Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Terence Davies: ' Kind Hearts and Coronets is one of the greatest comedies of world cinema'

This is one of the finest comedies ever – and it's all thanks to the man who plays its well-bred villain There are four great voiceovers in cinema: William Holden in Sunset Boulevard ; Joanne Woodward in The Age of Innocence ; Joan Fontaine in Letter from an Unknown Woman ; and, to my mind the greatest of them all, Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets . It's utterly perfect; there isn't a flaw in it. The way Price delivers it is quite extraordinary. The truth is, without Dennis Price there wouldn't be a film. He holds it all together with the most elegant diction. It's quite wonderful, even just to listen to. The starting point of Kind Hearts and Coronets is a 1907 novel called Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman . It was originally a somewhat laboured Edwardian satire on antisemitism; I tried to read it, and frankly it's impossible to get through. Robert Hamer ,
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