Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Most of us don’t realize it until years down the road, but being born is the most important game of chance you’ll ever play. Where, who and what you are born into can be damn near inescapable. And there’s not a thing you can really do about it. You either luck out or you spend the rest of your life trying to climb out of the hole you were born into.
Kind Hearts and Coronets understands this in that essential way most British flicks do. (The American “rags-to-riches” myth has greatly held back our cultural understanding of class.)
Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini (Dennis Price) was born into the landed gentry. Or rather, born to the daughter of the 7th Duke of Chalfont who was cast out of the family. He’s poor. He has the name. He’s memorized the family tree—and, more importantly, succession line. And he knows the only way for to obtain his birthright is if everyone in front of him dies. Oh, and they all happen to be played by Alec Guinness.
Guinness plays nine roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets, and he seems to be having the time of his life. He gets to be everything from a haughty codger to a suffragette. And yet most of the characters do feel distinctly different, part of which is credit to Guinness and partly due to excellent costuming.
It’s not every day this blog gets to touch on 19th century fashion. (Quite frankly, it’s a sartorial period of which I know little about.) Gentlemen wore suits, but the ascot was still more popular than the necktie. Neckwear is less gendered with Edith (Valerie Hobson), the erstwhile Mrs Henry D’Ascoyne and future Mrs Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzin, first appears wearing an elegant necktie. The fashion seems to jump around somewhere between mid-century modern and the Civil War. It’s all something that looks alternately familiar and alien.
What stands out to me most is how frequently satin lapels appear outside of formal dinnerwear. Mazzin shows up at the office in three-piece suit with them. Lord D’Ascoyne wears them to a funeral. Even Mazzini’s bathrobe has some of the widest black satin peak lapels I’ve ever seen for Christ’s sake.
But maybe this all ties back to class instead of era. Perhaps if Mazzini had been born into the upper class instead slaying his way into it as an adult, his wardrobe would be a little less showy. His straw hat, bold-striped seersucker sport coat and vest with black piping along both the lapels and patch pockets looks fresh out of a barbershop quartet. Contrast that with Henry D’Ascoyne’s black herringbone sport coat that’s just a few buttons too many to blend in seamlessly with today.
I’ll never really know. Aside from being born a century too late, I didn’t win that birth lottery. I was born into a well-educated, comfortable, suburban family. I’ve no reason to complain, but sadly no title. No castle. No reason to murder a number of distant cousins to claim my birthright and splurge on satin lapels.
