“Murder, being a delicate matter, needs to be kept within the family. What surer cause for it is there than the kind of prolonged companionship that usually settles into a family relationship? It is all very well for such as André Gide to pose the thought of murdering a stranger in order to demonstrate the acte gratuit. But among people of taste and quality, the proprieties of murder--shall we say its art?--depend upon familiarity and intimacy. As Louis Mazzini reflects in this altogether instructive film, ‘It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.'
“The artfulness of Kind Hearts and Coronets is to have all its victims, the D'Ascoynes family, played by one actor, Alec Guinness. This manages to add to the satire on family and nobility--such resemblance, but such eccentricity. Guinness also provides a model of that English acting which delights in pretense and regards distinct character as an illusion. The black humor, the iconoclasm and the going-in-drag are rooted in English history, but this film marks their special importance in the years since the war, and starts a movement that leads directly to Monty Python. The mannered artificiality of the eight sides of Guinness is nicely held in check by the very plausible charm of Dennis Price as Mazzini, so that we feel a human being is disposing of puppets. And as if eight variants on a theme were not enough, the film has other exquisite supports--Joan Greenwood, Miles Malleson, Clive Morton and Hugh Griffith.” David Thomson