2 hours ago
6
Remaking Robert Hamer’s 1949 British classic Kind Hearts and Coronets – the greatest Ealing Studios comedy and, in my own fevered opinion, the greatest film of all time – needs the chutzpah of Cecilia Giménez, the amateur Spanish artist who “restored” a painting of Christ and left him looking like a gibbon. This remake isn’t actually quite as gibbony as it could have been. But as with the Coen Brothers’ uneasy version of Ealing’s The Ladykillers, or indeed Todd Phillips’ heavy-handed remake of Hamer’s School for Scoundrels, the question is: why do it at all, especially when the new American setting means losing the all-important element of class-consciousness and class shame?
The original starred Dennis Price as Louis, an Edwardian draper’s assistant who is distant heir to a dukedom, and who is living in genteel poverty because his late mother was cruelly rejected by her snobbish family for marrying beneath her – for love, in fact. Louis vengefully sets out to murder all the family members that stand between him and the coronet – and all of them are expertly played by Alec Guinness, a Fregoli nightmare in which all Louis’s enemies are the same entitled monster. Joan Greenwood plays Sibella, the cynical minx whose snobbish cruelties trigger Louis’s plan, and Valerie Hobson is Edith, the refined widow of one of his victims with whom he falls in love.
This new version directed by John Patton Ford, of Aubrey Plaza thriller Emily the Criminal, transplants the action to the present-day US, and Glen Powell plays a young man with the bizarrely Wasp name of Becket Redfellow, excluded from the clan and keen on serial-killing his way to control of the family estate. Margaret Qualley is the slinky Sibella figure and Jessica Henwick is Becket’s true love. The film sticks pretty close to the original’s plot but the victims are lamely played by … different people. Perhaps no actor dared take on Guinness’s amazing multi-role. (Who might have tried? Benedict Cumberbatch? Andrew Scott? Eddie Redmayne? Jonathan Bailey?)
Powell himself, though game enough, is quite bland with nothing like Price’s ice-cold elegance or the furious power of his hurt feelings, and the resulting film never approaches the brilliant, original satire of male careerism. A pale imitation.
