keeps from his doctor. In the Michael Balcon collection of the BFI National Archive, there is an exchange of letters registering a complaint against Ealing for this scene from the real bishop of Matabeleland, who was most aggrieved by his depiction on screen. The claim is dismissed by the studio’s lawyer as “verging on the absurd”.
While there are certainly moments of absurdity in Kind Hearts and Coronets, the most delectable aspect of the film is the coolness and sophistication of its protagonist right up to the closing moments. Price’s performance is not that of a hapless murderer; there is no mess, none of the psychopathy of Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom or Christian Bale in American Psycho. His crime is not homicide, but hubris. There is a mode of cinematic pleasure in witnessing the success of an anti-hero like Mazzini, or Becket in How to Make a Killing, as seen in the sequence of murders that ends Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, and more recently in Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. It is an engagement with our darkest speculations in times of economic hardship, of how our lives might be were those who stand between our rags and our riches simply to disappear. It remains too tantalising for cinema to resist.
“How to Make a Killing” is in cinemas now
[Further reading: Nintendo: the company that consoled the world]
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This article appears in the 04 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Trump's global terror
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