The Alec Guinness Collection (Kind Hearts and Coronets / The Lavender Hill Mob / The Ladykillers / The Man in the White Suit / The Captain's Paradise)
Five of the British film industry's best-loved comedies in one boxed set makesThe Alec Guinness Collectionabsolutely essential for anyone who has any passion at all for movies. It containsKind Hearts and Coronets(1949),The Lavender Hill Mob(1951),The Man in the White Suit(1951),The Captain's Paradise(1953) (only available in this set), andThe Ladykillers(1955).  The Ealing Studio's greatest comedies captured the essence of post-war Britain, both in their evocation of a land once blighted by war but now rising doggedly and optimistically again from the ashes, and in their mordant yet graceful humor. They portray a country with an antiquated class system whose crumbling conventions are being undermined by a new spirit of individual opportunism. In the delightfully wickedKind Hearts and Coronets, a serial killer politely murders his way into the peerage; inThe Lavender Hill Moba put-upon bank clerk schemes to rob his employers;The Man in the White Suitis a harshly satirical depiction of idealism crushed by the status quo; inThe Captain's Paradise, a ferryboat captain complements his proper British wife with a fiery Spanish wife; whileThe Ladykillersmocks both the criminals and the authorities with its unlikely octogenarian heroine Mrs. "lop-sided" Wilberforce.  Many factors contribute to these films' success--including fine music scores from composers such as Benjamin Frankel (Man in the White Suit), Malcolm Arnold (Captain's Paradise), and Tristram Cary (The Ladykillers); positively symphonic sound effects (White Suit); marvelously evocative locations (the environs of King's Cross inLadykillers, for example); and writing that always displays Ealing's unique perspective on British social mores ("All the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the concomitant crudities of his period")--yet arguably their greatest asset is Alec Guinness, whose multifaceted performances are the keystone upon which Ealing built its biting, often macabre, yet always elegant comedy.--Mark Walker