page_title: Kind Hearts and Coronets
section_title: Themes
hierarchical_section_title: Kind Hearts and Coronets / Themes
caption_attribution_description: English: Leeds Castle, Kent Leeds Castle is set on two islands on the River Len in Kent. Robert de Crevecoeur , one of William the Conqueror’s lords, first build a castle here in 1119. Leeds Castle passed into royal hands in 1278 and became part of the Queen of England’s dower - the settlement widowed queens received upon the death of their husbands. Over the course of 150 years it was held by six mediaeval queens: Eleanor of Castile; Margaret of France; Isabella of France, Joan of Navarre; Anne of Bohemia and Catherine de Valois. It has Norman foundations; a mediaeval gatehouse; the Gloriette, built by Edward I and updated in Henry VIII’s times; a Tudor tower; and a 19th century country house - all of which were substantially refurbished in the 20th century.( http://www.leeds-castle.com)
context_page_description: Kind Hearts and Coronets is a 1949 British black comedy film. It features Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood, Valerie Hobson and Alec Guinness; Guinness plays nine characters. The plot is loosely based on the novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman. It concerns Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini, the son of a woman disowned by her aristocratic family for marrying out of her social class. After her death, Louis decides to take revenge on the family, and to take the dukedom by murdering the eight people ahead of him in succession to the title.
  Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing Studios and the producer of Kind Hearts and Coronets, appointed Robert Hamer as director. Hamer was interested in the film, and thought it an interesting project with possibilities of using the English language in a unique way in the film. Filming took place from September 1948 at Leeds Castle and other locations in Kent, and at Ealing Studios. The themes of class and sexual repression run through the film, particularly love between classes.
  Kind Hearts and Coronets was released on 13 June 1949 in the United Kingdom, and was well received by the critics.
context_section_description: The British Film Institute see Kind Hearts and Coronets as "less sentimental" than many of the other Ealing films. Along with The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), Kind Hearts and Coronets "unleash[es] transgressive nightmares, fables of subversive, maverick masculine obsession and action, where the repressed and vengeful bubble up to the surface and lead to a resolutions which were only just contained in the moral strictures permissible in (Balcon's) Ealing cinema at the time".
  The film historian Sarah Street identifies the theme of sexual repression running through the film, shown with Louis' relationship with the manipulative Sibella. The historian Ross McKibbin sees the film as a "sustained satire" in its portrayal of the upper classes, partly because of the intended absurdity of the D'Ascoyne family being portrayed by Guinness. "Lady Clara Vere de Vere", the poem from which the film's title derived, concerns class tensions surrounding love between classes.
caption: Leeds Castle, which served as the ancestral home of the D'Ascoyne family.
exif: {}